Do You Think Stamps Form The 1980-S Till 2013 Will Increase In Price?

Use for postage.

Most likely, these will become the 'discount postage' of the future...stick 'em on yer outgoing mail.

Postage. No question at all about it. I am constantly turning down offers of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars worth of such items at 80-82% of face.

If governments around the world stopped making postage stamps I'd expect the demand for this sort of material to rise but only in the very short term. Ultimately they may be completely worthless, if their use is banned altogether.

They may increase if you keep them for a couple hundred years. (Maybe.)

I think postal history / covers will do ok. There are factors beyond the stamp that influence the value of covers.

Discount postage or donate to charity or utilize for decoupage project.

decrease relative to inflation

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General Mills common stock is currently paying a dividend of 5.02%; if the price of the stock goes nowhere, and you select dividend reinvestment, the value of your General Mills common stock will double in less than 14 years.

<guess>Nobody, but nobody, thinks that the value of recent fixed-denomination US MNHOG stamps is going to double in the next 14 years.</guess>

Unless, of course, you buy them for 50% of face value, and use them for postage, in which case they will double in value just as fast as you can lick'em'n'stick'em.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Use them for postage as soon as you can.

Just a thought, if a person uses stamps in the 80s or 70s for postage today, wouldn't it make those covers rare (old stamp with a modern postmark)?

Covers with stamps used in-period seem to be much more desirable. The covers you describe are common as all get-out, and are essentially philatelically contrived.

Of course one would deem it as contrived now, but the lenses another collector will use to view that cover a few decades later would be very different.

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Q/ How many decades is a few decades?

Covers with US postage from the 1950s passing thru the mails six decades later are a yawn.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Numbers-wise, yes, these covers will be rare. However, will this translate to the covers being more desirable and collectable, and commanding a premium in price? I am not sure about that. Beauty in the eyes of the beholder, I guess.

Purists like me will want the stamps to be used for their intended purpose(s) in exactly the time period they were meant for (i.e. in-period usage). My daughter back in the US mails me items plastered with postage from the 40s and 50s because she can get them as discount postage and thus save 30-40% off face value. I don't keep the covers because I don't think they are of any value. However, rather than trash the covers, I give them to the kids next door to get them interested in stamps.