Home Renovation Part 7: Do Not Forward

We rented a nearby apartment during the project. We had several options for handling our mail during the renovation:

1. Ask the post office to forward our mail to our temporary address.
2. Ask the post office to keep our mail.
3. Pick the mail regularly from our home.
4. File change-of-address forms with every institute we deal with to our temporary address, and change the address again after we return home.

Clearly option (4) is too much hassle for a relatively short (4 months) period. Option (2) is not feasible, because the post office will keep the mail for up to one month at a time. Option (3) seemed like a lot of hassle, because we visit our home one or twice a week during the renovation. So my wife and I picked option (1).

I asked the post office to forward my mail from my home to my rented apartment during the renovation. The clerk in the post office explained that mail forwarding incurs a delay of a week in the delivery because all forwarded mail must be sent to a central location where they affix the the new address label and mail it again. This seemed odd, because both old and new addresses are a few blocks apart in the same town. However, the clerk said that this is the procedure, so I agreed.

Everything was well until Vanguard decided to send me a checkbook for my money market account automatically. They probably wrote "do not forward" on the envelope, which the post office obeyed. The result was that Vanguard became concerned that they cannot reach me, so they froze all of my accounts. Since I pay for the renovation with money from my Vanguard MM account, some of my checks bounced, even when I had sufficient money. This was not fun. Since all regular mail from Vanguard was forwarded to me without a problem, I did not expect it.

Finally, after my kids did not get the beginning of the year paperwork from their schools in time, I decided to stop forwarding my mail and pick it up daily from my home.

My wife and I thought that we solved the mail problems for good, until 3 friends told us that mail they sent to us was returned to them with "unable to deliver" or "unable to forward" stickers. My wife spoke to the postmaster, who explained that once you stop forwarding your mail, new mail is sent directly to your home. However, the mail that it is in transit from the originating post office to the forwarding center is returned to the sender because the forwarding people do not have any forwarding instructions. Moreover, this is the normal way that the system works. He was not surprised at all.

As a technical person I think that this system is broken, can be easily fixed, but it is not.

First conclusion: when you decide to forward your mail, do not trust the smiling people on the brochure. There are many unintended consequences.

Second conclusion: in retrospect, we could have avoided the problem with Vanguard by changing the address just with them. The Vanguard checkbook actually contains a note saying that the post office will not forward these checkbooks, so you must update your address with Vanguard if you move. I should have paid attention to it when I asked the post office to forward my mail, but who could pay attention to everything that all of the institutes you deal with say in their printed material?

2012-07-15 update:
If you decide to keep your mail delivery to your home, you must install a high-security large-volume mailbox, because you will not be around to pick the mail every day. I installed a Mail Boss mailbox. It must be attached to a sturdy surface on the outside of your home. You can order it from multiple merchants.