How do you handle mail/bills when on extended vacation ?

[Nazgul Girl]

    I've been thinking about how to handle our mail and bill-paying while we're out of the state for about 2.5 months this winter.   

    Since we had 3 credit cards compromised on Marco Island last year, we're planning on taking some cash with us, and we can use atms to get more out if need be.

   There is a branch belonging to one of our banks in Naples.

   I pay bills online, but we still like to get paper copies.   Should we change our address and get a p.o. box while we're in Florida ?

   We have a handyman who will perform any fixes on the rental houses as needed, and he will wait for us to send him a check.   Our tenants make their rental payments through bank transfers, so we don't have to wait around for a paper check to arrive.

   Our DD is going to take our dog and if a real tenant emergency arises, she can take care of it.   

   But, we still have no idea what to do with our mail and bills.     Any ideas are appreciated.
    
    

[muttleynfelix]

I think you can temporarily have your mail forwarded.  I remember having to fill out some stuff in college - it's been over 10 years, but you can look into something like that.  When my Grandparents would spend 6 weeks in AZ during the winter, my mom would check their mail and she had POA to do anything that required bills or things like that.  I would talk to your daughter and see how much she is willing to take on.  Otherwise, it might just be worth it to rent a PO Box and get your mail forwarded.  

[wvugurl26]

I believe you can rent a post office box and get a temporary forwarding order for your mail.

[Deleted]

Aug 8, 2014 9:04:36 GMT -5 Nazgul Girl said:

    I've been thinking about how to handle our mail and bill-paying while we're out of the state for about 2.5 months this winter.   

    Since we had 3 credit cards compromised on Marco Island last year, we're planning on taking some cash with us, and we can use atms to get more out if need be.

   There is a branch belonging to one of our banks in Naples.

   I pay bills online, but we still like to get paper copies.   Should we change our address and get a p.o. box while we're in Florida ?

   We have a handyman who will perform any fixes on the rental houses as needed, and he will wait for us to send him a check.   Our tenants make their rental payments through bank transfers, so we don't have to wait around for a paper check to arrive.

   Our DD is going to take our dog and if a real tenant emergency arises, she can take care of it.   

   But, we still have no idea what to do with our mail and bills.     Any ideas are appreciated.
    
    

stop your mail and continue to pay everything online.  why do you still get paper copies of bills just to throw them out?

[teen persuasion]

You can fill out a change of address at the PO, it takes effect very quickly.  DS2 did that after leaving his campus apt for an apt off campus.  Unfortunately, DH's mail got redirected to DS2, since they have the same first and last name, but not middle.

When we were away for a week, we just had the PO hold our mail for the week.  There were lots of options - go in to the PO and ask them.  I would transfer as much as possible to email delivery, though.

[Sam_2.0]

Why do you still get paper copies? You can safe the PDF ones they send you every month incase there's an issue and you need to go back. Most places have the statements available online for 6-24 months for free anyway. Go all paperless. You can use a service like Doxo to keep your PDF copies organized if you want too.

[achelois]

I have not been away for that length of time, but for shorter periods, just have the Post Office hold it. I have very little paper mail, though. 

[Tennesseer]

Aug 8, 2014 9:12:00 GMT -5 @singlemominmd said:

Aug 8, 2014 9:04:36 GMT -5 Nazgul Girl said:

    I've been thinking about how to handle our mail and bill-paying while we're out of the state for about 2.5 months this winter.   

    Since we had 3 credit cards compromised on Marco Island last year, we're planning on taking some cash with us, and we can use atms to get more out if need be.

   There is a branch belonging to one of our banks in Naples.

   I pay bills online, but we still like to get paper copies.   Should we change our address and get a p.o. box while we're in Florida ?

   We have a handyman who will perform any fixes on the rental houses as needed, and he will wait for us to send him a check.   Our tenants make their rental payments through bank transfers, so we don't have to wait around for a paper check to arrive.

   Our DD is going to take our dog and if a real tenant emergency arises, she can take care of it.   

   But, we still have no idea what to do with our mail and bills.     Any ideas are appreciated.
    
    

stop your mail and continue to pay everything online.  why do you still get paper copies of bills just to throw them out?

And you can view your detailed bills on-line and print them out at your convenience.  

Have your mail forwarded to your DD while you are gone?

