One of the most popular questions in the RV community is how to get your mail.
It’s a completely logical question and I think it was probably the first question we asked after deciding to full-time RV.
The answer is quite simple actually, you need a mail forwarding service in the state you are going to claim domicile in.
Once you know what state that is, you need to hunt down a company that offers a mail forwarding service for full-time RVers.
We chose Texas as our domicile state since they do not have state income tax and they are full-time RVer friendly. It also helps that we have family in Texas and will find ourselves passing through at least once a year.
Once we decided on Texas, it was time to chose a mail forwarding service.
While plenty of RVers recommend Escapees Mail Forwarding, we decided to go with a smaller family run business called Texas Home Base.
We opted for Texas Home Base mainly due to the fact that scanning every piece of mail was included in the cost, while Escapees will only scan the envelope and then charge a small fee per additional page scanned (if you want to see the entire contents of a letter).
While Escapees Mail Forwarding service seemed cheaper originally, it ended up being slightly more than Texas Home Base after you added in the additional cost of scanning all mail.
While Texas Home Base offers mail forwarding for all types of businesses and travelers, they have a specific program for RV mail forwarding that includes scanning.
We chose their middle tier package, which works out to less than $17 a month. If you only want their mail forwarding (no scanning) you can get it as cheap as $11 a month.
With any package, you will still need to pay the additional shipping fees to have your mail sent to wherever you are in the United States.
We only have documents forwarded to us when we need the original copy. Otherwise, we save a PDF version of anything we want to keep and then have it securely shredded, leaving us spending very little on additional postage.
Tip: Mention Getaway Couple sent you during sign up and receive $5 in your postage account!
Some additional benefits that we love about Texas Home Base include:
- You will receive a unique domicile address, meaning you can use it on legal documents and obtain a Texas drivers license with it
- There are no membership fees, enrollment fees, or cancellation fees
- There is never an extra charge to hold mail
- They will receive an unlimited amount of mail for each account and do not charge extra handling fees
- The staff is extremely friendly and they have prompt responses to any questions
We truly can’t recommend Texas Home Base enough as a mail service for full-time RVers. We believe they are the best Texas mail forwarding service out there.
To get your unique Texas address sign up here. Remember to tell them that Getaway Couple sent you and you’ll get a $5 credit in your postage account!
I notice you still have California plates on both your 5rr and TV. Just wondering you have change them to Texas plates?
Hey Vernon, we finally got around to changing them to our Texas plates.
We just lost our home in the Paradise, CA fire. It’s all gone. We happened to be spending the fall in our motorhome in Arizona when it happened, so fortunately we still have our home-on-wheels. We’re possibly going to decide to become full-time RVers for now. Does signing up with Texas Home Base mean that would be considered our permanent, legal address, so we can change to that for all our financial accounts, etc.? We need just one permanent address and we don’t really care where it is as we’ll be traveling all the time. Then do we go to Texas when we’re ready to change vehicle registration, get a drivers license and fill out voter registration? I assume we would file income tax with that address. Is all that considered establishing a domicile in Texas, or is there more to do besides just getting a mail box? Just starting to investigate all this, and it’s all kind of confusing. Thanks for your help.
I’m so sorry for your loss. My family lives in the canyon adjacent to where the Woolsey fire started and were on high alert for days. That address works for your permanent legal address. It’s on our drivers license, bank accounts, everything! That is pretty much what is considered establishing domicile but they have a PDF that walks you through everything.
Hi,
I signed up and gave you guys the referral and have been running into issue with my auto loan bank and even T-Mobile saying that I can’t use the address since it’s a mail forwarder. I reached out to them and was given a real address but the bank doesn’t like that since it’s a vacant lot.
Have you guys run into these issues?
We have only had an issue with one bank. We were able to give them another address as the “main address” and use the mail forwarding address as the mailing address. Its an unfortunate circumstance from the PATRIOT act. We have not had issues with our other two banks or anything else we’ve used the address for.