Forwarding Mail

Greetings,

My wife and I will be heading out soon for our first Winter getaway and would like to ask all the experienced travelers for suggestions on the best way to handle forwarding of mail. We'll be on the road for about 3 months, spending from 3 to 14 days in each location and aren't sure of all the options to handle our mail.

Will there be someone at your regular address who can pick up and forward your mail?

The Post Office has a thing called "Priority Forwarding". What it does is hold your mail and then every 10 days or so forward your mail to an address in a Priority Mail envelope or box. You will pay around $10 each forwarding. You can do this for up to a year. The other option is to have the Post Office hold your mail. They can only hold it for 30 days. We have done both and have 'priority forwarded' our mail to our daughters address. It worked well. The other couple of options are for a neighbor to get your mail or get a mail forwarding service such as offered by Escapees. www.escapees.com and you can look up all about it. You will have to be a member of Escapees to use their forwarding service and it would give you a Texas address in Livingston, Texas. Hope this helps.

You can also do a temporary forward which only costs a dollar through the USPS website. Just go to the site and click on the address change link. From there it will ask if temporary or permanent.

We have a mail service that we forward our mail to. The hold our mail until they hear from us. When we are going to be someplace for a week or so we email them and they forward our mail to that location. We are on the road 4-5 months each year and have used this system for about 15 years. There is no charge from USPS to forward mail, just fill in the card and send it in. We do try to do this a wek or sso before we leave to make sure everything is working as anticipated.