Transcription
I know a lot of people are considering moving to permanent remote work, not having a physical office at all, or maybe you’re considering starting a new online business and you haven’t even considered renting an office. That might be ridiculous sounding to you, but what are you going to do about a mailing address? Because if you’re sending out invoices or email marketing, you’re still going to need to include an address on those items. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to put my personal mailing address on email marketing.
It just seems like a bad idea. Of course, you could march down to the post office and you could get yourself a P.O. box to give you a nice little key. You get a tiny box and it fills up with junk mail every couple of days. Now, I’m speaking from experience here. If you don’t keep that thing empty, they actually change the locks on you.
That’s what happened to us when we started our digital marketing agency. It’s a completely remote business, never had aspirations of an office. And we eventually got kicked out of our P.O. Box for not getting the junk mail out fast enough.
We don’t really receive physical mail. We just needed the address and it didn’t work out for us, which is what led me to remember hearing about this company right here. This is traveling mailbox. I first heard about traveling mailbox when I was reading the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I think this is in about 2011, 2012 somewhere in there. And at the time he was preaching about starting a music business so you could go travel the world.
His solutions are still receiving.
Your mail was a company called Traveling Mailbox where they would actually go ahead and send you your mail wherever you were in the world. Now it actually runs a little bit deeper than that. But essentially what you’re getting is a virtual office. We can go over to the addresses section of their admittedly dated website here, and you can see that they have 25 locations all over the United States. So I am in the Midwest. We are in Minneapolis Twin Cities area and get an office right near by the physical mail actually goes to this address.
I can give it out as though it is where our physical offices are, except instead of receiving a bunch of junk mail with a random letter every two or three weeks, all of the junk mail gets automatically shredded.
And the letters that I think that the company thinks are important will get scanned.
Let me show you what this actually looks like. So here is a letter that I received the other day, and I can click on it and I can see what the outside of the envelope looks like. You can see that this is from the IRS. That is obviously a little bit of an alarming thing to receive a letter from the IRS. I was nervous. No reason to be. But it’s the IRS, right?
So at this point, actually, what this looks like is you get an email and actually has the photo in the email. You can obviously open it up in one of their apps.
But at that point, you are given several options. You can say, no, this is junk mail. Just shred this for me again. They try to screen everything out, but every once in a while they’re going to air on the side of caution and not shred anything that could possibly be important. The next option you have is to have them forward it to you wherever you are in the world. You can set up a forwarding address is just right over here on the side.
Click on forwarding, add the address where you’re located and the letter game physically gets sent to you back over in my inbox, you can see the actual wait times. So right now it’s taking about twelve hours. If I click on forward to this letter, it will take about twelve hours for it to get put in the mail and then sent off to me and obviously that’ll take a few days to be delivered. So that is one option.
The last option, which is most appealing to me is that they can actually just open it and scan it so you can read the contents. And that’s actually what I decided to do here, even though it’s from the IRS. And it could be, you know, full of personal information. They have some really good security precautions in place, which I’ll tell you more about in a little bit. I can go ahead and view this just by clicking on view right here.
And I can either download it or open it up right in my browser. And it turns out this this was just a notification to let me know that my second stimulus payments had gone out. All right. So that’s kind of the essence of the service here. Now, I’m completely done with this letter and I’ve actually already gone ahead and told them to shred it for me. But I can request another action, which is to delete the letter, which is to move it out of my digital landscape as well.
So let’s go ahead and do that. Now, as I mentioned, this is an entire virtual office. So there’s a tab over here called Virtual Office. And this is going to give me a fax number so I can actually receive faxes. I can also mail a letter or send a fax. So if you wanted to send a physical letter to somebody, you could write it up in Microsoft Word, upload the letter directly to through your browser, and they will actually print it out, put it in an envelope, stamp it and send it to somebody.
Same thing goes for faxes. If you have a document, you need fax. Maybe, you know, a particular company needs a fax to be received. It’s strange, but financial institutions sometimes still need that. You can go ahead and fax right over your browser. Now, there is one type of mail that I actually like receiving, and that is checks.
If you receive a check when you’re using traveling mailbox, don’t worry, because they can actually deposited in your bank account for you. How cool is that? So all you do is you add in your bank information here. When a check is received, you’ll go ahead and tell them, yeah, go ahead and deposit that for me. Of course, you could have them send it back to you and you could deposit it yourself. But that is definitely a really cool feature.
