Keep Your Stamps in Your Envelope Box

Last I checked, I have very good credit, but that fact has little to do with fiscal responsibility and a lot to do with automatic online bill pay. Every time I wind up with a bill I can’t set and forget — like the rent at my last apartment — I fail to pay it on time almost every month. And even when I do remember I need to drop a check in the mail, I can’t find a stamp and wind up having to go to the post office — not something I want to do during the pandemic.

But former Lifehacker staffer Nick Douglas recently clued us in to his own personal hack for that: He suggests keeping stamps in the box your envelopes came in. That way you’ll always know where they are and they’ll be close at hand when you’re most likely need them.

Now that I’m not going into an office every day, this is an excellent supplement to my own stamp hack, which was to keep one or two of them in my wallet in case I needed to mail something at work.

Yes, many offices have a mailroom where you can buy stamps, but every office I’ve ever worked in required you to pay for postage with a personal check instead of cash, and who carries checks around in 2020? I don’t even remember the last time I used a check for anything other than confirming my routing number. (Nevertheless, Lifehacker parenting editor Meghan Walbert suggests a supplemental hack — keep a single check in your wallet — but you probably don’t want to write a 55 cent check to buy one stamp.)

And now that you can rest assured you’ll always be able to find a stamp, it’s time to begin sending hand-written personal letters to all the people you aren’t able to go visit in person right now. Future historians documenting the collapse of society will thank you.