fulltiming

During a recent rally I was approached by an Airstreamer who was unhappy because he wasn’t getting his Airstream Life magazine regularly. It turned out that when he and his wife were traveling, they filled out a temporary mail forwarding order with the US Postal Service, and expected that it would work for up to six months as the USPS website claims.

Unfortunately for this Airstreamer, USPS mail forwarding has significant limitations, among which is that they won’t forward periodicals after 60 days. Since Airstream Life is mailed quarterly, he never got his magazines. The Post Office just tossed them, without even notifying him.

If you’re a frequent traveler, or planning a multi-month trip, you need to find a professional mail forwarding service and use it all the time. This can be a little weird at first, because you’ll need to permanently change your mailing address for everything, to the address of the mail forwarding service. That means you won’t get mail delivered directly to your home anymore (except junk mail).

It can take a few months to get everyone updated on your new address, but the rewards are worth it. Once you’ve got all your bills, correspondence, and other paper mail coming to the new mail forwarding address, life becomes very convenient. Wherever you are, you can simply call, email, or log into the website of your mail service and have them bundle up all your current mail to be sent to you as a single package. In other words, you can deal with the mail on your schedule.

Moreover, a good service will allow you to set up a recurring schedule for delivery. When I’m at home, my mail is automatically shipped to me in a single Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope (about $5) every week. It arrives in two days and it’s trackable. If I want, I can request UPS delivery with overnight, two day, and three day delivery options. Postage is charged to my credit card on file, and the service costs $12/month.

When I’m on the road, the mail service waits for me to get in touch. I look ahead a few days and pick a convenient location to receive the mail, then place an order for shipment on a particular date. It can be shipped to a campground, a Post Office (using General Delivery), a friend or family’s home, or a business address. When I get there, my mail is always waiting.

If you’re ready to make the switch, keep a few tips in mind:

Choose the right mail forwarding service.

When we were looking for a new mail forwarding service, people advised us to “just use any UPS Store.” Bad idea. What if that little shop in the strip mall closes? It has happened to friends and fellow fulltimers, and they’ve had the hassle of moving everything to another address.

Instead, look for an established mail forwarding specialist that has a succession plan in place in case the owners retire or the business has to move. Also, look for a service that will give you excellent personal attention via phone and email.

Keep it professional.

While it can be tempting to ask a friend to collect your mail at home and forward it to you, be wary. I’ve heard too many stories in which the friend ends up “too busy” and crucial mail is delayed.

Check the fine print.

As with USPS Mail Forwarding, some services have limitations on what they will forward. At Airstream Life we get occasional complaints from subscribers who paid for the cheapest mail forwarding service they could get and found out later that their magazines were getting tossed.

Know your options.

Make sure the service you use will forward your magazines and give you the option to have them discard junk mail (mail which is addressed to “Occupant” or similar). Make sure also that if you receive an unexpected 10-lb paperweight in the mail, they’ll notify you before shipping it at your expense. That way you are getting everything you want, and not paying to forward stuff you don’t want.

Get a permanent solution.

Yes, you can file temporary forwarding orders, but once you experience the convenience of professional and permanent mail forwarding, you will probably become addicted. You’ll never fail to get a bill, statement, check, renewal, or other important mail again, whereas it’s all too easy for things to fall through the cracks with on-again, off-again solutions.

Reduce your volume of mail.

Some full-time friends of mine used to get a giant pack of mail once a month from their mail forwarding service. It would typically run about four inches thick. Then they’d spend a full day sitting in their Airstream, sorting through all the paper, paying bills by check, licking envelopes, and shredding sensitive information. I can’t imagine many worse ways to spend a day in my Airstream! So…

Go paperless.

Get every credit card, utility, bank, and other recurring relationship to send you an e-bill, or get rid of that vendor. Have all your small recurring bills (cell phone, etc) billed automatically to your credit or debit card, to reduce the number of bills you get. Save copies of the e-bills on your computer as PDFs so you can refer to them if you need to. Use online banking to simplify your bill paying. It’s generally free and easy to use.

Some people still feel more comfortable receiving paper bills, but you’ll find that if you don’t use online e-billing you might get hit with late charges. That adds up fast, and can affect your credit rating.

In short, try to eliminate as much paper correspondence as you can. Very few things really need to be in paper form these days, so if you are getting a thick stack of mail every week, take a hard look at what you are getting and see about cutting it back.

Just say no.

Cutting the volume of mail includes simple techniques like asking to be removed from mailing lists and closing unnecessary accounts. Ideally you should just get a few crucial pieces of mail each week, so you can spend most of your time enjoying the travel experience.

Consider state of residence.

You don’t have to choose a mail forwarding service in your home state. I am an Arizona resident, but my mailing address is in Florida. It’s perfectly legal to have your mailing address wherever you like.

However, if you are going out full time, this is a chance to review your state of residency. Fulltimers can sometimes choose where to legally domicile, taking into account factors like state income taxes, vehicle registration fees, voting registration, health care costs, and many other factors.

This is a much more complicated decision, so do your research and choose wisely. You may be considered a resident of some states simply by remaining there for a period of time, or because you own real estate, have a child in school, or operate a business, so in some cases the decision is made for you.

Get a physical street address, not a PO Box.

If not, you may have trouble with banks and drivers licenses later, thanks to certain remaining provisions of the Patriot Act. An address like 411 Walnut St #4468 is fine.

In some cases (as with state Driver’s Licenses and banking accounts) you may be required to provide a “real” physical address as well. In Arizona, the Motor Vehicle Registrar has my home address on file but my driver’s license shows my mailing address. This surprises people regularly—they assume it’s “not legal” but of course it is, and it prevents businesses from capturing my home address and adding it to their databases for junk mail.

