Forward mail or change of address

Hey all,

Don’t know if this is the correct section to post this.. but I’m wondering what exactly to do with my mail as I’m On my way to the UK soon. How exactly has this worked for others?

Do I forward all my mail? Or just give everyone my new address? Not sure how this mail thing works.

Maybe use a mail forwarding service.

https://www.usglobalmail.com/mail-services-for/expats/

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Unless you have a reason to not be giving out your forwarding address, I'd say go that route. We've used USGlobalmail. For the most part it's worked well for us. You put in a forwarding address at the PO where you live, and they will forward to USGM for a year. You pay monthly, and can cancel at any point.  You do need to sign up before you go, though, I think. (Maybe not?)

USGM receives the mail and lets you know it's there. They will scan it, if you wish, for about $3.50 an item and you can read it as a PDF. Or they will forward it on to you - it's been taking about two weeks to get forwarded mail. We have three names on our account, and the cost is a flat $20 a month.  You get an actual street address and PMB number.  They also have a webchat available during their normal business hours. As far as dealing with standard postal mail, I can't fault them at all.

They will consolidate boxes if you do shopping in the USA.  We were a bit unhappy with that service, as they had advertised how much cheaper they were to ship than just going through, say, FedEx. The consolidation fee is $5 for each outbound box, and when we had them use USPS first class international (the cheapest option) we ended spending about $60 to send a 3 pound box. Before having to deal with customs and VAT at this end. The USPS would have cost, had we had a friend send it using the same first-class international, about $35.  (USGM does have a shipping price calculator on their website, but we've had problems with the website being buggy and not working properly. But only rarely.)

Still, it's handy that they have such a service at all.  Note that if you are having anything sent, if it costs above about $20, you're going to get slapped with a UK 8pound handling fee and then VAT on top of that. And they'll add in the cost of the postage for the VAT charge. Even if it's marked as a gift.  If you can have a friend ship your item(s) to you as gifts, the limit is higher. Unless of course they are not gifts and then you'd be circumventing the law, and that would not be the right thing to do.

Unless you have a reason to not be giving out your forwarding address, I'd say go that route. We've used USGlobalmail. For the most part it's worked well for us. You put in a forwarding address at the PO where you live, and they will forward to USGM for a year. You pay monthly, and can cancel at any point.  You do need to sign up before you go, though, I think. (Maybe not?)

USGM receives the mail and lets you know it's there. They will scan it, if you wish, for about $3.50 an item and you can read it as a PDF. Or they will forward it on to you - it's been taking about two weeks to get forwarded mail. We have three names on our account, and the cost is a flat $20 a month.  You get an actual street address and PMB number.  They also have a webchat available during their normal business hours. As far as dealing with standard postal mail, I can't fault them at all.

They will consolidate boxes if you do shopping in the USA.  We were a bit unhappy with that service, as they had advertised how much cheaper they were to ship than just going through, say, FedEx. The consolidation fee is $5 for each outbound box, and when we had them use USPS first class international (the cheapest option) we ended spending about $60 to send a 3 pound box. Before having to deal with customs and VAT at this end. The USPS would have cost, had we had a friend send it using the same first-class international, about $35.  (USGM does have a shipping price calculator on their website, but we've had problems with the website being buggy and not working properly. But only rarely.)

Still, it's handy that they have such a service at all.  Note that if you are having anything sent, if it costs above about $20, you're going to get slapped with a UK 8pound handling fee and then VAT on top of that. And they'll add in the cost of the postage for the VAT charge. Even if it's marked as a gift.  If you can have a friend ship your item(s) to you as gifts, the limit is higher. Unless of course they are not gifts and then you'd be circumventing the law, and that would not be the right thing to do.

Thanks for this, Nan! It sounds like you feel this was worth it... Do you mind if I ask what kinds of things you were getting as physical mail that made this service useful?

I'm thinking about doing it "just in case," but most of my accounts are online only already and clients/friends/family will need our new address anyway. There are only a couple of important things I still get by mail (eg, property tax statements), but I think most of those can be handled by just changing the mailing address.

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We were not sure what our address was going to be once we arrived in the UK or how long it would be before we had a flat leased, so we were able to set this up before we left. The Daughter was waiting to receive her formal Uni diploma document. (She didn't "walk" in the graduation and even if she had, all they give them is a blank. The official copies come later, in the mail.) We have used it for things like receipt of paper checks, when a vendor would not do direct deposit on refunds. We also used it for hardcopies of bank statements (etc.) sent over that were needed for residency cards, proof of finances for the soon-to-be-landlord, that sort of thing.  There were items that we had sent there via USPS (the sender would only send via USPS) that we were able to have FedExed over, tracked.  I am leery of having things sent through "regular" mail if they are important, as we have had people send us mail directly here from the USA that has gone AWOL.

We are approaching having lived here a year now, and are preparing to shut our account with USGM down for lack of need of it. There are other services that one can use for international shipping that don't require a standing monthly fee paid, and we do have everything on electronic delivery. But it was really quite good for what we needed it to do while we needed it.

We were not sure what our address was going to be once we arrived in the UK or how long it would be before we had a flat leased, so we were able to set this up before we left. The Daughter was waiting to receive her formal Uni diploma document. (She didn't "walk" in the graduation and even if she had, all they give them is a blank. The official copies come later, in the mail.) We have used it for things like receipt of paper checks, when a vendor would not do direct deposit on refunds. We also used it for hardcopies of bank statements (etc.) sent over that were needed for residency cards, proof of finances for the soon-to-be-landlord, that sort of thing.  There were items that we had sent there via USPS (the sender would only send via USPS) that we were able to have FedExed over, tracked.  I am leery of having things sent through "regular" mail if they are important, as we have had people send us mail directly here from the USA that has gone AWOL.

We are approaching having lived here a year now, and are preparing to shut our account with USGM down for lack of need of it. There are other services that one can use for international shipping that don't require a standing monthly fee paid, and we do have everything on electronic delivery. But it was really quite good for what we needed it to do while we needed it.

That is really helpful, thanks! I think we'll probably end up using my in-laws' address as our US forwarding address, but we're still debating the issue...

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Hello, @ForeignBandz -- what did you decide to do?

Hey all,

Don’t know if this is the correct section to post this.. but I’m wondering what exactly to do with my mail as I’m On my way to the UK soon. How exactly has this worked for others?

Do I forward all my mail? Or just give everyone my new address? Not sure how this mail thing works.

Hello, @ForeignBandz -- what did you decide to do?

Not the OP, but we ended up going with US Global Mail, as Nan suggested, since it turns out I will need a US mailing address to receive checks from my US freelance clients. If I didn't need it for business purposes, we probably wouldn't have bothered, since most of our other stuff can be dealt with entirely online or mailed overseas.

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