A number of you sent us Christmas cards that we haven’t received yet.  We have been using the UPS Store in Bellingham, WA as our forwarding address for nearly a year.  Problem is, they weren’t forwarding our mail to us.  In the year, we might have gotten four or five mailings, if that.  I could never reach them by phone, and I could seldom reach them by email.  It has been a very frustrating experience.

My New Years resolution was to try to find something better, but I wanted to keep our domicile in Washington, close to family.  I had tried my own searches and couldn’t come up with any other options, so I finally contacted my cousin, Bob Brim.  I asked if he knew of anyone that would be willing to forward our mail to us.  He said he did, and this is where things get really exciting!

Workampers are told we need to choose a domicile state since we move around so much.  We tend to choose one of the handful of states that don’t charge income tax, but even out of that handful, there are only three that are really set up to offer mail forwarding; Texas, Florida, and South Dakota.

Bob retired from a thriving company he started and he’s been doing consulting work for start-up companies, so he is attuned to business opportunities.  As soon as he heard about our dilemma, it occurred to him that we aren’t the only Workampers who might need forwarding service.  Bob traveled a lot in his business, and he had his daughter-in-law handle his mail for him, so he knew what it would entail setting up a forwarding service.  He is also a computer whiz, so he immediately sat down to start writing an app for smartphone users who need mail forwarding.

In the meantime, I had been trying to get hold of the UPS Store since January 11th to close my box there and have my mail forwarded to Bob’s company address.  Having had no response from them, I wrote them an email and cc-ed Bob, authorizing Bob’s daughter-in-law, Trang, to pick up our mail, close our box, and submit a forwarding address form.

Trang was able to accomplish all that yesterday, and she took photos of all the mail she picked up so I could decide what to have her send and what she could trash.  There were about four months worth of magazines in our mail!  There were important pieces of mail, including something I’ve been asking UPS to watch for for several months.  (If they had sent it, Mark wouldn’t have had to make that recent trip to Texas!)  Also, a number of Christmas cards were in the pile.

Trang mailed our first box full of mail today.  She is so efficient!  Now all we have to do is get a smartphone so we can download the app Bob has been writing.  After that, we need to learn how to use a smartphone!  😉

If any of you would like to have our new forwarding address, contact me and I’ll send it to you.