Is stamp collecting lucrative?

Lucrative investment?

In the edition of Collect in 2010 (number 66) TNT gave you the advice to keep stamps. "What philatelists already know, is now scientifically proven: collecting stamps is a lucrative business," says the magazine of the stamp seller. This is certainly a handy trick to persuade wavering buyers. TNT suggests that buying postage stamps will always lead to profit and is never a waste of money, but is it really?
You understand that any hobby costs money. Yet the defense of the collector and his high spending needs to answer to his roommates is often that stamps are a good investment. This is a mistake. I will demonstrate this with a simple example.

Where is the profit?

Suppose you bought mint stamps from the Netherlands from 1975 to 2000. What is this investment worth now? If you regularly write letters, you can still use stamps for postage. These stamps bring a hundred percent on postage. You will lose fees paid by you on postage stamps for charity - and that was a decent amount. If you want to immediately sell stamps, they bring in about fifty percent of the postage. Once these stamps can no longer be used for franking of letters, the sale value of this investment will suddenly decrease up to twenty percent of the catalog value.
Buying recent Dutch stamps will never bring a profit. This is due to market trends.

Decreasing market

It is inherently dangerous to predict the future market development of postage stamps. You and I simply can not predict the future. If I pronounce a development, then I will draw the line through the existing situation into the future.
Market development may change, but probably not. In the current postage stamp market is demand growing, while the number of philatelists is decreasing. I described the main causes and consequences in my publication 'Postzegels kopen en verkopen ('Buy and sell stamps', only available in Dutch).

Down trend

Can the tide be turned? The biggest problem for the stamp market is aging. The age of the average collector is continuously on. More old collectors die than there are flocking young philatelists. The number of collectors will show a down trend. The result of this trend is that the supply increases and demand decreases. Any economist would conclude that the price level of the philatelic market will continue to decline.

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