If you write a lot of letters, do a lot of mailing for your business, or have ever had a wedding, you know sending out mail can be quite expensive over time. It might not seem like a lot for someone who just pays their bills each month and doesn’t do much after that, but if you begin to do more than that, it ads up real quickly, real fast. It’s only going to get worse as the US Postal Service recently proposed an increase in the price of stamps to 41 cents. Don’t worry, just like everything else sold in the market place, postage stamps are sold at a mark-up, and you can get them wholesale.
You can purchase stamps at about a 10% discount by purchasing them through stamp dealers. This postage is perfectly legal to buy and sell, as well as use on all of your mail that goes through the US Postal Service. Hgitner.com, an online stamp dealer, explains why they can sell their stamps cheaper than the going rate, “The secret is that the volume of stamps sold to collectors over the last 50 years is enormous: often much larger than the demand from today’s collectors. When these stamps were purchased, the post office received full face value for them. Today, when large accumulations come on the market, our position as a one of the largest US mint stamp dealerships allow us to buy them in bulk at current market prices, often below face value.”
This is really an interesting result of capitalism. Stamps which have not appreciated in value and just aren’t collectible to anyone since there are so many of them out there have returned to being a commodity, that people can use to mail their letters.
The stamps that you will actually receive will not be a booklet of 39 cent stamps, but rather a mix of varying sizes that you can mix and match to make up 39 cents. It makes sending postage a bit more fun, because you can use a variety of different sized interesting stamps and give your letters a little bit of a different look than the traditional American flag.
The current prices for stamps are going at about an 11% discount, you have to pay a fee of about $2.50 or $3.50 to have the stamps mailed to you, so unless you are ordering a large purchase of around $100 or more, it probably doesn’t make sense to get a discount for you stamps. But if you buy a year or two’s worth of stamps at a time, it might be a great way to get a discount on stamps.