Mail…It’s a Problem on the Road

Mike and I both still receive mail at our respective mothers’ houses.

When we got married each of us had our mom’s houses as our permanent addresses since both of us have a history of moving pretty frequently and officially changing your address through the DMV every 6 months to a year gets real old, real quick. We were also doing a long distance relationship when we got married (he proposed over Skype while he was studying abroad, we eloped in NYC during the winter break, and then he went off to Texas for a semester while I stayed in Florida) and didn’t live together again until 6 months after we got married (we had lived together prior to all this though). With all of that, and our laziness, we have two separate permanent addresses and we just got stuff forwarded to whatever apartment we were living in at the time.

So, we knew that the forwarding wasn’t going to be a great option for our purposes since we do plan on moving around a fair amount. We do have a PO Box in Texas (now) that we maintain on a semester basis so we can get packages mailed to us and all that.

Anyway, when we decided to go mobile we switched everything over to paperless and made sure that our online login stuff/pertinent apps were taken care of and sorted. Now we weren’t receiving any mail except junk mail which was great.

Maybe y’all already realize where we went wrong but we just learned a valuable lesson the almost-hard-way. We didn’t even think about those random pieces of mail that you occasionally get sent- stuff like jury duty, insurance cancellation notices because you didn’t sign one document that you could swear they never told you about, notices that your license will be suspended if you fail to provide proof of new insurance and the bus’ license plate will have to be returned, notices of failure to appear at jury duty and possible jail time…you know, the usual. The stuff they won’t email you about.

Both of our mothers are super into privacy. They won’t look at anything past the name and they certainly won’t go opening our mail willy-nilly. Unless we ask them to check it out. We found out because Mike’s brother thought one of the letters looked important (it was!), checked it out, took a picture and sent it our way.

That was the notice that Mike’s license would be suspended if we couldn’t provide a new proof of insurance after our insurance had reported the policy cancellation to the state. This was news to me. I was totally unaware that the insurance on the bus had been cancelled. I had recently got a refund because they had pulled too much during my automatic payments and was wondering why it hadn’t pulled out of my account yet for the month. So I called National General annnd I had not signed the PIP insurance form (which is required by Florida) by the deadline so they had cancelled the policy. In October. A month before we got the text from Mike’s brother. I had no idea. The cancellation notice was sent to my mother’s house where it sat in my mostly junk mail pile. It’s a good thing we hadn’t gone driving during that period. So I called National General, got another policy set up (it was the whole shebang all over again, pictures, underwriters, etc [although this time they asked extra questions like how much the bus cost when it was new…in 1996…]) and got all the information for Mike so that he could contact the state and not get his license suspended. National General had done the notifying so we were all set there. Whew. Crisis one adverted.

Then there was the jury duty. Now, Mike had gotten the first notice of his scheduled jury duty sometime in the summer right around when we were moving. It got neglected. He missed jury duty without giving them any notice. He got a letter stating that he had to provide his explanation or face a fine and possible jail time by a certain deadline which we missed since we didn’t receive the notice. So he sent a very late explanation (explaining the original absence and the lateness of his explanation) which was accepted and he now has to appear for jury duty next summer. Crisis two adverted.

This all occurred during a roughly 2 week time span. Add in some issues with our billing setup and travel and it was a mess. It felt like a period of fire putting out cause those are big things to mess up.

So needless to say, we’ve got a PO Box and our mothers are on the lookout for any thing that looks potentially important. Although we’re back in Florida for a little bit over winter break so it’s more or less a moot point for the next month and a half.