ira

PS, some people turn the water heater and the main water supply to the house off.

thursdaysd

I turn my water off at the meter (not the main entry to the house) when I go on a long trip. The last time, the town water dept. decided my meter was broken, replaced it, and started charging me for the amount I normally used.

When I called them about the bills (they gave me credit), I was told I was not "allowed" to turn the water off at the street myself, and had to have them do it!

NeoPatrick

ira said:
"Sell the house, move into an apartment and forget about home maintenance. "

Amen.

It was a hard decision when we did that in 1995, but knowing we wanted to spend all summer every summer traveling, it has been the smartest thing we ever did. (Not to mention the rather huge profit we were able to put into income producing investments which help fund our travels!)

robjame

This may be obvious, but check with your insurance company that holds your house insurance. I know that ours in Canada requires someone to check the house at least every 3 days or you may not be covered. This only becomes an issue if you have a claim because if a water pipe were to burst, break-in, leak in roof , etc, etc, they want someone to know before a real disaster happens. (be sure to turn off the water feed to the hot water heater - expensive to heat water when no one is using it and a typical source of problems)

NeoPatrick

By the way, one wonderful thing you'll learn is that when you are budgeting for those long trips and how much money you will need, you'll end up surprised at how much you are "saving" at the same time by not being home. Putting things like phone, cable, newspaper, internet service, etc. all on hold result in some fairly substantial savings, as well as usually greatly reduced electric bills. Not to mention the amount of money you aren't spending on things like gasoline, entertainment, and groceries by not being at home. I'd say a good third of our long period travel budget is met by those kinds of "savings".

redhedgurrl

Hi - everyone has given you such great advice - I have one hint that I haven't seen here - we have a postal box (not a PO Box - they won't accept FedEx or UPS deliveries) that we use to collect our mail when we are out of town and also for delivery of packages - like things ordered online, presents during the holidays. It's also useful if you need to give an address but don't want to give the address of your home. If you plan on doing alot of traveling, I think it may be a good idea to just change your mailing address anyway so you don't have to have anyone gathering your mail - I don't like making it obvious that I am leaving my home for any extended amount of time.
Just my 2 cents.

Linda431

To those who asked about the Yahoo account, the answer is no, it won't cause the same kind of trouble.

(CarolA, the real story you are talking about is an email address being cloned or forged, rather than hacked which is what happened in my case. Big difference.)

In my case, my internet provider is Bellsouth. Or now, it's AT&T, but the thing is that I use the email account from my internet provider as my main email account and I never use it to post in any public forum, even this one. I use Yahoo or gmail for that.

Had I used one of those accounts in the hotel, it wouldn't have been a major issue had someone hacked into it. If Yahoo or Gmail had suspended my account, the worst that would happen would be that I couldn't access it until I straightened it out.

But by using my Bellsouth account, 2 things happened. First off, the "bounced" emails very often exceeded the size limits before I got a chance to delete them off the server. When that happened, Bellsouth started returning legitimate email to the senders because my mailbox was full.

Stupidly, I took the advice of several friends who were more internet savvy than I, who said that my email address was probably "cloned" or forged and not actually hacked into (big difference) and after a week or 2 the bounced emails would stop.

Also stupidly, I did not change my password because these people told me that this "cloning" was very common and the cloners would just go on to another person's email address.

In my case, that's not what happened. Bellsouth security looked at the headers and saw that the spam was coming from my account. (In cloning, the headers would give away the fact that it wasn't coming from the cloned email address). They also found 7 sub accounts under my main account with different routing addresses in the U.K. So they pulled the plug on my internet access and I could not use my DSL to access the internet. I had to install AOL from a disk and use dial up for a week until I got the security department to "vet" me again.