“How do you get mail in an RV while you’re on the road?” is definitely one of the top 5 questions we get about the trip. The simple answer is that we use a mail forwarding service called Traveling Mailbox for all letters. Start talking about packages though and that’s a whole other ball game that we still haven’t figured out (It’s hard, ok?!?!).

First, before we left we did our best to get all of our bills and other correspondence online to minimize the amount of mail we got in the first place. This worked pretty well but there definitely were still a number of things we couldn’t move online (I’m looking at you, Xcel Energy!). After we had most things online we signed up with our mail forwarding service Traveling Mailbox and set up a forwarding address with the post office.

Traveling Mailbox gives us a mailing address at some building in Aurora, CO. My work is very strict about the states I’m allowed to “live” in because of State sales tax rules so getting an address in Colorado was a high priority when choosing which service to go with. The address has a street address and then a number just like an apartment address. This is one of many advantages over a P.O. box since some people won’t mail to P.O. boxes. All of our mail gets sent to their office where the envelope gets scanned and Traveling Mailbox then sends us an email with the picture of the envelope:

After we get the email, we go to the site and choose what to do with the letter.

We have a few options but they basically fall into:

1. Open and Scan – Open the envelope and scan both sides of every page inside. This is what we do with almost everything.
2. Forward – Put the letter in the mail and forward it to another address. We had to do this with some credit cards and a new drivers license when Allison’s expired.
3. Shred and Delete – Traveling Mailbox will automatically get rid of most junk mail but a little bit still gets through so we can send this stuff to be shredded and deleted.

We can pay for different amounts of page scans per month but we settled on the $25/month plan with 80 page scans and 100 envelope scans per month. It has been about right for the amount of mail we get and we got a discount for paying for a full year in advance.

Overall, we love it. We still get all the mail we need, someone else takes care of removing the junk mail before it gets to us, we don’t need to worry about keeping paper around the house, and they will shred stuff for us so we don’t need to worry as much about identity theft. Most importantly, we never have to put pants on to walk out to a mailbox. Epic Win. Honestly, it makes it so easy we’ve thought about keeping the service even when we go back to living in a house eventually (the no pants thing is pretty great 🙂 ).

 

 

P.S. The links to Traveling Mailbox, like this one, are affiliate links so if you click on them and then end up signing up for the service we’ll get a five dollar discount on our bill for the month. We try to only put affiliate links on the blog for products we use and like so we hope you don’t mind supporting us.