I’ll add another tip: Notify your credit card companies and banks before you leave home, especially if you are moving cross-country by vehicle. If you don’t have time to do the full change of address (or don’t know your new address yet), at least put a travel notification on your account. A travel notification is usually pretty easy to do, and most banks will let you do it through their websites.

You will use your credit/debit cards multiple times on the road, including gas, hotels, and meals. When you arrive at the new place, you will likely purchase things for the new home, replace things that you left behind, and buy cleaning supplies and other incidentals. If your credit card company hasn’t been notified that you are traveling, and they see hundreds of dollars in out-of-state purchases, and they can’t reach you at your home phone, they may start to deny your purchases.

From a “good citizen” point of view, it’s probably nicer to return the item to the local post office and let them know of the mistake and its ongoing nature. They can notify your postal carrier so he/she stops delivery of the other person’s mail to your home.

- for some reason most magazine subscriptions take FOR-E-VER to change your address (in my experience sometimes longer than the postal service will forward your mail) so I’d call and tell them the new address as soon as you know it

- if you’re not a U.S. citizen you are legally required to notify USCIS of your physical address within 10 days of moving

Is that legal?

Almost all of my address changes never took effect until after the post office forwarded my mail at least once. In other words, those organizations did not heed my request for an address change even with a one month lead time.

The worst of it was my credit card company. I took the time to call and wait on hold for 20 minutes (because my credit card company won’t offer an online change of address option). Several days later, all of my purchases were denied because the address I was using wasn’t matching up with what they had on file. Another 20-minute call later, I found out that no one bothered changing my address when I requested it. My financial services company and my employer similarly did not change my address until months after my move.

The next time I move, I’m going back to letting the post office handle almost all of my mail forwarding and notifications.

Anyone applying for a Department of Defense clearance has to list every single one of those. Depending on the level of clearance, someone may actually visit those locations and ask about you. When my husband applied for a clearance as part of his job, we were visited by some very nice FBI guys, who wanted him to draw maps of the rural locations. Years later, a very nice FBI lady stopped by my farm, for the very same reason.

I still get junk mail and credit card offers for a family I’ve never met, and don’t know their actual address. And I did tell the post office (USA) about the mix-up. They’re damned lucky I’m not the sort of person to steal an identity and use their cc offers!

I also still get mail, the ocassional cemetary bill and tax statement for the former owners of our house. All their mail gets recycled, along with the previous family’s mail.

Now, if only certain relatives of mine, who have known for 10 years now that we’ve moved & stayed in this one location, would update their address books. It’s not that hard! Especially when important lawyer type letters are involved. Sheesh.

Thank you for a wonderful and informative blog.