A Virtual MailBox Made Life Easier

It is time to move! And we will be moving around in the next 5 years. So what do we do about our mail?

You may think it is not such a big deal by simply filling out a form at USPS.com and forwarding your mail to the new address. However, mail does not start forwarding until 2-3 weeks after filling out the form. Furthermore, you may not have finalized your destination residential address yet and it changes for some reason. Our scenario was:

-- We signed our destination apartment lease and had a permanent mailing address.

-- We started forwarding our mail to the permanent mailing address as soon as it was established.

-- Even so, we were still receiving mail to our old house up through our moving date. Also, if you rent that house or it is an apartment complex, now your new tenants will receive your mail after you move out -- the forwarding services by the mail couriers is simply not 100% dependable.

-- Another issue (separate from the courier forwarding shortcomings) was that when we moved to the destination apartment, for some reason, the mail person at our apartment thought we did not live there, and returned our mail by accident for another two weeks. My new credit card was lost in the mail 2 times during this move, and so did two of my last paychecks. On top of that, what if the new tenants after us received our credit card and other personal documents started to use it? What if we have to deal with this every time we move for the next 5 years?

If we have a real permanent address, we would not have this problem again. I spent a few days doing research, compared iPostal1, US Global Mail, Incfile, PostScanMail, Earth Class Mail, Virtual Post Mail, and finally found this amazing family owned mail service company called Texas Home Base.

Texas Home Base offers 3 straight forward service types at an affordable price:

1. Mail Forwarding ($130-$185/year),

• consolidates and forwards mails to an address at your request.

2. Mail Scanning Digital Mail Box ($200/year)

• service scans mail and stores it on your digital mail box once a week for your review, and shred/hold/forward upon your request.

3. Mail Scanning - Emailed Scanning($200/year)

• scans and emails all mail received to you.

Pros:

Unlike other mail services, THB does not have a limitation on the number of Recipients in one mail box, nor the number of mail pieces you receive OR require to scan every month. We are currently using the Digital Mail Box Service. After a while, we realized that most of the time, we really don't need the mail physically. Shred or download after we read through the mail are the most common options we use. It saved us so much time and space!

Cons:

There is a small fee to forward mail, so I usually consolidate all the mails need to be forwarded and forward them together. Also, even though it happens rarely, some venders still require a physical address, which means you may not be able to use your virtual mail box you paid for.

Overall, for $17 a month, we have a peace of mind that we will never lose our mail due to A Change-Of-Address. I will definitely update this post if I find something new later.