They usually trade at a deep discount.

This would be a good place to put a better idea to park your money, but I don't have one.

and as far as resell, you could sell them on e-bay at a discount but still make a profit if you held on to them long enough.

A few of them were worth a little bit, but the vast majority of them I couldn't sell for as much as face value. However, the USPS informed me they were still perfectly good to use for postage. It took me years to use them up, but use them up I did. Of course, this was back in the days before electronic payments and such were done, so I was mailing checks out every month for various bills.

An excellent ROI IMO.



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Now, I'm not an investor in stamps but I had inherited a reasonably nice stamp collection and was thinking about selling it recently. Lucky for me, there's a person nearby who gave me a very nice lowdown. I'd say more about why this person was qualified to say what they did but it would give too much away about who they are. Anyway, among all the other things I was speaking with them, my stamps came up and the person said "Look, the only stamps that are actually going to move in any kind of real context are stamps that are notable AND over a hundred years old. AND somebody's gotta want to buy them, AND there aren't a lot of those somebodies around."

That was it, in a nutshell.

Just sayin'

PB

I am talking about buying first class forever stamps and selling them in years to come at a price above what I bought them, as postage will have gone up, but fro less than the usps on e-bay.

the stamps will always be worth current first class postage. they are for use , not traditional stamp collecting

Look, I can't say for certain that you wouldn't be able to make a killing. But...you know, a crapload of people and institutions also probably have the same idea about how to make a killing. When there's a bunch of interest in a good idea, sometimes the thing that makes it so good..well, it doesn't go away, but it might be harder to exploit.

I don't know where you could find more information about it, but Ponzi originally thought he could make millions with discounted International Reply Coupons. And technically, in some sense, he might have been able to. But it ran into red tape to get the kind of turnover and that's what caused him to kick of his Ponzi Scheme. I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, just pointing out Ponzi's accurate analysis of being able to make money off those International Reply Coupons but actually turning the profit proved much harder than it seemed.

And for Christ's sake: If it's something the government can fuck you out of with new legislation, you can almost count on them doing it. That's a bend in the road, and you never know if or when it's gonna come.

PB

When I hear of an upcoming increase, I get a roll at the current price. I was one of the first in line when the Liberty Bell forever stamps first came out. It just makes sense.

Now, that aside, I have purchased entire sheets of the theme stamps (like space, wild animals, etc.) for one of my daughters who loves stamps. They're in a file folder getting older. I also clip any interesting cancelled stamp that comes into the house for her.

...found it again after there'd been an increase or two".

Now I can use them up for about 12 cents less than current price. Jackpot!

Forever stamps came out in 2007 for 41 cents apiece. Let's presume you bought 10 rolls of them. This would have cost you $410.00.

I just checked Ebay, and a typical lot of 10 rolls of forever stamps sells anywhere from $400 to $450. Let's assume you do better than average, and get $440; you've made $30, a profit of about 7%, right? But not so fast...

You have to ship the stamps to the winner; that will cost at least a couple of bucks. More importantly, Ebay and PayPal are going to get a cut. At roughly 12% of the selling price, this works out to $54.00. Add in the shipping cost, and you wind up with $384.00 in your pocket. You've taken a 6.5% loss.

You would have been better off hiding your money in a mattress.