Your opinion wanted, no seriously ... mail?

I think what I am looking for is a box that looks like an actual street address. This way my bank and college apps all appear from someone who lives in that area. I like the (Chain Mailbox) store option because it appears that I can have them send whatever appears to be important to wherever we are at that time.

I'm not sure any of that is important really. I have moved to this house for two months while we finish Jack's remodel and then from here we have another short term location scouted. This will be a few months while living in Jack full-time where I will have access to a shop should I need to make further changes to the interior and to stress test this idea. Once we pass all this then we're on the road teaching and traveling. I guess we can change states and I like that idea because I think CA is a mess but that change can wait a bit. Mostly the box is currently needed to quickly start getting mail that is now being delivered to two other addresses before we add two more addresses to that mix.

Yes, I am aware that I am rambling. Thx.

so do any of you use a mailing address that is drastically different from your "domicile"? I plan to use our family farm address - new location for me, but same state - as my domicile, but as it is in a very rural area there are limited mail services nearby (one UPS store about 45 miles away). Do I need to stick to same state or will it cause problems?

There are a lot of good mail services available, and the best one will depend entirely on your needs. If you need to domicile in a particular location, then you want a service with an address where you want to put down "roots". We needed to domicile in Florida, because that is where we could get health insurance that would give us some coverage as we travel around the country. We are not yet eligible for Medicare, so we are dependent on the insurance marketplace. Health insurance costs are dependent on zip codes, so we searched for the best insurance rates among the zip codes that were offered by mail services in Florida. For us, the MyRVMail service was the best choice.

However, if we were not burdened with choosing a service based on the cost of health care insurance, we would have gone with Traveling Mailbox for our mail service. Their cost and service are far superior to any of the others. When we were "mostly timing", and still had our house address as our home base, we were gone more than at home. We used Traveling Mailbox for our snail mail handling, and there were very few times where we had to forward hard copies of mail to wherever we happened to be. For most items, their scanning service was good enough that we could download the mail contents and print it off, if we needed a hard copy. And the cost for the scanning was included in the base rate of the service (with limitations), rather than having to pay for each scan as we now do.

I've been using St. Brendan's Isle (FL) since I started full timing. Works great.

We have our domicile in VT and use escapees in Livingston, TX for mail forwarding.

You do need to have a state you call home however your mall forwarding address can be different.

we have used myrvmail.com in Florida and were very satisfied with it. They will help and answer any questions you have about residency. They have a couple of levels of service. Worth a look.

I used a UPS store service for about five years until the store was sold; the new owners couldn't find their butts with three hands. So it depends on the store.

I've been using St. Brendan's Isle ( https://www.sbimailservice.com ) for about a year and it's been great. They've been in business since the late '80s I believe.

If you're going to change your domicile you probably should use a service in the same state; if you're not changing it then you can use any service you want.

Where are you going to domicile? (This is different than residency). You need a legal address - registrations, licenses, medical, banking, taxes, etc. When you pick the best state for you that's where your mail forwarding service should be.

We used Escapees RV Club out of Livingston, TX for approx. 20 years with absolutely no issues.

Residency is the issue. When we retires we were already Texans, but joined Escapees and use their mail service. We have good friends from Maryland who this year decided to retire and become FTers and change domicile to Texas. Escapees helped with the advice and guidance on changing states, and they are also using their mail service and the legal domicile address it provides which is important for government and financial institutions. Good luck.

As stated above, it's not just about mail - it's about legal domicile as well. Not every place that will host a mail box for you can provide you with everything needed to establish legal domicile. The Escapees RV Club mail service has been tested in the court system and prevailed. Several other of the RV-specific services are similar (mostly in TX, SD and FL). This is usually something that is taken care of before the purge and listing of the house. The Escapees web site has a lot of educational material on the topic of domicile.

Rob