How Can You Save Money By Printing Your Own Cards?
by Chelsea Camper | Last Updated June 5, 2023As gas prices fluctuate up and down (but mostly up), the cost of milk rises, and the general increase in prices every where you turn, people are trying to find ways to save money. From extreme couponing to growing your own vegetables, there are plenty of ways you can try to save money. Another way people have started saving has been to print their own cards.
Printing your own cards (such as Christmas cards, New Years cards, Birthday cards, etc.) is an easy and fun way to save a bit of cash.
How You Save By Printing Your
Own Cards
Own CardsYou may be wondering just how you’re going to save money when you start printing your own cards. Well, let’s take a look at the cost difference between buying a pre-printed card and printing your own card.
Most cards in the store will cost you about $5 a piece which doesn’t seem like a lot at first, but let’s look at how many people you send cards to on a yearly basis:
- Your mom
- Your dad
- Your mother in law
- Your father in law
- Your children
- Your grandparents
- Your grandparents in law
- Your best friend
- Your baby sitter
- Your siblings
- Your siblings in law
Above we’ve listed just 13 people you send cards to on a yearly basis. Just that list is $65 dollars if you buy each of them a pre-printed card! Now think about Christmas, Valentine’s day, Teacher Appreciation Day, the list could go on.
Don’t forget about the gas and time it takes you to go to the store to pick out a different card for each occasion. You can see how all of those cards can really add up!
Now look at the Print Your Own option. You buy some blank cards in bulk then print your own right from your home printer. How much are blank cards in bulk?
You can buy 250 blank greeting cards for $42.00 (before shipping). Already you have way more for less. But what about the ink/toner you’ll use for printing the cards? Believe it or not, it only costs about $0.05-$0.20 to print a single card, depending on your particular printer.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can figure out how much it will cost you to print your card. For this example we’ll use a Cyan ink cartridge for the HP Officejet 6500. In the description it states that the cartridge will yield 300 pages. If we divide 13.95 by 300 we get $0.0465, which we’ll round up to $0.05. Now that’s just Cyan, so let’s multiply what we have by four to get an estimated cost for all four inks: $0.20.
Some printers have more expensive ink than others and if you’re printing several full color photos on your card, add a few cents to your total. Let’s just estimate $0.25 total for a colorful card.
Now, how much are you paying for the paper? Well at 250 sheets for $42.00 (before shipping and handling) you’re only paying $0.17 per sheet (it’s actually $0.168, but we rounded up).
Combining your paper cost and ink costs, it’ll cost you a whopping $0.42 to print your own card.
Fun Note: $0.42 was the price of gas in 1973.
We mentioned several occasions and people you would send cards to on a yearly basis. What other occasions or people would you send cards to?
