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Another potential option is to get a private PO Box and request that they periodically mail you your mail to your requested location, but this will of course cost more. A weird quirk with private PO Boxes is that USPS will not forward mail from a private PO Box.
Yeah, that "weird quirk" was a big PIA for us when we moved. I'll NEVER use a private PO box again, at least not for anything important.
We were in transition for about a year, living in four towns in three states.
We put in a forwarding order to our first temporary address, a p.o. box.
Some stuff we had sent to our physical address.
Then we did forwarding orders from all three addresses (old house, p.o. box, and temporary house) to my brother's house while we traveled around that state looking for our next spot. (We had trouble getting a p.o. box there; they wanted proof of residence. The previous city didn't make that a problem.)
Then we settled and put in forwarding orders from all the prior addresses.
Another potential option is to get a private PO Box and request that they periodically mail you your mail to your requested location, but this will of course cost more. A weird quirk with private PO Boxes is that USPS will not forward mail from a private PO Box.
It is not just Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRAs), which is what the USPS classifies private PO Box businesses, it is any address coded as a business in the US. Thus neither the computer when the mail is first read and assigned a bar code to move it along nor the carrier on the last mile is looking for an individual name from a business to pull from delivery to be forwarded. For a business coded address all mail for that delivery point or none will be forwarded.
If you have never received the weekly market ads at your home address and you never contacted the sender to stop them you might want to ask the carrier if it is coded as a residence or business. Should a child or single person try to change their address and get mail forwarded if it was miscoded as a business to avoid the ads, then that incorrect code will have the postal service refusing to forward mail under the justification that it came from a business.
I recently read that they they have changed to 6 months.
The USPS or the CMRA? For the USPS the temporary change of address limit has been dropped to 6 months from a year. Since the service sold of permanent changes to the advertisers but not temporary new address people have gamed the system to hide their new address from advertisers, for a short time, by using a temporary change of address. Thus now it is a bit of a pain to use the temporary instead of a permanent change of address.
The other "6 month limit" that comes to mind is for 6 months is when a permanent change of address has expired after that year mail is returned to the sender with the new address information for 6 months. Afterwards it is just returned as undeliverable.
We live full time in our RV and use a mail forwarding service. I have all my mail sent there and then go online every few weeks and have them send it to wherever I am. Sometimes that is General Delivery at the local post office.
There are many options and price points for this service.
What about the option of forwarding my mail to the in laws for a few months then do a change of address when I land in the new state?
As long as your in-laws are ok with this, it is probably the easiest option. Although I would change the address to your in-laws' address and then change it again to your new address for things like any credit card communications or periodicals you might get (rather than just relying on having them forwarded).
Do a temporary change until you get a permanent address. That way the USPS doesn't give out,sell, the temporary change and the one year clock, plus 6 months of giving corrections, doesn't start until you have the permanent place. The downside is when the temporary change ends mail will be delivered to your old address and the new resident might just keep it for themselves for whatever purpose instead of returning it to the postal service
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