Hello, travelers! It has been a while since I posted. This is mainly because we’ve been living in the United States and that’s not interesting enough for me to write about. However, being location independent, there ARE still some tips and tricks we’ve picked up that I thought were interesting enough to warrant an article.
Virtual Mailbox
Back in our article Troubleshooting Location Independence: Getting a Driver’s License & Buying a Car, I talked briefly about iPostal1, a virtual mailbox.
A Virtual Mailbox is like a Post Office box, but setup so you can review, discard and forward content digitally. They assign you a Personal Mailbox Number at the address of a physical Mail Store. You have the option to designate Suite/Unit/Apartment with that Personal Mailbox Number to legitimize the mailing address if you choose to. We use that mailing address for banks, bills, medical appointments, etc. Ours is a Postal Annex in South Dakota.
It costs about $99/year for up to 30 pieces of mail a month.
They scan any envelope addressed to you and you decide if you want to:
- Discard: Have them throw it in the trash
- Shred: Have them shred the envelope (costs ~$2/shred)
- Scan: Get a PDF of the contents of the envelope (costs ~$2/scan up to 10 pages)
- Forward: package one or several items and have it mailed to a different mailing address. (costs ~$5/envelope to forward)
With Doctor’s bills & highway tolls we scan and pay them. With Drivers License Tags, we forward them on. Pretty much everything else, we discard.
General Delivery
This is a GREAT service that we discovered about a year ago. Many AirBnBs do not allow you to receive mail at their mailing address. General Delivery allows you to have mail sent to a local Post Office anywhere in the US for pickup within 90 days.
WARNING: This doesn’t work for Amazon/UPS deliveries, but I will teach you another trick for that in the next section.
First, you need to lookup your Ship To location.
Download the USPS App or browse to USPS.com
Select Locations in the top toolbar
Find a Location: example Bellingham, WA
Show Filters
check General Delivery option
Search button
Note the [Zip Code] of your closest or choice facility, then
Use as your Mail To location. example: Ehren Boren OR Evalynn Sundeen, General Delivery, Bellingham, WA [Zip Code]
The OR allows either my partner or I to pick up our delivered packages.
One word of warning, you may want to check General Delivery Hours with your specific post office before you go to pick up your deliveries. For example, Bellingham only allowed General Delivery pickup between 10-11:30am.
Using General Delivery for Amazon Deliveries
When we were in Pocatello, ID, I realized the hard way that you cannot ship Amazon to General Delivery because they use UPS and UPS doesn’t deliver to Post Offices. We had to call UPS and stop them from returning our packages to Amazon. A little searching, I discovered this quick work around.
Instead of Ehren Boren OR Evalynn Sundeen, General Delivery, City, ST 55512
Use
Ehren Boren OR Evalynn Sundeen, PO Box General Delivery, City, ST 55512
This will indicate to Amazon that they should send this package using USPS. This has worked well for us although we were told by one Post Office in Myrtle Beach, SC that even though they are listed for General Delivery, they won’t accept any more for us and they gave us the Zip Code of another Post Office in the area.
One of the huge concerns when living a more nomadic lifestyle is how to handle your mail. I hope these tricks for using Virtual Mailboxes & General Delivery might help ease your mind and give you one less reason not to go. Because now you can receive your mail on any road to everywhere.