There is so much planning that goes into moving abroad. What to do with your mail is not one of those first things that you think about, but oh so important! I did a lot of searching about this before we left to figure out the best option for us.

When you sell your house, you have to send your mail somewhere! We considered sending everything to my parents house because we knew we could trust them. But at the same time, we did not want to have to depend on them to keep up with our important documents or decipher which we really needed.

Solution

Our solution was finding a third party to handle all of our mail called Traveling Mailbox. Using Traveling Mailbox gives you a physical mailing address and not a PO Box, which if you are a business this is a huge plus. There’s a number of different cities around the United States to choose where you want your address. We chose Sanford, NC since it’s the same state we lived in.

How it works

The company receives our mail, scans the envelope and sends us a notification of a new letter. I then log on, and request it to be scanned and opened if I want to read it. Traveling Mailbox notifies me once it’s been done and I can see what came in the mail as if I opened it myself. If I want the document, I can download it and save to my files or I can request them to forward it to me for a small fee. After, I can request to shred anything or for it to be held for a certain length of time.

Another plus is the assistance if you ever have an issue with extended hours 7 days a week. At the start, you have to get some paperwork notarized to authorize Traveling Mailbox to handle your mail. I had a question about where on the form for it to be notarized and through a live chat it was immediately answered.

Price

There are 3 different plans available according to how much mail you expect to receive. The main difference is how many pages included per month to be scanned. We aren’t too important of people so we went with the Basic, and we haven’t gotten anywhere near of hitting our limit. That might also be because we have most of our accounts set to be paperless delivery. Check the website for full pricing details. We paid a year in full, so got 2 months for free! The regular price for the basic plan is $15 per month.

We’ve been using Traveling Mailbox since we left home and have had no complaints! We used it once already to have a bank card forwarded to us in the UK and it arrived promptly. Anything that we don’t physically need in hand, we just save and it’s so easily accessible!

If you are looking for a simpler way to handle your mail, or making any type of move abroad, give Traveling Mailbox a shot! If you sign up through any of our links, we receive a small commision but no extra for you!

Contact us and let us know what you think!

To our fellow travelers, what do you do with your mail? We would love to hear.