[Nazgul Girl]

   We can't just have our mail held, because we have bills and notices, etc.  to pay.   We do like paper copies, because I don't feel like going online to access umpty-million different websites, all with slight variants on our passwords, to pay something.   Besides, I can forget, and the paper copies coming in the mail are an excellent reminder.      ETA:  I pay bills online through our main checking account.   I don't go to each website for each bill.  

[Sam_2.0]

Most places let you turn ebilling on/off. Why not turn it on while you are out so you are certain the statements are all emailed to you, then go back to paper copies when you get home? Seems safer than having it in some post office somewhere or having a neighbor collect it. Doesn't mean you have to keep it that way forever

[Tennesseer]

Aug 8, 2014 9:44:19 GMT -5 Nazgul Girl said:

   We can't just have our mail held, because we have bills and notices, etc.  to pay.   We do like paper copies, because I don't feel like going online to access umpty-million different websites, all with slight variants on our passwords, to pay something.   Besides, I can forget, and the paper copies coming in the mail are an excellent reminder.      ETA:  I pay bills online through our main checking account.   I don't go to each website for each bill.  

Have you thought of subscribing to a password management website?  I use LastPass.  You go to a website where you have to type ìn your user ID and password.  In my case, Last Pass asks me if it should remember my user ID and password.  If I say yes, it stores the information.  Next time I want to go to that site, I click on the entry in LastPass and it opens up that site and fills in the user ID and password.

LastPass seems to be a very secure system.

[bookkeeper]

Aug 8, 2014 9:44:19 GMT -5 Nazgul Girl said:

   We can't just have our mail held, because we have bills and notices, etc.  to pay.   We do like paper copies, because I don't feel like going online to access umpty-million different websites, all with slight variants on our passwords, to pay something.   Besides, I can forget, and the paper copies coming in the mail are an excellent reminder.      ETA:  I pay bills online through our main checking account.   I don't go to each website for each bill.  

Make a list of the bills you expect to receive. If you are only looking at two to three months, an easy way to handle it is to prepay your recurring bills. Then you know that no one will get paid late.

If you don't want to prepay your recurring bills, use that list and add the phone numbers of the businesses.  Add to that the regular day it comes due.  Check your master list once a week and determine who needs to be paid, you can call for the amount due.  Don't forget about property taxes or insurance premiums.  You need to have those dates in mind as well.

As far as the mail, it's a crap shoot. Some people get their mail forwarded to them by the post office. That may make your mail 2 weeks late depending on where it is getting routed to.  I suggested to my friend that winters in Arizona that they have their daughter pick it from the post office once a week and send it first class to them. They like that system because they get one batch of mail to process each week and it comes in just days, faster than the forwarded mail.

My parents have been snowbirds for 30 years.  They set all their recurring bills to be paid with their credit card, prepay any that can't be paid with a credit card and then have the post office forward their mail.

[zibazinski]

Can you call up and ask what's due? Keep copy of previous statement so you can write account number on check and then just mail payment in without bill. Of course that might not work with credit card statements. Is having your DD open your bills an issue?

[Gardening Grandma]

I have our bills set to be paid automatically on a rewards CC. So I only have to log into the CC account to see what is going on. In addition, the CC is set to be paid automatically from the credit union checking account. That happens on the 7th of the month.

When I get home, I can download statements and save them as a pdf file.

[Deleted]

All my bills are on autopay and I get very little mail. Whoever takes care of my animals picks it up or the mail lady just puts it in my garage if I ask (she's also a neighbor).

[Blonde Granny]

When we still had our MH this is what we did: All bills except CC on auto pay, most bills we received email notices. CC bills were paid thru their CC website.  The PO will only hold mail for 30 days before they start returning it. I don't recall, but are you renting for that 2.5 months or do you own? If renting, owner may not allow mail to be delivered, best to check first. Normally they don't care if FedEx is delivered.

We also used the old Mailbox Etc. which I believe now is the UPS store.  We rented a box for 3 months, did a temp forward to there for the PO and picked our mail up when we got home. We also did have the option to have the UPS store forward all the mail to us using FedEx. We left a deposit with them to cover the postage. If we did that, we would have the mail forwarded to us once a month.

[Bonny]

Naz,

As you know I have quite a few bills with the 4 rentals and our own house. And just like this last summer sometimes I'm gone up to 6 weeks.

I've set all the recurring bills on my version of "budget billing". That is I make the same dollar amount every month automatically. Most utilities have some version of this if you've had service with them for a year or more. I have a couple of small utilities, such as a couple local water districts which don't have this service but I've talked to them and everyone is cool with my plan.

