Forward mail with temporary address change or Premium Service
 

Hello! I need mail sent to Illinois from The Villages for a couple of months. I see two options: 1) Temporary address change (which is free!) or 2) Premium Service (which is $24/week).

Can anyone tell me the benefit of the Premium Service? Are there things that won't send via the free forwarding? Does the Temporary Address change necessary for the free service cause other headaches? Thanks in advance for your help!

Answers at USPS.
I don’t have any mail worth $100 a month.

We just forward to FL in the winter and forward to UpNorth in the summer. The postal service is unreliable regardless, so I get everything I possibly can electronically. All bills are on auto-pay and all statements arrive via email. 99% of the stuff that gets forwarded is stuff I can go without.

We'll be heading back to Indiana in May after our first winter here. We're having our mail forwarded here. About how long before you go back north do you stop the forwarding? Thanks!!

I start my Forwarding about a week before I leave. That way I can make sure they actually stop delivering the mail here before I leave.

I've always considered a service like Affordable Virtual Mailbox | Traveling Mailbox

In addition to all the answers above the post office allows the option to mail preview (or informed delivery) so they take pictures of your mail and email it to you (one email) at the beginning of each day so you can prepare for what needs thrown out, LOL

While still snowbirding, I tried premium service one Summer. One week I received someone else’s mail. Lady Lake post office never answered phone, so I submitted my issue through usps website. Lady Lake PO then called me to tell me to just send the mail back to them. When I said if I received someone else’s mail, where is mine? They said until someone reports getting yours, we don’t know. There was never any further contact from USPS on the matter. I have no idea if I ever got my mail or not. Needless to say, I did not use premium service again. I now use informed delivery and try to do as much as possible electronically

Whatever you decide on, sign up for USPS Informed Delivery. You'll get a daily email, with photos of each piece of mail that you receive. I save the emails with important mail (1099's, etc.), for tracking purposes if it doesn't arrive. Once it arrives, I delete the email.

With the free service, magazines will be forwarded for the first month. After that, they are trashed. For $24/week, we can buy lots of magazines. We use the free service all the time since we travel north in the summer. Have had very few problems. However, all our bills are on autopay or done electronically so we don’t have to worry about being late.

FYI - the post office has one more step now when you forward mail *temporary or permanent* After you fill out the change online you now must go to the PO to show an ID to prove it was you who made the change, The PO will send you an email with a bar code to show to the PO along with your drivers lic. Needless to say the ladies at the PO weren't real happy as it will add to their workload. I had to do this in Jan 2024 when I returned to TV and put in a request to forward mail from Il to Fl.

1. Sign up for “Informed Delivery” online at USPS.COM.
2. Get all the apps for your mail senders and enroll in paperless statements.
3. For the short time period, can you have a friend pick up your mail and bulk mail the important items and trash the unimportant each week. Even UPS or FEDEX will be cheaper than $24/week

Fill out the form on line from the USPS. Don’t use the post card you can get from the post office. We have had an issue with mail being forwarded for 5 years now. Definitely sign up for informed delivery. We did a change of address for 11/1 and finally got mail 1/15. Be sure to tell the mail person at your local mail station here when you leave and when you are back in TV. The USPS is very unreliable and even if you drive to the PO in Lady Lake, they are rude and useless. Our PA post office at least answers the phone but still had no idea where our mail was. We just got a Xmas card forwarded yesterday that was post marked 12/14. Good luck.

Temporary Change of Address
 

Temporary Change of Address doesn't send the Junk Mail. I used TCOA while snowbirding for 2 years. Just make sure you give yourself a minimum 2 week leeway in setting your stop forward, or else mail will trickle through after you are gone from the address.

A lot of full-time RVers use these services.