After looking at many other aspects of full-time travel life (See where to start, taxes, and insurance) the final topic we researched was Mail Service providers. By this point, you should have your preferred state selected or at least narrowed down to just a couple of options.

If you have friends or family who live in your preferred state, are they open to managing your mail for you? If so, you’re set. All you have to do is ensure they understand what you want them to do and start transferring your mail. You owe them quite a large favor, so treating them to dinner out, concert tickets or other gifts will go a long way to keeping them happily receiving and managing your physical mail.

Can’t paper mail just go away?

If you don’t have friends or family who are willing to receive and forward your mail to you, you’re not alone. That’s a big ask, which is why most nomads find a mail service to take on this task.

Mail services make life on the road much easier, as they receive, handle, and forward mail, and many give you the ability to view images of your mail and easily tell the service company what to do with each piece. They may also provide a legal address if you’re looking to change residency, which was our situation.

So, what do you want?

Before running off and doing a ton of research, decide what services are important to you. Do you just want your mail bundled up and sent to you periodically? Is shredding important to you? What about recycling vs. just throwing what you don’t want sent to you into the trash? This important step and can save you quite a bit of time down the road.

In our case, Florida was our preferred state because we like their tax structure, and they offer a great PPO health plan on their public market.  Florida also has many mail service providers, so we had lots of options to consider. These were our initial requirements:

• Have a physical location in a preferred county (a county with low health insurance costs)
• Offer envelope opening and document scanning
• Shred envelopes if desired
• Have a large number of positive on-line customer reviews
• Provide a physical address accepted by state and financial institutions
• Offer international mail forwarding
• Give you options for how forwarded mail will be sent

Once we decided what was important to us, we identified the potential candidates. A simple search for the name of your preferred state and “mail servicer” will give you your initial candidates. Once we had that list, we looked at each to see if it met our initial criteria. Here’s how each fared:

Get down to specifics

The next step is to get information on the companies who passed the 1^st round. Service descriptions, like all good marketing info, varies from company to company. Prices also vary quite a bit. Some companies use tiered plans based on volume, some price per piece, and all have add-on services and special one-time fees. It’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges.

To simplify the process, we created an Excel spreadsheet to capture pros, cons, locations, preferred plan, costs, and outstanding questions for each vendor.

Then we gathered the following information: monthly fees, add-on costs, and any per-item fees.  We compared the services, and followed up with each vendor to get answers to any lingering questions.

But will they take the address?

Only MyRVmail and Escapees RV Club would confirm the physical addresses they provide would be accepted by the state and most financial institutions. That was one of our top requirements, so all the other candidates were out of contention.

To finalize our decision, I geeked out and created a pricing model using various mail volume assumptions. I wanted to see the annual cost differences between companies based on various volume scenarios in case our expected mail volume was way off. At the end of the day, we selected MyRVmail due to them being located in a preferred county (Okaloosa) despite being slightly more expensive.

We have been thrilled with the MyRVmail service and had no problems using our new address for our FL driver’s licenses, car registration, Global Entry applications and voter registrations. They have an excellent step-by-step guide and phone support to help you through the process.

Looking back, our research and analysis was invaluable in helping us select the best mail management solution. Taking a little time upfront made a world of difference for us. Moving our mail was a big step, and we wanted to go into it with the peace of mind of knowing we’d be fine when taking that first big step into the nomadic life.