Stamp Collecting - A child's Play

You may wonder why stamp collecting has anything to do with passive income.  Let me explain.

After I started my "Save at School" Stamps/POSB Saving Account, I developed a liking for those beautiful stamps and began my journey as a stamp collector.

Both my parents are from China and we have quite a lot of relatives there.  In those days before the telephone/cellphone era, the only mode of communication between Singapore and China was writing letters.

When the letters arrived, I eagerly cut out the stamps from the envelops, soaked the stamps off the papers in water, dried and aired them, then sorted and placed them in a small album.  I was young and had little skills then; and some stamps were inevitably destroyed in the process.

Those days we did not have electronic/video/computer games and most of the kids had simple hobbies such as collecting stamps, match boxes, bus tickets (those were colourful unlike the plain ones nowadays), etc.

Our group of friends then exchanged the excess stamps in our possessions to some other stamps that we liked.  It was just one-to-one exchange as we did not have idea on the value of the stamps then.

My stamps collection mainly concentrated on China and Singapore stamps.  I received a scolding from my parents when I paid $8 for the China 8c monkey stamp issued in 1978.

After I started work, I continued adding on to my China stamp collection.  I stopped about year 2000.  Partly because my collection was almost complete (except a few of those rare gems), and I found it not worthwhile to continue because the number of new stamp issues are too huge, practically making the new issues worthless.

To be continued......