igotjam wrote:

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This does not answer your question but I have a comment from the other end. We use UPS when our mail is forwarded to us and pick it up at UPS on our travels. If you pick up your mail at a UPS Store, quite often the store will charge you a handling fee for being used as a pickup point. If you use UPS (not a UPS Store) as a pickup point there is no charge to get your package.

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The problem is, we need an address for our mail to go too!  Then have it forwarded via whatever means, etc.

 

We have had UPS as our address for over 2.5 years, they have been great. Normally they will mail forward once a week, I believe the cost is like $12 per mo for the service.

we have used them for the past 10 months and no problems. They send us an email when our forwarding pkg has been sent and have called us to get instructions on larger packages we have received.

I've used the US Postal Service, as opposed to UPS, for mail forwarding. It works 100% of the time, but cost more than I'd like. The UPS method sounds like a good idea for what might be a less expensive method for mail forwarding, but I'm a bit confused by all of the different posts. Can someone get this down to the two digit IQ level for me?

Basically, I'd like to know:

1- How much does it costs to mail a single package full of forwarded mail once a week?
2- How plentiful are the UPS pickup points? That's important because if I have to go out of my way to find one, I'd rather pay for the convenience of having a Post Office on every corner where I can always get my mail at general delivery.

Phil Bob wrote:

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Basically, I'd like to know:

1- How much does it costs to mail a single package full of forwarded mail once a week?

depends on the weight. The UPS store sends ours to us through the regular poastal system (this is what we instructed) to wherever we specify. Works the same as all the other "popular" mail forwarding companies Rvers use, ie: Escapees, My Dakota Address etc.

2- How plentiful are the UPS pickup points? That's important because if I have to go out of my way to find one, I'd rather pay for the convenience of having a Post Office on every corner where I can always get my mail at general delivery.

Just have your UPS store send the mail package wherever you want including General Delivery. You are not required to ship and or p/u at a UPS store. We have instructed them to forward our mail via the post office and simply provide them with the address to send it to. We have money on our account to pay for the packaging (usually a manilla envelope) and the postage.

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 Ditto....they charge whatever the cost is for that individual package, and ship it to whatever campground I am at, as frequently as I want,  and they ship whatever way i want, ie. ground, 2nd day air, or overnight.  We usually only get our mail once a month, since all of our bills are paid online....

soos & phil bob > Appreciate the clarification.

We are no longer full timers. Now we are out several times a year for 1-3 months or a single 4-6 month period for work camping. So, if I understand this correctly, the lower cost factor appears to come with a couple disadvantages if one is an extended traveler as opposed to a full timer:

1- Unless I used the UPS store for collection all year long, even when at home, I would need to do an address change everytime I hit the road. Those are a hassle even assuming that the companies get it right the first time.

2- If I chose to have the PO temporarily forward mail to the UPS, then I have a major delivery lag. The PO forwarding process, the hold time at the UPS, and then the UPS forwarding time.  Even with bill pay, it then might be difficult to be timely with payments.  I also suspect that in the case of a box or package there would be an additional charge for the PO to forward to the UPS.

So if my thinking on this is correct, it appears that time saving convenience comes with a higher price tag and I'm stuck with the PO premium mail forwarding service. 

Thanks to all for your help!  We are seriously looking at UPS because we do not want to change of State of domicile. 

From the majority of replies UPS has not been a problem with the mail but what about using it as your legal address for tags, licenses, voting, etc?

Judy

In my experience (state of Michigan) you can NOT use it for voting (they told us we could be treated as homeless, and we could just give them the street corner we "hang out at")
we could NOT use it for our drivers licenses...after arguing numerous times with DMV they canceled our licenses until we caved in and gave them an ex-neighbors address.
We had no problem using it for license plates etc. We also had a problem using it for Fidelity Investments- no problem with most of our accounts with them but with one particular account they discovered it was a "P.O. Box" and froze our account until we gave them a physical address as "required by Federal Law". No issues with our other banks though....

Sue
PS- the state of MI did not give us a problem until about 6 months AFTER we gave them our UPS address.  We had already assumed everything was ok and had left the state...

-- Edited by soos on Tuesday 26th of January 2010 03:33:22 PM

This is why most Full-timers use one of the mail forwarding services in states like SD, TX, or FL as their permanent address.

We have used Alternative Resources in SD since we went full-timing in 2001 and have never had a problem with investments or anything else for that matter.

Unless you have a very good reason for keeping Michigan as your state of residence, I would strongly recommend you do some research on one of these other states and change your address. (See Howard's article on "Selecting a home base".

By the way it sounds, Michigan will not be happy until you move back into a stix and brix house, and will continue to give you trouble.

When we went full-timing we moved everything to SD so we wouldn't have any hassles. We had enough of them when we had a house.

Life is short. Make it easy on yourself and enjoy the lifestyle.

Jim