The Government Doesn’t Like Homeless People
Pretty much every part of the launch has been tricky, but domiciling has been one of the trickiest.
Most folks who consider themselves expats don’t travel full time. They simply relocate to another country. You can be a US citizen, live full time in Costa Rica or Thailand, and use your local address as your legal address. That’s completely legit.
But what if, like us, you’re going to travel full time with no fixed address? We’ve sold our home in St. Louis to hit the road, and don’t actually have a permanent address. As it turns out, that’s not OK. The US government requires that you have an actual residence. Somewhere. You don’t get to be homeless.
If you’ve explored this idea at all, I’m sure you’ve run across Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRAs). In addition to handling your mail, they promise to provide a legal street address, rather than a PO Box, that will satisfy your need to establish residence. And while it’s true that many DMVs will accept a CMRA address for your driver’s license, that address is insufficient from the federal government’s perspective to establish legal residence.
That’s because of an obscure provision of the Patriot Act, passed in 2001, that required banks to check that customers have a legal residence. One of those checks is to run your address through a list of CMRAs. And that list exists because CMRAs have to register with the Postal Service, and banks can check against that data.
Now, I’ve spoken to several people who are traveling full-time and use a CMRA to provide their legal residence address, and they said they’ve never had a problem. Good for them.
But that’s basically relying on your bank doing their job poorly to maintain access to your own money. I bank with Charles Schwab, so I called them to ask whether I could use a CMRA as my residence address. I expected to be passed around multiple agents until someone was able to answer such an obscure question, but the agent who picked up the phone knew the answer instantly.
That answer was “Hell no.” Schwab regularly monitors accounts for legal addresses, and if they find that you’re using a less than kosher address, they will freeze your funds. While you’re out of the country. With no redress except providing them with a legitimate address. That’s not a task I want to take on overseas.
So, no CMRA for us. Prior to launch I spent months managing inbound mail and converting our accounts to update us via email. Just about the only things that have to be sent snail mail at this point are absentee ballots and driver’s license renewals. In that regard, the loss of the CMRA is no big deal.
However, we still have to have a real residence to use as our legal domicile. That didn’t seem like a reasonable request of friends, so we’re using my sister’s address in Chicago. Of course, having the address is one thing. Proving it’s your actual residence is a completely different thing.
A driver’s license or state ID are the primary ways to demonstrate your residence in a particular state, but you can’t get either of those documents without proving to the DMV that you really, truly live at that address.
Every state articulates their own requirements, but proof of residence typically includes documents, which must show your full legal name and your claimed address, such as: bank statements, canceled checks, deeds, leases, utility bills, insurance policies, pay stubs, official government communications, and the like.
Obviously, some of those proofs of residence are going to be pretty hard to come by. Utility bills, deeds, government documents… But that’s the challenge, and the hoops you have to jump through to establish residence without an actual home. We’re now official Illinois residents, so it can be done.