Money for beginners: Stumping up for stamps

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/featur ... or_stamps/

NOT bought your Christmas cards yet? Here’s a tip – buy little ones.

Send them early.

Or buy your stamps from Superdrug.

Big cards cost you more to post.

And if you don’t pay the extra postage, they could easily cost the person on the receiving end £1 or more to collect. Tidings of comfort and joy indeed. They’re really going to appreciate your Christmas message.

It’s now more than two years since Royal Mail changed the way they charged for postage, but many of us are still being caught out. As well as by weight, they charge by the size of the letter.

A standard letter size – which covers most letters, bills and smallish greetings cards – costs 27p second class, 36p first class. But if your letter is bigger than 240mm x 165mm x 5mm – which many greetings cards can be – the cost goes up to 42p for second class and 52p for first class.

And it’s not just the weight of the card or the length of the envelope that decides how much it will cost, but also the thickness of the letter.

So even if you’re sending a titchy little birthday card, if it has a jolly badge on the front, then your twoyear- old might well have to trek down to the delivery office and divvy up the extra postage plus £1 for Royal Mail’s trouble.

And the really sneaky thing is that they don’t show you the letter...

Postmen aren’t allowed to collect the extra money any more, so they don’t bring the letters that haven’t got enough postage on. So until you’ve actually paid up, or made a trip to the delivery office, you don’t know if it’s a card from Granny with a tenner inside, or a flyer offering you a once-in-a-lifetime timeshare/ stairlift/hearing aid/miracle diet opportunity.

It doesn’t help that even though they have a terribly high tech gadget – a piece of plastic with slots – to sort out the different rates, different post offices can give you different decisions.

At the other end, you might get a sensible sort of postie who will just deliver cards that are underpaid and only a little over the limit. But if the mail has been sorted automatically, those larger letters will already have been discarded and put in the sin bin to be collected.

So if you buy big flash cards, not only will you pay more for the cards, you’ll pay more to post them too.

Which, in these straitened times, is either very show-offy, or just plain daft.

As some cards are very borderline, manufacturers are increasingly telling you somewhere on the packaging, what size it might be and whether it will incur extra postage.

The information might be in very tiny print somewhere on the cellophane wrapper, but is worth looking for.

If you see a little picture of an envelope and the word “Letter”, then you know it’s just the standard postage.

The other easy way to save money is to post your Christmas cards early.

That way you can send them second class for 27p, as opposed to 36p for first class.

And the last way is buy your stamps from Superdrug. They have discounts on stamps – only First Class, which seems a bit odd – but still, let’s not look a gift horse etc, etc.

A book of 12 first class stamps from Superdrug costs £4.10 instead of £4.32 and a book for four large first class stamps costs £1.98 instead of £2.08. Limited to 72 stamps per customer.

■ Last posting date for 2nd class is December 18; for 1st class December 20; special delivery December 23.

[Lounge Lizard]

http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/featur ... or_stamps/

NOT bought your Christmas cards yet? Here’s a tip – buy little ones.

Send them early.

Or buy your stamps from Superdrug.

Big cards cost you more to post.

And if you don’t pay the extra postage, they could easily cost the person on the receiving end £1 or more to collect. Tidings of comfort and joy indeed. They’re really going to appreciate your Christmas message.

It’s now more than two years since Royal Mail changed the way they charged for postage, but many of us are still being caught out. As well as by weight, they charge by the size of the letter.

A standard letter size – which covers most letters, bills and smallish greetings cards – costs 27p second class, 36p first class. But if your letter is bigger than 240mm x 165mm x 5mm – which many greetings cards can be – the cost goes up to 42p for second class and 52p for first class.

And it’s not just the weight of the card or the length of the envelope that decides how much it will cost, but also the thickness of the letter.

So even if you’re sending a titchy little birthday card, if it has a jolly badge on the front, then your twoyear- old might well have to trek down to the delivery office and divvy up the extra postage plus £1 for Royal Mail’s trouble.

And the really sneaky thing is that they don’t show you the letter...

Postmen aren’t allowed to collect the extra money any more, so they don’t bring the letters that haven’t got enough postage on. So until you’ve actually paid up, or made a trip to the delivery office, you don’t know if it’s a card from Granny with a tenner inside, or a flyer offering you a once-in-a-lifetime timeshare/ stairlift/hearing aid/miracle diet opportunity.

It doesn’t help that even though they have a terribly high tech gadget – a piece of plastic with slots – to sort out the different rates, different post offices can give you different decisions.

At the other end, you might get a sensible sort of postie who will just deliver cards that are underpaid and only a little over the limit. But if the mail has been sorted automatically, those larger letters will already have been discarded and put in the sin bin to be collected.

So if you buy big flash cards, not only will you pay more for the cards, you’ll pay more to post them too.

Which, in these straitened times, is either very show-offy, or just plain daft.

As some cards are very borderline, manufacturers are increasingly telling you somewhere on the packaging, what size it might be and whether it will incur extra postage.

The information might be in very tiny print somewhere on the cellophane wrapper, but is worth looking for.

If you see a little picture of an envelope and the word “Letter”, then you know it’s just the standard postage.

The other easy way to save money is to post your Christmas cards early.

That way you can send them second class for 27p, as opposed to 36p for first class.

And the last way is buy your stamps from Superdrug. They have discounts on stamps – only First Class, which seems a bit odd – but still, let’s not look a gift horse etc, etc.

A book of 12 first class stamps from Superdrug costs £4.10 instead of £4.32 and a book for four large first class stamps costs £1.98 instead of £2.08. Limited to 72 stamps per customer.

■ Last posting date for 2nd class is December 18; for 1st class December 20; special delivery December 23.

And the Northern Echo classes that as news does it ? No wonder local and provincial newspapers are falling by the wayside.

[Thorby Bislam]

At the other end, you might get a sensible sort of postie who will just deliver cards that are underpaid and only a little over the limit.

How sensible is that if you get caught out ? It would probably be deemed to be contravening the conduct code. Everything else is.