Nomad Life Ops Part 1: Where Is Our Residency and Address?
The infrastructure for living is definitely not setup for nomads. Convention assumes a person has a home-base to conduct daily life such as banking, healthcare, connectivity, stream favorite shows, etc. Good news is, unconventional solutions do exist for people like us and is ever evolving. Start digging around YouTube and there’s a plethora of advice on how to accomplish this. Here’s Part 1 of the behind-the-scenes look at how we chose to structure our nomad life operations…for now.
Nomad Life Ops Part 1: Where Is Our Residency and Address?
Even after getting rid of our house and belongings to galivant about the world without a physical home-base, we still needed a place to call home. Why? We all rely on our government for certain life essentials and without a home-base, it would be difficult to prove our existence—often a requisite for these needs. For example, we still need a US permanent address to maintain a driver's license or any form of state identification, ability to vote, obtain healthcare, pay taxes, etc.
In the future, a permanent residency doesn’t necessarily need to be in the United States. Lots of expats have moved abroad and can still absentee vote for federal elections, qualify for healthcare outside of the US, and so forth, but we don’t know where we might end up yet so…
Residency
At the ripe age of early retirement, we officially became roommates with our good friends down the road in the same town! This way, we continue to be able to maintain Kansas residency. It does create added responsibility on our friends to deal with some government business on our behalf, so we went into this intentionally and not frivolously. We briefly thought of moving to another state with no income tax but it would not have benefited us too much right now with limited taxable income!
Mailing Address
To help lessen the burden on our friends from having to handle our routine mail for us, we were looking for a unicorn service that:
Has a physical address where mail and packages could be mailed to (unlike PO Boxes)
Opens our mail to discern what to forward or shred (we get a lot of junk mail)
Can forward both mail and packages to anywhere in the world
Turns out, this is not a unique Mike and Akiko problem. Truckers, boaters, and RVers have the same problem, just to name a few who are on the move a lot.
St. Brendan’s Isle (SBI) in Green Cove Springs, Florida was not easy to find. After a lot of sleuthing around, we found the unicorn mail service!! For a monthly fee, SBI receives our mail, scans the front of the mail unopened into an online account that we can review. SBI will only open mail that we specifically request to be opened and the inside scanned for our review. We can opt to shred the mail at anytime, or request that it be physically sent to us, including packages.
We’ve forwarded most of our mail to the Florida address at this point. Use the 411 Walnut Street #24397, Green Cove Springs, FL 32043-3443 address to send us stuff!
