Choosing a Virtual Mailbox
(Note - this blog post is written from the perspective of an American. Comments about what we need mail for are solely based on our personal experience.)
The last two times we’ve gone cruising, we’ve asked my parents to be our mail drop. We shifted our address to c/o theirs, forwarded all mail, and relied on their generosity and care to let us know if something critical needed our attention. Once in a very great while they’d package everything up (mostly magazines) and send it along with someone who flying down for a visit.
Mom’s taking the picture, of course.
Since this time our cruising plans are far more open-ended, we wanted to do the responsible thing and, well, be adults about it. Time to pay someone to deal with our mail.
It’s both a blessing and a curse that these the availability of these services has exploded in the last 15 years. Googling “mail forwarding” hands you over 55 MILLION hits in less than a second, and of course, the first 4 of those are ads. How on earth can you find what will work for you?
I started by checking out what Behan Gifford at Sailing Totem and Carolyn Shearlock at The Boat Galley have to say about the matter. They’ve each chosen different services, but their articles are spot on for how to start thinking about the whole mess. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel, after all, and they each offer some sound advice on what you ought to be considering.
Why deal with mail at all? Most of us have pared down what comes into the mailbox so that pretty much it’s all either junk or packages. Spending money every month for the random piece of important mail feels a little wasteful. But you need a mailing address for things like voter registration, drivers licenses, those pesky tax documents at the end of the year, and even for credit cards that are increasingly how many of us transact business.
Okay, reluctantly we agree we need a place to get mail. Now what? How do you even start to narrow down the choices?
Residency. Figuring out where you want to claim residency can factor hugely. There are financial considerations and voting considerations, for starters. For many, there’s an emotional attachment to being a resident in a given state. Banking institutions are getting increasingly savvy to any address that is commercial in nature; the Patriot Act that passed after 9-11 requires that you have a residential address attached to any bank account. This can be problematic for cruisers who don’t have any address other than their boat and is worth making sure your mail service has a plan for this. (Alternatively, if you don’t have a “real” address of your own, you might ask a friendly pal or sympathetic family member to serve as your residential address but you have all the mail going through your mail service. All banks are happy to have a mailing address that’s different from your actual “real” address.)
What services do you really need. Forward? Scan? Open and scan? Shred? Are you wanting just a mail forwarding service, which will quite literally bundle your mail together and send it off to you when you are ready to receive it? Are you looking for more of a virtual mailbox, where each envelope is scanned and opened if you tell the service to open it? Do you need to be able to receive mail addressed to 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 people?
Any extra special tidbits. Your personal circumstances might skew you to some additional considerations; each of these situations is addressed (hah - see what I did there?) by one or another of the services that made our final round of cuts. Sailing far afield and wondering about how to source the inevitable boat part? Needing to deposit real live paper checks regularly? Planning on sailing locally and jonesing for a physical place for regular get-togethers? Wanting the immediate response that comes with an active online support system?
Once you’ve made these decisions, then you can get down to comparing services. Any one of these Initial questions will likely limit your options; you should also look hard at the quantity of mail you think you’ll need.
Behan suggests running a hypothetical situation around your own mailing needs. This is such a great idea. No two mail services price things quite the same way, and running the same scenario for each option means you’re really able to draw legitimate comparisons.
For us, the residency factor in terms of mailing has become a non-issue. Neither of our children is going to college in Virginia, so the requirement to keep our Virginia residency has disappeared. We initially thought we’d be drawn to a state with no state income tax like Florida, but a little research proved that this would likely be a false economy. Saving a couple of hundred dollars a year on income tax (if that) only to pay far higher health insurance rates didn’t seem to make sense. It’s also a whole lot simpler to plan on eventually becoming Vermont residents since we own property there.
Reviews mattered a lot in our thinking. Mail is a sensitive enough concern that being cautious feels prudent. Researching on Women Who Sail, Cruisers Forum, and on various blog posts led me to narrow down the options to St. Brendan’s Isle, Dockside, EarthClass Mail, and Traveling Mailbox. The first two are cruiser-created businesses, also there in support of any nomadic lifestyle; the last 2 are less niche and far less personal. Base costs range from $15 a month all the way up to in excess of $75 a month and there are extra fees for things like mailing packages or dealing with checks or holding mail for an excess amount of time.
St Brendan’s Isle is, at least for East Coast-based US cruisers, is the gold standard. They’ve been in business since 1988 and offer a variety of services way beyond just dealing with mail. They’ll help with sourcing parts and renewing Coast Guard documentation. They’ll work with you on Florida residency and go to bat with the elections board to make sure you’re eligible to vote. Pretty much if you spend any time on cruiser sites, you’ll hear people singing the praises of SBI.
Dockside Mail seems to be positioning themselves in much the same way for West Coast-based cruisers. Founded by cruisers in 2011, the company prides themselves on customer service. In addition, like SBI in Florida, they’re in a “no-income tax” state, meaning you have alternatives if this is important to you. (If you mention Behan Gifford/Sailing Totem when you speak with Angela at Dockside, those fine cruisers earn a small stipend at no extra cost to you.)
EarthClass Mail was appealing for how they handle checks, at least one of which comes my way in physical form every single month. Everyone else charges a high premium to deal with checks; my friend Carolyn has worked out a higher-tech way to handle the very few checks that come her way. She has SBI open the mail, scan it, and then she prints the check on board and deposits it via her mobile banking app! That said, I had a conversation with my employer about maybe looking at going electronic or at the very least just sending that check directly to the bank, which she is happy to do. The need to deal with a physical check should no longer exist.
Traveling Mailbox initially caught my eye when we were thinking we needed to keep a Virginia address. Like Dockside, they’ve been in business since 2011. They’re not cruiser-started, though, so don’t have the insight into that unique lifestyle. They offer “non mailbox” addresses that may sneak past banking institutions (although we’d have probably asked a friend to serve as our physical address of record if we needed that Virginia residency.) Any of the addresses at Traveling Mailbox that are NOT in Sanford, North Carolina, are just rented boxes at UPS stores, so mail is sent on to North Carolina for any processing, adding days to your mail time. The vast majority of negative reviews of Traveling Mailbox are from people who had mailboxes outside of their main facility.
After running a scenario of 2 people, 10 pieces of (non-junk) mail a month, 20 pages needing to be scanned, and 1 package of mail sent our way every other month, we decided on Traveling Mailbox. Once we realized we were not bound to any state in particular, our options opened up. We were won over by the immediate online help availability, the included number of page scans, the easy online portal, and the pricing. Talking to other cruisers who have used Traveling Mailbox was helpful also, cementing our decision. (Yes, the link here is an affiliate link - but I requested it after a test drive of the service. I don’t promote stuff I don’t use.)
So far, a month in, we’re happy with the call. We get an email when a new piece of mail has arrived and can decide whether to open and scan or just shred it. We’ve set up an integration with Google Drive so any opened mail can be accessed while we’re offline. The couple of questions we’ve had have been immediately answered on the live chat. We’ve been manually changing addresses based on mail that’s coming to the Charlottesville house and will set up mail forwarding next week; there might be a month of extra envelope scans in August as we settle things out.
Choosing a mail service is just like every other cruising decision - what is “best” really depends. Spend some time, do your research, and figure it out for yourself!
Forwarding mail sticker!