Getting your mail

kakampers...very good to know! Thank you. ;-)

Remember to use temporary forwarding order with USPS, and let it expire or cancel it when you return home...do not, I repeat, DO NOT put in a change order back to the original address....your mail will end up In a "LOOP" that is hard to stop....20 years experience in the Postal Service fixing these kinds of mistakes!

Thanks so much everyone. We are happily planning. ;-)

You can put in a temporary forward with the USPS...beginning and ending date. On the end date everything goes back to your regular home address. The snowbirds from my area do this. And, it does not cost anything!!!
Or, you could get premium forwarding....the USPS send you everything once a week in a priority box. Downside of this is it does cost you. But you wouldn't have to change your address.

Thanks for the question and replies. This is FINALLY going to be a problem for us and your responses have been very helpful

Clay L wrote:
For two winters we did a post office TEMPORARY mail forwarding to a mail forwarding service. The service then sent our mail to wherever we were. Worked fine for us. It is a small town though and the local PO and carrier are very helpful and knowledgeable.

The reason for a temporary forward is that if you do a permanent one to a mail forwarding service you can't just submit a new change of address because that would route all of the mail sent to the mail forwarding service to your new address. The PMB (private mail box number) the service assigns you and uses for your mail means nothing to the post office.

Thanks for further clarifying that for my post. I forgot to state that it is a temporary forward.

When you go on line to forward your mail it is important to click TEMPORARY forward.

Many Post Offices and soon to be all including mine are now requiring that you do it on line. That way it is done automatically at the main office and your mail is never even sent to the local one. Less change for missing mail.
https://www.usps.com/
click tab manage your mail then forward your mail

For two winters we did a post office TEMPORARY mail forwarding to a mail forwarding service. The service then sent our mail to wherever we were. Worked fine for us. It is a small town though and the local PO and carrier are very helpful and knowledgeable.

The reason for a temporary forward is that if you do a permanent one to a mail forwarding service you can't just submit a new change of address because that would route all of the mail sent to the mail forwarding service to your new address. The PMB (private mail box number) the service assigns you and uses for your mail means nothing to the post office.

In the past we've only been gone two months max at a time and our PO has been gracious about extending our mail hold.

You do NOT need to suck up to your Post Office about mail hold or forwarding your mail.

Here is what I found out and do on line.

Go on line to the United States Postal website.
Plug in your PO box number or home address. Then click forward mail.

You put in where you want it forwarded to. CG or a neighbor or relative back home.

They will forward your mail automatically anywhere in the US for 4 months!

When the 4 months is up you go back on line and reapply for another 4 months. And so on if you desire. You can also stop the forwarding at any time on line if your trip is shorter than 4 months.

Have your mail forwarded to a friend or relative. At whatever interval you agree upon, call that person, go through it to eliminate the junk and have them forward the remainder to wherever you wish via priority mail (USPS can provide you with prepaid priority envelopes which make this more convenient for your sender). If you don't know a specific address where you will be have them send it you via General Delivery to a post office in the town you will be near a week from then. Although 98% of P.O. will accept general delivery mail, a few do not. Best to call ahead to make sure. You will need ID when you pick up your mail. I suggested giving your sender 1 week notice, but in over 13 year of doing this fulltime we've only had priority mail take more than 3 days once and that was 5.

I tried using a mail forwarding service for the first time this summer when I was on vacation. I submitted a change of address to the Post Office to have things sent to my private forwarding service. They would hold my mail until I asked them to do a bulk send to me. They did their job and things worked fine with them, but the Post Office end was a disaster. First, the PO only forwarded what they thought was First Class Mail. Fine, but their method of determining First Class Mail was hit or miss. Apparently business size envelopes (#10) that have a lot of extra verbiage on the front were tossed out as 4th Class mail. That included some of my normal monthly bills. Then when I got back home I tried canceling the PO mail forwarding. They deleted the forwarding address but didn't clear the forwarding "flag" for their auto-sorting equipment. So any First Class Mail that had the address bar code on it allowing machine sorting was kicked out for forwarding to a non-existant address. It took multiple trips to the PO over about two weeks to get that resolved. Luckily that mail just rode around in the delivery trucks for a few weeks and finally showed up at my house when they got everything straightened out.

In the future I'll just use my very friendly neighbors and my garbage can size mailbox. I can go 3 or 4 weeks collecting mail in my mailbox now, so having the neighbors pick it up every week or so isn't a problem. And I've figured out how to get electronic (e-mail) notification of all my monthly bills.