The outliers are the three credit cards because they can fluctuate so wildly and repairs. I just set a date (usually the 3rd Sat of every month) to pay, download the bank statement and code them into Quicken.

With the repairs I have the tradespeople scan their invoice or if they're not set up with a scanner, send me an e-mail invoice. For my regular service people (spa and yard care folks) they are trained to call/e-mail me if something is broken and to double-check the bill. I only have one guy who is a little flakey and thankfully he's so low key that if he doesn't get paid for an extra bill for a month or two he's cool.

When we spent the three years in Germany we kept our AZ P.O. Box and I paid a girlfriend who is a retired secretary to pick up and open my mail every two weeks. If there was anything of import she would scan and e-mail the document. The outliers during the three years were property tax bills, insurance (which is now on-line) a business rental tax and the occasional notice/letter. No major issues during those three years.

Are you going to have someone check on your house while you're away? I always do. I also tell a couple of neighbors and leave my cell phone contact "just in case". I worry about irrigation leaks or some other silly homeowner issues.

[justme]

Before they retired my parents just put their mail on hold for 7/8 weeks. I'm not entirely sure what the limit is, but there is one.


Now they just temporarily forward it to me for the 4/5 months they are gone (still not sure how I got stuck with this non-paying gig). I check through and open some stuff so I can let them know if anything comes they need to know about - like my dad got jury duty this year and they wanted him to come while they're still out of the country! So maybe you can con your daughter into doing that like my parents did. They just pick it up sometime after they get back, and I stash it all in a box.

[The Walk of the Penguin Mich]

I can tell you what I did while I was out for my surgeries.....

You can get your mail held at the PO for a period of time, we do that now.  However, they will not forward it to you (or at least didn't for me).  I had someone pick up my mail weekly and mail it out to me.  This friend was having some financial problems, so I paid him $100/mo to empty my mailbox and mail the important stuff to me.  I also had him take my car out for a spin regularly to keep it from sitting too long.  I left a stack of priority envelopes with postage on them, so all my friend had to do is to stick the mail in it, seal it and throw it in the mailbox. The second time, I really wasn't expecting my time out to be as long as it was.  The first time I did this, it was about 2 months, the second time, it was 18 months.  

What I found is that there really isn't a lot of temporary options for diversion of mail for a small period of time.

I had all of my regular bills on bill pay through my bank.  I paid the normal amount while gone, and it worked for all but my electric bill in that I wound up with a credit on my account for awhile.  I know that some people, for utilities, will just pay the entire thing in advance.

[marvholly]

I see a couple of options:

What my parents did: (traveled 4-6 weeks at a time)
Mail was forwarded to me. I was a signatory on their account & paid their bills including mtg & HOA fees.

What I do/can do
1. Forward to an adult kid. The above as both kids are signatories on my main account.
2. Forward to an adult kit. Give one of my adult kids enough $$ to pay my expected bills
3. Clear my accounts of anything due before leaving. Take only 2-3 cards w/ me. Get bills online or estimate from receipts & pay online.
4. Set up pre-scheduled payments from my online account for known re-curring bills like heat gas, phone, insurance.....

[Artemis Windsong]

The people I know who go to AZ have permanent addresses there.  They either forward or change their address.  Anytime you are dealing with forwarding or address changes, there could be a mix up.

A few other people have a rellie pick up the mail and check for important items.

One mix up I know about was the driver's license renewal that came while the couple were gone.  She must have missed it, it was misplaced or something.  Her DL was expired for 6 months.  She never said how she found out.

The cc co. changed my due date one month and I missed it then had to pay the interest charges.  Ouch.  I usually pay the entire balance each month.

[thyme4change]

A two and a half month vacation?  How the hell would I know how to handle that?  I've never even been away for two and a half weeks!

[The Walk of the Penguin Mich]

It looks like the PO's mail forwarding service would work best if you don't have anyone to do the work.  It costs $17 to sign up for the service, and $17/16 per week you are gone.  They forward your mail to you once/week and can do this up to a year.

I don't remember seeing this option when I got sick.

[marvholly]

Had another idea:

Limit yourself to using 2-3 credit cards. Every 3 weeks call the number on the back of the card. Check your balance and then speak to a CSR. Arrange for them to pull the money from your account (they will do an EFT).