My husband Michael and I have been digital nomads for eight years. We left the United States at the end of 2017, and except for Covid — when we rented an apartment for almost a year — we’ve never stayed in any one place for more than three months.
People often ask us: What do you do about mail? Don’t you need a permanent mailing address?
The answer is an emphatic yes. On one hand, it’s been surprisingly easy to move most of our affairs into the cloud.
But you can’t move everything into the cloud. There are still lots of reasons why a nomad almost certainly needs some kind of physical address.
Here are some of the reasons:
File an income tax return (which is, of course, required for all U.S. citizens, even if you don’t owe any taxes). Local taxes depend on the state where your address is located, but we used to live in Washington State, which has no state income tax.
Register to vote, which we think is essential (but also makes us susceptible to jury duty, which can be a pain to deal with when we’re out of the country).
Get a driver’s license, which is a good second ID (after a passport) and allows us to rent cars in the U.S. and worldwide. We also have international driver’s licenses, but we’ve never needed them.
Apply for and keep a (subsidized) Affordable Care Act or ACA/Obamacare health care plan. Washington State also has a very liberal definition of “residency” for health care, making it a great state for nomads to be based in.
Keep private insurance. We have a renter’s policy ($20 USD/month) on our storage unit, which we need to hold a “non-owned auto policy,” which we keep suspended except for the weeks we’re back in the U.S. and want to rent a car ($120/month), and having this “suspended” policy also allows us to keep a permanent “umbrella” liability policy of $3 million ($30/month). Whew! Complicated. But the total annual cost of all this insurance is less than $800 a year.
Maintain an ongoing relationship with an American financial advisor. Many advisors are legally unable to work with people without some kind of American residency.
Have an address for credit cards and other services. For example, by signing up at the local library, we have access to free e-books all over the world.
I’m sure there are also lots of other things I’m forgetting,
But that’s kind of the point of a U.S. address: there’s always some government issue that you have to deal with.
I imagine it’s exactly the same in countries other than the U.S. as well.
And you don’t just need an address: you need someone to oversee your mail and open anything that looks important. Once the IRS misread a check of mine by 17 cents, but because the IRS only notifies you of anything via the U.S. post, I didn’t read their notification letter until months later. This resulted in a year of Kafkaesque hell where I had to send letters and checks from various countries all over the world.
Some nomads pay for the kind of mail-receiving service that will open your mail and send scans of all your correspondence via email, but this isn’t cheap.
Most nomads we know use the address of a family member or close friend. That’s what Michael and I do.
I have also signed up for Informed Delivery, a free service of the U.S. Postal Service, where I receive an email daily with scans of the outsides of the envelopes of all the mail being delivered to our friend’s address that particular day. If anything looks important, I have my friend open it for me.
But given that we’re out of the country most of the year, this is a fair amount of work. So I always make a point to show my appreciation by giving this particular friend a very nice Christmas gift, and I also take her out to dinner whenever I’m back in town.