Handling Mail While Traveling Long Term

Updated June 2018 after travelling for one year.

As we started planning for our year-long trip, two items of business kept coming up: what do we do about mail and how do we handle health insurance. Of the two, figuring out what to do about mail was the easier one to solve. What did we end up doing about handling mail while traveling long term?

The US Postal Service will only hold mail for 30 days, so the usual Vacation Hold Mail service wouldn’t work for a year-long jaunt. One potential solution was to have our mail forwarded to a trusted family member. We didn’t want to burden anyone, and what if we needed to look at a piece of mail? An indefinite schedule with frequent moves precluded having anything sent to us. We discovered a website called bootsnall.com which is set up to assist travelers planning year-long around-the-world trips. An article on the site introduced us to the concept of virtual mail boxes.

Virtual Mail Boxes

A virtual mailbox turns out to be an excellent way of handling mail while traveling long term. These services provide a physical address to their clients to use as a mailing address. When mail arrives, the envelope is scanned. The service also includes a website for viewing the envelopes and then giving instructions on what to do with each piece of mail. The options are:

• Open and scan each page.
• Shred the piece of mail.
• Have it forwarded to a different address.

When choosing this third option, we have had the mail forwarded to a family member to open and describe the contents.

Evaluating Mail Services for Handling Mail While Traveling Full Time

Researching our options, we looked at pricing, flexibility of the service, and reviews of other long-term travelers. Each service has a variety of plan levels based on several factors. These factors are:

• How many mail recipients can use that address.
• The number of envelopes that can be scanned per month.
• How many pages of opened mail can be scanned per month.
• Charges incurred when exceeding the limited number of envelopes or pages.

Even though not the cheapest, we selected Travelling Mailbox because for $2 extra per month, this service provided us with a San Diego mailing address. This simplified a lot of potential problems (drivers license, state income taxes, etc.) since we planned to return to San Diego once the trip was over. We have since changed to a Phoenix mailbox when we decided to change our state of residency. We made this change when we ran into issues that certain businesses (e.g., banks and Medicare supplement) would not accept the mailbox address as a physical address.

Reducing the Amount of Mail

We were concerned about how much mail (especially junk) we were getting at our old address because it could end up costing us a small fortune. We took the following steps:

• Switched all our bills over to electronic only.
• Requested that we be removed from direct mail lists at directmail.com.
• Entered a temporary (6 months), rather than permanent, forwarding address with the post office.

By providing a temporary change of address, the NCOA (National Change of Address, not National Council on Aging in this case) system wouldn’t notify the sender about our address change. Also, the NCOA database wouldn’t get updated with the virtual mail box address. Something we did worked because happily during our entire first year of travel, we got very little junk mail at the virtual mailbox.

Next up: How we solved the health insurance issues

Ian & Ann