Day 23: Step #9, Take Your Administrative Life Virtual

How To Receive Paper Mail And Packages In Your New Home Overseas

Dear Student,

The other communication matter to think about before you head off for your new life overseas has to do with mail. Not email but the old-fashioned kind that requires a stamp.

For things like credit card bills, bank statements, and investment account reports, you can (and I recommend that you do) elect to go paperless. You’ve already organized things (if you did your homework from days 18, 19, and 21) so that you can access all your accounts online. If you need a paper copy of something, you can print one out yourself from your electronic files.

But even if you go completely paperless, you’ll still need a system for getting paper mail and packages. You’ll need to be able to receive your new credit cards when they are issued. You’ll want to be able to receive birthday, Mother’s Day, Christmas, and Hanukkah cards from loved ones back home. Plus you may find that it’s cheaper (although not necessarily cheap after you factor in the cost of forwarding… more on this in a minute) to receive your favorite magazines via subscription rather than buying them a single issue at a time on the local newsstand.

If you can find them on the local newsstand.

This, in fact, is one of the biggest reasons we’ve invested in a mail-forwarding service—so that we can continue to enjoy regular access to things we might otherwise miss from back home… such as English-language magazines.

An issue of The Economist magazine in Panama, if you can find it, costs US$8 or more. If you like to keep up with popular gossip, you’ll invest US$6 or more in each issue of People magazine you buy locally anywhere in Latin America (again, if you can find it for sale).

Your alternative is to put in place some kind of mail-forwarding infrastructure.

In Europe and any country with real addresses and mail delivery to your door, the simplest thing is to set up a P.O. Box with a mail service like the UPS Store in your hometown. Change your address for all deliveries that you want to continue after you’ve made your move to that P.O. Box. Then arrange with the store to forward all mail to that P.O. Box to you at your overseas address at regular intervals (once a month is probably best).

Note that you probably don’t want to change the mailing address on your bank or credit card statements to your new address in Europe. Some won’t mail overseas. Others may decide that you should no longer be permitted to keep your U.S. credit card if you’re no longer resident in the United States.

In Central America, where postal services don’t deliver door-to-door, the simplest option is a mail-forwarding service out of Miami (or wherever, but these are mostly based in Miami) that provides you with a P.O. Box where you can have your mail delivered and then ships your mail (along with that of their other customers) down to their office in the country where you’re living. At the in-country office, the mail is sorted, and you are alerted. You either drop by the office to collect your mail or, in some cases, arrange to have it delivered to you.

These services charge by weight. Note that they aren’t going to filter out junk mail for you (at least not junk mail in an envelope; you can typically ask them to trash any circulars or brochures), so you’re going to end up paying for some mail you don’t want. Not including magazines, expect to spend about US$20 a month for either of these systems.

If you’re living in Central America, where some things you might want aren’t available locally, a Miami forwarding service also allows you to take receipt of online shopping orders. You can place an order with Amazon, for example, and have it delivered to your Miami P.O. Box (they also give you a physical address for FedEx-type shipments that require a signature). The mail-forwarding service takes care of getting the package through customs for you and onward to your actual new location. Again, this isn’t cheap, but it is cheaper than flying to the United States to get the latest DVD series or to stock up on English-language reading material.

You may want for some things from back home in parts of Europe, as well, but in much of Europe you’ll be able to source many things locally. Amazon, for example, has sites for the U.K., France, and Germany, from which you can order English-language books.

If you don’t get much snail mail and don’t subscribe to magazines or want to be able to order things online, consider a service called Earth Class Mail. This company can receive your mail, scan each envelope, and send you the scans (electronically) so that you can determine what you want them to do with every piece of mail. You can choose (with the click of your mouse) to trash the envelope without opening, to have the envelope forwarded to you (in which case you’re back to one of the above options for delivery in Central America), or to have them scan the contents and email them to you (and then either to destroy the papers or to forward them on to you physically).

A very low-tech option might be called “Family and Friends.” This is the strategy we use for the bulk of our mail.

We haven’t gone paperless (although I realize that’s the recommendation I’ve made to you), as Lief prefers to have hard copies of credit card, bank, and investment account statements mailed to us. It’d be costly to have all this dealt with by our mail-forwarding service, so, instead, we use a family member’s address in the States for these things. The statements, annual reports, etc., are forwarded to us once a month. It’s similar to using the UPS Store, but you have a better chance of getting at least some of the junk mail filtered out this way. And you have greater control. You can call your sister or your son, for example, and ask her or him to be on the lookout for something in particular that you’re waiting for and would like to have forwarded immediately.

We do, though, as I’ve mentioned, also have a Miami mail-forwarding service. This we use for online shopping deliveries and other packages that need to be managed through customs. Our Family and Friends service is for paper mail only, specifically so as not to attract attention from customs officials.

Here are a couple of other tips related to sending and receiving snail mail globally…

• You can ship books more cheaply from the United States to another country by sending them via a U.S. Post Office M-bag. An M-bag is delivered via slow boat and takes about four to six weeks to get where it’s going. However, if you’re not intending to ship a container of stuff to your new home overseas, but will be carrying all your worldly possessions with you on the plane (or maybe shipping some boxes using the UPS Store, for example, as we discussed as part of your days 16 and 17 lessons), this can be a cheap and easy alternative for bringing at least some of your library with you…

• When you arrive in your new country of residence, pay attention to delivery times for mail you send elsewhere overseas. Regular mail (airmail) from Europe generally takes a week or so to get where it’s going. Regular airmail from Central America can take four to six weeks to arrive at its destination. I’ve sent two different documents from Panama to the same address in the United States about four weeks apart and had both envelopes arrive on the same day. I guess they didn’t send the mailbag until it was full. By paying attention early on, you’ll be able to gauge when to send what where to be sure it gets there in time.