One question we’ve been asked since becoming digital nomads is:
How does a digital nomad receive mail if they aren’t tied to a location?
Simple, you just need to sign up for a virtual mailbox. A lot of people think a virtual mailbox is a P.O. Box, but the two are very different. A virtual mailbox is accepted in more places than a P.O. Box address. A virtual mailbox can be used as a permanent mailbox address, which is very helpful if you need to sign up for services such as a bank or a lease.
How Virtual Mailboxes Work
A virtual mailbox allows you to manage your mail and packages online. When someone sends mail to your virtual mailbox you will get an alert that you have new mail. You’ll have the ability to receive, forward, pick up, shred, or discard mail and packages all online. It’s been a really helpful service for our transition to becoming digital nomads.
Photo Credit: Virtual Post Mail
In this article, I will give you a list of all the features that I needed in order to sign up for a virtual mailbox.
Virtual Post Mail
The first step is to find a company that you trust. I did research for a few weeks and I fell in love with Virtual Post Mail. There are tons of companies that offer this service, but for the price and features, I found that Virtual Post Mail fits all our requirements. Do your own research and I highly recommend you reach out to the company directly and see how quickly their response times are.
Next, I will run down all the features that I found very important when choosing this company.
Pricing
Virtual Post Mail has different pricing tiers based on your needs. We chose the Plus tier, which costs $30 per month. This gives you unlimited mail, 50 free scans per month, and up to 5 Recipients. I can’t believe that a service like this could be so affordable. It almost feels like you have your own mailroom staff working for you around the clock.
Multiple Locations
As of writing this article, VPM has 3 locations (Walnut, CA / Henderson, NV / Claymont, DE). I found that having multiple locations to choose from was very helpful. On their website, they list important information about each location such as the sales tax and state tax. They even have more detailed information about the benefits for each location in their blog. I couldn’t find any other company that went this each mile.
Mail Shredding
VPM will shred all your trashed mail. I love this feature! Other companies charge extra for this service. If you trash items like a magazine, catalog, newspaper, periodical, or mail that is addressed to “Current Resident/Occupant,” they will recycle it instead. You gotta love that!
Check Deposit
Having the check deposit feature is one of the biggest reasons I choose VPM. We have a few clients that still like to pay us via check. I just used a check deposit for the first time last week and was blown away by how easy and fast it worked. After I had the mail scanned I simply supplied VPM with my banking information and within a few days, the check was deposited into our bank account.
Package Forwarding
Another very important feature is still having the ability to accept packages. It’s not common but once in a while, we might need to accept packages. For a small shipping fee, VPM will forward your package to your location. While doing some research I found out that you can have your packages mailed to any USPS offices for free! It’s called general delivery, you can forward packages to any postal office for 30 days. You can read more about it from the USPS website. We plan to use this for future package deliveries.
Support / Documentation
VPM’s support and documentation really stood out to me. Any questions I had about a certain feature was answered in their detailed documentation (help center). On top of that, they have a great blog! Their blog articles have so much useful information, I have learned a lot of useful information on how to save money for our business just by reading some of their blog articles.
Conclusion
Signing up for a virtual mailbox has been the perfect solution for getting mail as a digital nomad. It’s easy to use and the service is great. Even if you aren’t a digital nomad, you might consider signing up!
