What to do with your postal mail while you're out seeing the world is a headache. Why isn't everything paperless yet? 🙁 The next best thing is a virtual mailbox that you can use to access your post mail online. Here are five tips to help access your post online.
Tip 1: Cancel all magazine subscriptions and ask any loyalty program or business you deal with on a regular basis to stop sending you snail mail. This includes all snail mail you may get from banks, health insurance, superannuation or even your local pizza joint that likes to send you mail directly. Ask any company that sends you post mail to stop. Just stop. Or, send any correspondence to your email address. Unfortunately, not all companies are happy to only send emails instead of paper mail. My suggestion here is to keep asking. You never know what can happen in the future.
Tip 2: Ask for all you bills to be sent straight to your email. Apart from saving the planet by consuming less paper you will also get to see exactly what money is going in and out of your bank while on the road. On that note, try to get rid of as many monthly charges as you can. For example your gym membership. Why should you keep paying your gym membership when you aren’t going to be home?
Tip 3: If you are going to receive really important paper documents from important companies,it may be useful for you to have these companies forward their mail to a fantastic family member. Although I trust our online mailbox company to respect our privacy some mail may be better of going to family members, just for the time being, until the company comes on board with the whole greener earth way of life – paperless mail.
Tip 4: Choose a company that is going to help you, contact you and enable you to contact them as often as required. This is very important. Just because one virtual mailbox company is cheaper than another does not mean they are better. A company that communicates with you is better than one that does not. After choosing that fabulous mail redirection company, sign up and send yourself a test letter. Make it cute so that you can look at it online and be all excitable like we were 🙂
Tip 5: Organise your mail to be redirected two to four weeks before you leave for your long term trip. This is to make sure you have enough time to fix anything that may go wrong. Which it won’t! But you know, better safe than sorry.
Enjoy your long term trip, knowing that you will be contactable at any time.
UPDATE: click here for a later post after we've been using a virtual mailbox for a while