How to Deal with your Mail while Traveling the World

Since we decided to leave on this almost-year-long trip I knew dealing with physical mail would be a bit of pain.

I didn’t want to completely disregard it in case the IRS sent me any notices, for example. I also didn’t want to bother friends and family with opening and scanning mail for me.

Photo by mrjoro

After some research I finally arrived at great and cost effective solution:

I opened up a UPS postal box, you can do this at most UPS stores all over the country. This will cost you about $200/year. Unlike a United States P. O. Box, UPS gives you a much more customized experience. They’ll receive and store any size packages for you. There is virtually no limit on how much you can receive and if your mail does not fit in the box, that’s OK too. All that was left to do was to change my address.

Another great advantage is that you get a real street address instead of a P.O. Box number, this is great as I believe both UPS and FedEx will not ship to a P.O. Box. You also get a key to your box and a key to the store so you can access it 24/7.

I then signed up for MailboxForwarding.com. For $10 I can receive up to 40 envelopes which they scan. They will let me know every time they scan a new envelope at which point I decide if they should open and scan it, shred it, or archive it. All from the comfort of my laptop, anywhere in the world.

Once a month I send an email to the UPS store and request that they mail a package with my mail to the address MailboxForwarding.com provided me, leaving out all magazines, catalogs and bulk mailings.

They have larger plans if you expect to receive a lot more mail. It helps to unsubscribe from all catalogs using Catalogchoice.org and set your bills to paperless whenever possible.

Please note, MailboxForwarding.com requires you to fill out a form and get it notarized allowing them to open your mail, make sure to take care of this before you leave the country. If you’d like to signup use this promo code “13384” to get a month free.

Thanks to Brent Wege for introducing me to MailboxForwarding.com

Feel free to share this post with someone you think may benefit from it. Also remember to subscribe to get notified of new updates.

You can follow me on twitter too.