Tips, Tricks, and Resources – Travel Prep Part 1

So you want to get out of town for an extended trip…but there’s a bunch to take care of before you leave.  In fact, there’s probably more to deal with than you thought.  You’ll need to put together a rather comprehensive list as you’re planning to make sure you don’t forget anything.

We’ve already dealt with a few items concerning travel tech on a previous post, so we won’t be dealing with that here.  I will be giving an update at the end of this post though, concerning disappointment I have related to changes in the terms of the hotspot that we are using while traveling.

My recommendation is to start taking care of a number of these items whether or not you have any intentions of leaving your house on long excursions.  Most people currently get way too many pieces of mail, even with the growth of online services and email.  I think you should start to actively reduce the amount of mail you get, since most of it goes in the garbage anyway.

Bill Payment

Most billing nowadays will allow you to receive your statements online or via email.  I’d say you should be availing yourself of that option.  Not only do you always know where the bill is, rather than misplacing it, but you might get reminders when the due date is approaching rapidly, and you haven’t yet paid the bill, to help you avoid incurring any late fees.  In fact, most banks will allow for you to receive the bills through their system, and you can just set it up to automatically pay, or have you manually pay it electronically.  I don’t know about you, but I hate writing a check, and addressing, stamping, and stuffing an envelope, and mailing out a bill.  I still don’t pay every bill automatically when it comes in (I still want more control than that), but I receive and pay almost all of my bills electronically.

Junk Mail

Now for all that pesky junk mail.  Before we left we signed up via both of these websites to start to reduce the amount of junk mail we receive, in addition to all those unwanted credit card offers.  Catalog Choice is supposed to actively reduce the amount of miscellaneous crap mail that you receive.  I have no idea how well either this or the next website are actually working so far, since we left town within 1 week of getting signed up.  All the research that I did pointed me to these, so hopefully they do what they are supposed to do.  The next one is associated with the annoying credit offers that we consistently get.  We signed up OptOutPrescreen, which is somehow affiliated with the three major credit reporting agencies.  You have the option to opt out for 5 years, or permanently.  If I want some additional credit, I’ll pursue it.  So I don’t need it coming to the door unsolicited.  These offers make up quite a bit of the junk mail we get, so we’re going to be glad to be rid of them.

Mail On The Go

Since there are still pieces of mail that we will want to receive while we are on the road, we lined up a mailbox that would receive our mail while we are on the road.  It would then scan the front of each envelope that comes in, and give us a variety of options to handle it from that point.  The service we went with is called Travelingmailbox.  We then forwarded mail for ourselves and some of our companies to our mailbox with them.  There was an initial delay of about 2 weeks before we started receiving any mail, but the lag now appears to be approximately a week.  I don’t know where the delay is, USPS or Travelingmailbox, but it is slightly annoying.  So far the service itself seems to be working well.

Here’s one oddity that we found.  We didn’t forward all of the mail that comes to our house to our traveling mailbox.  There was some mail that might come to a company that has our home mailing address that I wouldn’t really care about while on the road.  The USPS, instead of continuing to mail that mail, and anything mailed Standard mail, which doesn’t get forward, just rejected all the other mail.  Now I’m getting notifications about requests for an updated address from a few organizations that I do business with.  I’m going to have to do some additional research on how to handle this next time, because this was not our desired result.  I actually purchased and installed a large locking mailbox, which was getting checked once every several days, to handle the mail that didn’t get forwarded to the traveling mailbox.

Bonus…Hotspot Update

So, as you might have read in a previous post we’re using a hotspot from yourkarma.com.  It was billed as unlimited data, at a slightly slower rate, for $50 per month.  Several weeks ago they modified the plan so that you could get up to 15GB per month of usage at that speed, and then they would throttle it down to a trickle.  It was pretty much enough that you could get your emails and a little very limited surfing.  We hit the 15GB limit on day 27 of the cycle, so it was only throttled for a few days.  You never quite understand how much data you use when you are trying to run a couple of businesses from the road, and you’re not tied to your normal internet provider.  Now, just today, they decided that even that service is too much for them to offer, and are forcing you in to other, higher priced plans, at the end of this billing cycle.  This is the point at which I cancel my service, once I return home, and continue in my search for the best alternative for us while on the road.  I was very hopeful for this service, but I can no longer recommend it.

Get Connected