There’s one last perk as well: certain Florida entertainment venues have given us the “resident” rate for admission based on our mailing address, even though it’s on an Arizona driver’s license! It’s a small world, after all…

-By Rich Luhr

More and more Airstreamers are taking their jobs on the road with them. No, not camp hosting, or even work camping — they’re keeping an office job afloat as they travel from place to place, either temporarily in extended vacation mode, or on a permanent basis, year ’round. The rewards are obvious (like that view, below), but there are challenges, too.

Oceanview from an Airstream — Airstream ocean view (photo by Laura Domela)

Kevin Morris and wife Laura Domela run their own business (an online publication for electrical engineers) and manage ten employees. “We really can’t take much of a break from work,” said Laura, a professional photographer—but that hasn’t stopped them from regularly traveling in their 27-foot, 2010 FB Airstream International. “Kevin does the writing and manages most of the business side, and I do the layout and publishing of our articles and newsletters,” she said. “After eleven years of taking our work on the road we find that it’s really important not to just work the day away without taking a good break to go see or do something new.”

The Airstream office of Morris and Domela

Kyle Bolstad, (who has traveled to every state in the nation and all ten Canadian provinces while succeeding at his job as a software developer), concurs. “My one piece of advice for others who work while they travel is to try and take breaks during the day, to get out and explore,” he said.

Kyle Bolstad - jobs on the road — Kyle Bolstad

Itching to see the country, Kyle moved out of his apartment and into an Airstream five years ago. He maintains a full time job while full-timing in a 2008 23-foot CCD International, towed by his trusty Touareg. He’s currently in Hawaii (the only state he has visited without the Airstream).

“I typically work a bit in the morning, take a break during lunch to explore the area during daylight hours, and then continue working later that night when it’s too dark to explore much,” he said. “If your job doesn’t allow you to take a break during the day, try to mix up your work environment by getting out of the Airstream to work in a cool coffee shop, park, hotel lobby, restaurant, you name it.” As Kyle’s website states, “with a MacBook Pro and an internet connection, he works out of an Airstream—anywhere.”

Getting (and staying) electronically connected to employers, coworkers and associates while traveling is a challenge that Kevin, Kyle and Laura solve by using a sophisticated variety of hotspot technologies and all the associated gadgetry. More casual users will be glad to hear that plain old campground wifi is increasing in reliability.

As recent as three or four years ago, the internet connection at most campgrounds was nonexistent or spotty. “When they first started out they used consumer-level, homeowner solutions,” said Michael Sullivan, an Apple certified support professional and owner of MPS Consulting. “They put the router in the clubhouse, or the laundry room, or some other ‘central location’.” RVers requiring the internet learned to ask where the signal was strongest when checking in, and then selected the nearest campsite. “You’d put up with being next to the laundromat just so you’d have a good wifi signal, or you had to walk over with your laptop and sit there,” said Sullivan.

“There were a couple of problems with the campground wifi setup,” he explained. “Obviously, the range—the further you’d get out, the slower it would be, if you got a connection at all. And the consumer level units providing the signal were a combination of router and wireless device all in one box that wouldn’t give very good partitioning.” Each user on the network was visible to all. “You could look at your neighbor’s dirty laundry very easily,” he laughed, “especially if they have their computer set up for guest sharing. You’d be able to print to their printer if they had one! That would be really funny.”

Campground owners have recently wised up and learned from commercial hotels. “Mid range hotels provide reliable free internet, and they realize the better it is, the more likely you are to stay with them,” said Sullivan. “The campgrounds are just now figuring this out. They know wifi is a major pull. A high speed, high bandwidth connection is the new swimming pool.”

Look for higher-end campgrounds that have installed professional level equipment; meaning, a wifi controller box in a central location with a wire loop running throughout the grounds with a series of WAPs—wireless access points—broadcasting out. “Instead of one antenna, you have a whole series of antennas throughout the property,” said Sullivan. “So you could be parked way out on the end or wherever you liked, and still get a strong signal and high bandwidth.”

“Another problem with consumer level units is that they’re only meant to support a small number of wifi connections before there’s a great degradation in quality of the signal,” he continued. “Often times if you exceed the number of people, the wifi unit kind of freezes. The manager had to unplug it—knocking everyone off—plug it back in, and then everyone can get back in the pool…until it exceeds the quantity again, over and over. The commercial ones don’t tend to do that; they’re better controlled and better partitioned, with better security, and better availability. They don’t tend to croak.”

Another good thing: professional equipment usually comes with a maintenance contract. “If somebody has a problem, they call an 800 number instead of the poor hapless guy running the KOA who might be really good at cleaning pools and maintaining the site, but with the internet, not so much,” Sullivan said. “Now you can get a guy on the other end who will be able to remotely see what’s going on with your system and fix it for you, or troubleshoot the problem.”

Sullivan’s consulting business is located in a town popular for it’s outdoor recreation. “We have a lot of clients that we do tech support for that say ‘do you mind, I’m not in a traditional house, I’m not in a traditional business, I’m in an Airstream’ halfway to nowhere,” he said. “Do you mind dropping in on us? I say ‘no, we live for that!’”

“You see somebody with a really nice Airstream, and pulling it is a really nice rig — that’s somebody that wants to be taken care of in the same way as somebody living in a really nice house,” Sullivan said. “That’s our market—we take care of these people. And the mobile market is growing.”

“It seems like every mammalian species out there has an iPad or iPhone,” he joked. “Everybody wants to be mobile, and everybody wants to be able to take care of business while they are lounging about at their cabin, or in their RV. It’s getting harder and harder to cut the cord, so to speak; to say “I’m going on vacation and I’m not turning on my cell phone or device.”

“We’ve even snowshoed to a client, with our equipment in a backpack,” he said.

Mail Forwarding for the Serious RVer