Hello, We are going to be full-timers for awhile. Could you please give me any suggestions on how to get our mail? I have seen mail forwarding services advertised in the past but of course I can't find any and would benefit from any tips or recommendations you may give. Thanks in advance.
For the first year and a half as full time travelers we hired a relative in Michigan where we used to live to use their address as our home and new mail point. I Would call them once every few weeks and have them send our mail to where we were going to be. Once we decided to actually become residents of South Dakota we then picked a mail service there and switched everything over. We were unsure what state we wanted to become residents of when we first started and using the relative gave us time to decide.
One of the largest RV centered mail forwarding services is operated by the Escapees RV Club for its members. They offer addresses in the three most full-time RV'er friendly states, TX, FL, and SD. The Escapees service is unique I understand, in that they are the only one that the USPS has awarded its own ZIP code. The service has also been court tested as a legal domicile address. You do need to be an Escapees member to subscribe to the mail forwarding service, but as a fulltimer that's a very worthwhile membership to have anyway.
We use YourBestAddress in Sioux Falls and have been very pleased with the service. I am alerted to mail arriving at our box and am provided with an image of the outside of the envelope. I can then decided whether it should be opened and scanned, forwarded to me or destroyed. Regardless of what you may hear about any other mail service, including Escapees, all of them are classed as PMBs and the addresses may or may not be challenged by a financial institution at some time. Fortunately, that doesn't happen often in our experience, and federal law allows you to provide any physical address through which you can be contacted. In 10 years we've had exactly one financial institution question our address and that one instance was easily dealt with.
FMCA also had/has a mail forwarding service. I'm no longer a member, so I don't know if they are still doing it, or the features or cost, if any.
