What to do with mail when traveling
 

We are traveling in Europe for two and half months and essentially have no home address. We are not leasing an apartment until after we come back from our trip as our current lease is up. Where should we send our mail in the meantime? We will be staying with friends for a few weeks when we come home and are looking for an apartment. The most time the post office will hold our mail is for a month. Thanks!

How will you pay your bills while traveling? Do you pay everything online? While I pay most bills online through my bank, I don't receive many of my bills online, still via mail.

Can you use your friend's address as a forwarding address? If you don't get all bills online, they can open your bills and email you as to how much is due on each and you can pay online.

When I travel I have my mail forwarded to a friend's house. She bins the junk, saves the bills (which are paid by bank draft) and magazines, and keeps an eye out for jury summonses (for some reason they arrive for me with depressing regularity, while I know people who have never received one!)

If I were going to be gone for a really extended period I would look into one of the services that will field your mail and even send you email copies of the important bits.

You might find this blog post useful, although some of it is overkill for a trip that is only a couple of months.

https://everywhereonce.com/2011/11/1...lobal-citizen/

I'd do as thursdaysd suggested; have your mail forwarded to your friend. I haven’t had a mailed bill in years and have automatic payments set up for most of them, so banking isn’t much an issue when I travel.

If you live in the US there are many companies that provide "mail drop services" for people who do a lot of travel. They receive your mail at a "dedicated" PO Box and send you an email notification when you get any mail. You access your account online where you view a scan of each envelope. You then can instruct them to one of the following: 1) open and scan the contents, 2) Forward the envelope to anywhere you want or 3) Shred the letter. FYI - if you receive a check you can even have them deposit the check to your bank account. They automatically eliminate obvious junk mail & catalogues.

We've been using this service for several years and no longer receive any regular mail at our home. It's all very easy and efficient and not terribly expensive.

We use mailboxforwarding.com but like I said there are quite a few companies that provide this service (mainly to RVer's, sailors, ex-pats living in a foreign country or those who travel a lot). Google "mailbox forwarding services" or "mail forwarding services" for lots of info.

Well I learned a lot from this thread, thank you all for sharing such useful information!

I looked up pricing for mailboxforwarding.com, and it starts at $14.95 per month for up to 50 pieces of mail. Not bad at all. Thanks again for the tip, we don't need this now, but it's good to know about.

For what it is worth, since making the decision to use mailboxforwarding we've converted as much as we can to electronic/email notifications and pay almost all of our bills either online or have them automatically charged to our credit card. Our "snail mail" that goes to the mail drop has dwindled to less than about 15 to 20 pieces per month. After reading the scan, I save electronic copies of any "moderately important" documents to my computer. Once every few weeks I have the mailbox company forward only those documents that I deem it is necessary to retain the originals (that usually comes out to be less than 1/2 of the mail received in any given month - everything else gets shredded. By doing this we've cut down tremendously on accumulated and unnecessary paperwork.

The big plus is we never have to worry about our mail whenever we decide to travel (which we do often) and I can deal with any mail that is delivered to our mail drop in a very timely manner no matter where I am in the world.

What did you do to eliminate catalogs and restaurant flyers and all that other garbage? I go through periods of contacting catalog companies to make them stop, but when I slack off, here they come again. We, too, get almost all our bills electronically, so the important mail we get constitutes 10-20% of the total--the rest is junk. Well, and magazines, which we still get in paper.

The mailbox company just tosses catalogues away. Same with obvious junk mail. We haven't seen any since we started using the service. What a blessing!!!

Re magazines- when they come we get a scan of the cover. The few we get were included in the "monthly count" I gave in the earlier response. We've let most of our magazine subscriptions lapse but the are like the Energizer Bunny and keep coming and coming.

Either forward your mail to a friend or relarive or rent a mailbox at a ahipping store . We rented a box feom a shipping store ourselves when in a similar position.

Thanks, RoamsAround, more good information. If I were to convert to an e reader, I'd drop my paper magazine subscriptions.