I hardly ever write hand written letters much less need to send something through snail mail these days.  But, sometimes I do need to and when that time comes, I’m always having trouble figuring out which stamp to use.  The first reason is because the cost of first class changes so often it is difficult to keep track of the current amount.  Apparently, the current amount is 44¢.  Okay, easy enough right?  No.

Since I hardly ever need to send snail mail, I don’t usually buy stamps – so I wouldn’t have the most up-to-date one.  And I do know now that if I ever need to buy stamps, it will be the Forever Stamp so that I will never have this problem again.  Okay, so I don’t have the most recent 44¢ stamp but I do have a lot of old stamps.  These stamps came from….who knows where?  Either someone gave it to me or I actually bought it back in the day.  The problem with these stamps is that the USPS for whatever reason, does not put the value of the stamp on there – so I have no idea whether it is from when it only cost 29¢ to mail something or if it is 34¢ or 42¢…you get my drift.

Often times, I end up not even using these stamps because I find one or two forever stamps to use.  But, I don’t want to keep saving these stamps and because the cost is a bit high, I don’t want to completely waste it to double up.  So then I have to either find those small value stamps to make up or go to the post office or find a forever stamp.  Or what I have done before is try and google the value of the stamps I have.

The particular one I wanted to use today was a 2009 Lunar New Year stamp.  With no value printed on, I googled it and found out that it was worth 42¢, which meant that I had to go find a 2¢ stamp.  Luckily I have 2 of those.

Sheesh, what a difficult and inefficient process!  Do you ever have this problem?   Why don’t they just print the value of the stamp on the stamp and make everyone’s lives easier?