A-Z Guide to Full-Time RV Living: Mail

Welcome to post 13 of 26 in the A-Z guide to full-time RV Living.

For full-time RVers, receiving mail is one of the trickier aspects of the houseless lifestyle.  Living and traveling in an RV full-time means not belonging to any one single address.  However, a mailing address is required for many of life’s necessities and in some cases, a physical address is required as well.  Luckily, there are services available to help make receiving mail a possibility for those of us that choose to not reside at a fixed location.  

How receiving mail works for full-time RVers

1. You will need to decide on a single address where your mail can be sent throughout the year.
   
2. When mail arrives at your mailing address, you’ll need to decide how to get that mail to your current location (if needed).

For each of those two steps, there are a few options. 

Options for establishing a mailing address

Use the address of a friend or family member

Things to consider:

• How will this work?  Are they opening your mail and sending you photos?  Are you coordinating with them on a regular basis to forward your mail to wherever you’re currently located?  
• Are you comfortable with this person seeing all your mail?
• Consider the effort this will take on their end. Is it an inconvenience? Should you pay them a monthly fee? 

Use a virtual mailbox or mail forwarding service

A virtual mailbox such as Traveling Mailbox, or a mail forwarding service like that offered by Escapees RV Club, will provide you with a mailing address for an annual fee.  Your mail will be received at that address and can either be scanned and emailed to you or collected and forwarded to you depending on the service.   

We use Traveling Mailbox which allows us to view scans of our physical mail.  How it works:  When a new piece of mail is received, Traveling Mailbox scans the envelope and sends us an email.  We log on to our account and select whether we’d like them to open, scan, and email us the contents, shred and toss the parcel, or forward it to us.  This is extremely convenient as most of our mail can be scanned and emailed to us.  The only time we need to have mail forwarded to us is for items such as credit cards and health insurance cards.

Things to consider:

• What is the monthly or annual fee?
• Will they scan your mail for you? Is there a scan limit? How much are overage fees?
• Will they forward your mail to you?  When?  Is it an additional fee?
• Can they process any checks you might receive?

Use a PO box

Some full-time RVers pass in and out of the same town (maybe their hometown) several times a year.  In this case, you could get a PO box and let your mail accumulate until your next visit.  

Things to consider:

• Is your PO box large enough to hold all your mail?
• You could potentially miss something time sensitive such as a jury duty summons or a bill that is due before you pick up your mail.
• A PO box is only sufficient as a mailing address but cannot serve as your physical address.  A physical address is required for certain things such as banking, taxes, voting, and vehicle registration.

How to get your mail / Where to have it forwarded to

Send to USPS General Delivery

General Delivery is a mail service provided by the US Postal Service for those without a permanent address.  Letters or packages sent via USPS may be addressed as follows and will be held for you at that post office:

Name
General Delivery
Town, State, Zip Code

This is extremely convenient as there are post offices everywhere.  Though,  not all post offices accept general delivery.  Call ahead to find out if they accept general delivery, ask long they will hold it for (usually anywhere from 10-30 days), and if there is a fee for using their General Delivery service.  UPS and FedEx packages cannot be sent to General Delivery.

Send to a nearby friend, family member, or acquaintance

If you’re going to be in an area where you know someone, ask if you can have your mail sent to them.  We’ve had good luck with this as it’s a simple favor and is a good excuse to visit people you may not have seen for awhile.

Send to A local RV park 

If you have plans to stay at an RV park, this could be a great opportunity to have your mail forwarded.  Just be sure to check ahead of time as not all RV parks will accept guest’s mail.

How to receive packages

Living on the road full-time will greatly reduce your online shopping expenses since receiving packages is far less convenient.  Though, in our modern world it feels impossible to completely eliminate the need to order certain things online.

Options for receiving packages:

• Ask a nearby friend, family member or acquaintance
• Ask a local RV park if you can ship to their address
• If you’re ordering from a big box store, see if they offer the option to have the product shipped to the store for pickup
• For Amazon orders, see if there is a nearby Amazon locker.  These free, secure, self-service lockers allow Amazon orders to be sent to various addresses around the country for easy pick-up.

Ways to reduce your mail

• Opt for paperless options whenever possible. Doing so with your bank accounts and insurance companies can greatly reduce the volume of physical mail that you receive.
• Ask friends and family to email you instead, or text you a photo of the card, invite, etc. that they want to send.
• Through DMAchoice.org, for a small fee you can register to reduce promotional mail offers from companies or organizations you don’t have a business relationship with.

A note about domicile

For those that live in a house, residency and domicile are one and the same.  Unfortunately for full-time RVers it’s a little bit more complicated.  Domicile is a legal concept that is interpreted differently from state to state.  Establishing your domicile as an RVer is an important thing to do when you hit the road in order to protect yourself in the event of some unforeseen circumstance such as a lawsuit being filed against you or your vehicle insurer denying coverage because you’re no longer domiciled where you said you were. Those are just a couple of examples among many but I’ll stop there as I’m not a lawyer.  I recommend reading further about what domicile is and why it matters starting with this article on the Escapees RV website. 

While receiving mail requires more thought and planning than it does when living in a house, I hope this article helped you better understand what your options are. It can feel overwhelming at first only because you never had to think that hard about how to receive your mail but after a few months of full-time travel you’ll get the hang of it and it will quickly become a simple task.