Preparing to manage household activities while for nesting abroad

Back in the days when we worked and vacationed, we had little concerns about managing our USA household while we were away.  We locked all our doors and turned off our lights as we departed then struggled through a mound of mail and bills when we returned.  But that approach wouldn’t cut it for 3-month nestings abroad.  The solution involved three projects: going paperless, establishing a separate mailing address, and installing home automation.

Going paperless

This is pretty straight forward, but much more work then we imagined.  We started by going through our office files to list firms that bill us.  We ensured we had created an online account for each of them and then requested electronic correspondence.   Sometimes this meant the firms would email us instead of sending snail mail.  Sometimes we only received an alert prompting us to log into our account to read a message securely.

Establishing a separate mailing address

Although we were able to convert almost all important USPS snail mail to electronic communications, we knew that occasionally we would still be sent important, timely business or personal snail mail.  One way we considered to handle this was to have a family member or close friend go through our home mail once a week.  But, that seemed an imposition and also somewhat intrusive into our privacy.

We learned that way back in the 60’s several mail services started serving RV and yacht owners.  They had the same challenges as we faced nesting abroad.  We interviewed several and selected one that would:

• offer a real mailing address (not just a PO box)
• forward to us anywhere in the world
• open and scan mail we select
• be affordable and allow us to manage our account online

This worked better than we could have imagined.  We were able to respond to an IRS letter while nesting in Florence, Italy; a business issue while nesting in York, England; and execute real-estate documents while nesting in Bocas, Panama.  It also gave us peace of mind because we could scan potentially important mail to confirm that we did not have to take any immediate action

We also devised a strategy to forward our stored mail to us without paying international mailing fees.  We directed our mail service to place the batch of mail into a larger mailer and send the mailer to a friend/family member so they could courier the mailer to us during their visit to our nest.

A mail forwarding services costs about $50/year for the service and about $10 to forward each batch of mail.  Scanning costs about a $1/page.  You might find a mail service near your USA home, but strangely, most services are located in states without an income tax (e.g. Florida & Nevada)  I wonder why….

Automatic Electronic Billpaying

Before nesting, we typically received a bill, reviewed it, and then manually paid the bill after ensuring the billing was correct.  For nesting, we wanted to put most of our bills on autopilot.  We transitioned from the typical verify-a-bill-first and only then pay approach to to one where we auto-pay first but then verify afterwards.   This is similar to the way my Air Force retirement check comes to us — electronically on autopilot.  The difference is the retirement check is automatically coming into our account while we were going to allow funds to automatically come out of our account.

We set up automatic bill paying through the firms who bill us regularly — insurance, utilities, credit cards, etc.  For some firms, enabling automatic bill paying was simply filling out a web page on their web site.  Other firms required us to sign a paper form.  This whole automatic payment approach seemed risky at first.  But with established firms we had no problems  rectifying billing issues and receiving appropriate credits for the few billing issues we encountered.  Of course, we pay our bills from a different bank account than our savings account, so should someone attempt to over bill us hugely, their transaction could only touch our working checking account and not our savings.  We’re probably being over cautious, but we’re careful about fraud and hacking these days.

Credit cards and bank cards

Your selection of a credit card for nesting abroad might not differ from what you desire stateside.  For us, we valued:

• No foreign transaction fees
• Good customer service (because your travels will trigger their computer’s fraud alert)
• Points/miles
• VIP service (such as lounge access, priority boarding, hotel priority)
• Reasonable annual fees

For bank cards, we included ATM fees in our consideration.  Many banks and credit unions charge no ATM fee themselves and will refund customers ATM charges from overseas ATM machines.

What we learned from nesting abroad is that most countries are ahead of the USA in the use of mobile wallets.  In most countries it’s unheard of to allow a business to take your credit card away and then return with the card and a receipt to be signed.  Instead, they bring a card reader to your table….

*****************

Setting up your USA home (nexia, auto insurance while you’re gone, lawn, etc)