by Fred Fuld III
What would you think of an investment with the following characteristics:
1. Over 5% guaranteed return on your investment within less than a month!
2. Inflation-proof
3. Short term or long term investment: your choice
4. Guaranteed by the United States Government
5. No minimum investment
6. An easily transferable bearer investment with no registration required
7. The investment will never go down in value
The Perfect Investment
Can you guess what this investment is? It’s the Forever Stamp, the stamp issued by the US Post Office used to purchase one ounce of postage, no matter how high the price of postage rises, even if the postage rate rises to $1, $10, or even $20 per ounce.
The price of first class postage will be increasing before the end of this month on August 29 by 5.45%, from 55 cents to 58 cents. However, if you buy Forever Stamps by August 28, you can still use the stamp for one ounce of first class postage.
The price of first class postage has continued to rise historically. Back in 1968, the price of a first class stamp was only 6 cents. The price has jumped by 867% since then, which works out to 4.5% annualized.
You can still buy these stamps and take advantage of this ‘investment’. Over the long term, with inflation inevitable, postage rates will continue to increase.
So who would this purchase be useful for?
If you still pay a lot of bills using checks in the mail
If you own a small company that does a lot of mass mail-outs
If you are part of a club or organization that sends out printed monthly newsletters (there are actually a lot of these groups that still send printed newsletters)
If you mail out merchandise sold though eBay, Etsy, and other online sites without using the built-in postage service (many sellers of low priced items just use regular postage)
If you want to send out a sales-oriented flyer for your business as an alternative or in addition to an email blast, using some of the more unusual Forever Stamps to get people’s attention to open their mail
If you want to just sell your stamps down the road at a profit to either collectors or those that want to use them for any of the above reasons (there are almost a thousand listings on eBay right now for Forever Stamps, many selling close to face value)
