After having written about the upcoming stamp price increase way in back in February, I almost forgot about it myself. In case you missed it, stamp prices went up from $0.41 to $0.42 this past Monday. Hopefully you have “Forever” stamps. If not, you’ll need those pesky little penny stamps to round things out.
Whatever you do, don’t send off a bunch of bills with the wrong postage on them — there’s nothing worse than getting a bill that you paid on time returned to you after the due date because of insufficient postage.
While we’re talking stamps, why not hop on over to Stamps.com for a bunch of free postage and a free digital? You can always cancel if you don’t like it.
In Canada the increase in the price of a stamp is by law less than the cost of inflation. So it does not make sense to stock up on “permanent” value stamps.
I wrote an analysis on this. I would assume that it is the same in the US.
http://frugalcanadianliving.blogspot.com/2008/03/cost-of-mailing-letter-in-canada.html
These frequent postage increases are really starting to irritate me. I still have a handful of 2 cent stamps to offset my finally dwindling roll of 39 cent stamps, and now I need to get 1 cent stamps just so I can use my remaining stock.
This is mainly for stuff I have to mail for work, so it isn’t the cost that is an issue, but the stupid extra stamps you have to put on.
I mean, why can’t they just grandfather the old stamps? I’d like to see if the 1 penny they lose from a few people using up their existing stamps is more than the actual cost of printing all these stupid 1 and 2 cent stamps. I’m willing to bet that it is costing them more to print all the extra stamps than to let people get away without paying an extra penny.