You just don’t have to even worry about it.
So the company I worked for, as well as myself, my own personal mail is actually currently going through traveling mailbox. I’m actually a user of this company and I’m very happy with the service. So I wanted to talk a little bit about my experience setting it up. It’s a very, very simple process. So the first thing that will happen is you go ahead and you sign up for an account, right? Then they’ll give you this form. The first time you log into your account front and center, they’re going to say, you got to fill out this PDF.
It’s USPS 15 eighty-three form. You fill that out, printed off, and then you have to go to your local bank or wherever you have a notary available to you. You get the document notarized. Now, this document is actually giving them permission to open up your mail. So you got to get this done for the service to really be of any value at all. Once you get that notarized, then you can go ahead and start having your mail sent over to you.
Traveling mailbox. A great way to get that started is to go over to the USPS website, go fill out their change of address form. You can do this as an individual, as a family. If you’re you know, you and your spouse want to do this with your kids, you can even have kids included in there and you can also do your business address. I really like the fact that you can use multiple people with each traveling mailbox address.
So I think like their smallest plan, you can have like three people, I believe, and then their medium plan, you can do up to five people as well as a business address. So a ton of value there without having to have multiple accounts. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, this company’s been around for a while and they really take security seriously. They’ve got a security page on their website. I highly recommend reading through this before you sign up with the service.
You know kind of what you’re in for. The part I really liked around here was they’re talking about their actual facilities now. They have a lot of facilities, obviously, but they talk about how they use audio and video surveillance with facial recognition. Everything is backed up. They even have generators that run on natural gas. They have, you know, very, very secure servers with their own IP block, the train, their employees on hipple compliancy.
There’s hippocampi plans. So if you get there top of the line plan, you can actually have what’s called a business associate agreement, which is important for like health related things. So everything stays very confidential. Your privacy is respected when you go and you say, get rid of this email, it is securely shredded. It’s not like someone just takes all of the old mail home in a bag with them and goes and looking through for anything that’s good.
No, everything is securely shredded. I’ve had great experiences with their support when I’ve had questions about things, hey, how does this work? Can I get my account changed over? They’ve been really, really thorough with their answers, making sure that I understand everything along the way. And when I asked about security, they said, you know, we do very detailed background checks and all of our employees.
And then they mentioned some of the bullet points that are on this page, as you might expect them to do. But I really like that they didn’t just kind of just send me the link. They they talk to me, explain things, make sure that I felt comfortable. I did still, because this is such a big thing, I still check them out over on the Better Business Bureau. I was really impressed to see that they had one hundred and seventy five customer reviews and a four point eighty six out of five star rating.
I don’t usually look up businesses on the Better Business Bureau, but this seemed like the type of one that you’d want to know about. They’ve gotten a plus rating in been in business for nine years, so they’ve obviously been in business a little longer than that, but they’ve been accredited since 2012.
So I’m fully aware that this is not going to be the solution that everyone wants for their personal mail. Not everyone’s going to be comfortable with all of their mail getting sent over to traveling mailbox. For me, it’s been a huge lifestyle upgrade because I get no junk mail is a very beautiful thing. But I do think it is a great solution for any business that doesn’t want to have a physical address because you might not be able to spend the thousand twenty three thousand dollars to get a office that no one’s ever going to use.
But hey, the twenty bucks a month or whatever it costs for traveling mailbox, that starts to look like a pretty good bargain. So I’m a user here. I really enjoy this. I’ll have a link down below so you can check it out and see if it’s a company that you want to do business with. But I’m very happy with it. Their interface is fairly usable. I think, you know, everything could use a little bit of a facelift in terms of UI.
Everything looks like it was done about seven or eight years ago. But other than that, you know, it’s been very rock solid and reliable using it for several months now. I thought I would share it with you guys. I’ll give this one to score. I’m going to give it eight nine point two. They bump up their UI. You know, this would be definitely one of my top recommended apps. That’s going to do it for this video.
I hope it’s been helpful to you if you have other suggestions on what would make a better mailbox service, definitely leave me a comment down below. I want to hear about it. Other than that, I’ll see you in the next review.
