The following is a guest post from my frugal friend Guest Blogger Susan.
I bought my first house the day after Thanksgiving. After my junk had been moved and unpacked enough so I could find my socks and forks, I wanted to let my friend and family know where I had gone. I thought about sending an e-mail but when friends send me an e-mail with their new address, I fail to put it in my paper address book and when I need it I have to look back through a zillion e-mails to find it.
Then I remembered that a lady I work with had promotional postcards printed up for an event we were working on that were pretty cool. So I loaded a picture of the house and the text on to my flash drive and headed off to my local Office Max.
I told the fellow at the print center what I wanted and he fired up Publisher. He stuck my picture on the front with a caption and put my text on the back. He then printed them on their printers at the cost of $1.14 per color side and 10 cents a black and white side. I also had him cut them for a buck-o-nine. I had 120 of them printed up for the grand total of $40.39. That’s 34 cents each. A postcard stamp runs 27 cents these days so the total cost of each card for printing and mailing was 61 cents. They turned out beautifully and the people I sent them to seem to think they were pretty cool.
To save money I could have run the things through my own printer and I could have done both sides in black and white but I thought I deserved a little luxury. I also had a moment of pause mailing my info out in the open context of a postcard. Then I remembered that if an evildoer wanted to find me, all they would have to do is use my return address in whitepages.com and Google maps and they would have all the same pictures and information.
If you do the picture cards for holidays or birthdays, these would be a much less expensive alternative. Since there is no limit to how many you can have printed the possibilities are endless! I don’t know the cost at other office supply stores or print shops but I would image they would be similar.
~ Guest Blogger Susan
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