How to stop giving out your home address

Every company wants your address. Thankfully you can use a PO Box or other option to keep your location info to only those who truly need it.

Privacy is very important to me, as it should be to you. And while I know that there are volumes of data on us, that doesn’t mean that we need to make it any easier on these companies who spy on us and sell our personal information for a profit.

One of the ways that I like to preserve some form of privacy is to never give out my home address, at least not if I can help it.

Why? Well, my first response is philosophical: why do companies need to know where I live?

And my second thought is a question: how much junk mail and other unnecessary stuff, plus undesired knocks on your door, do you get? How do you think these companies got your address? It’s because you entered it on every web form ever.

Luckily, giving out your home address is almost never necessary, and it doesn’t take much leg work to do so.

And yes, you’ll still be able to get packages.

Get a PO Box

The simplest way I’ve found to to almost never have to give out your home address is to get a PO Box.

A PO Box is amazing. You can get mail and packages sent to the box, most obviously, but the other big benefit is that it can be a secondary address associated with you.

That means that you can use this address instead of your home address on forms and other places where an address is “required”.

Shipping

The obvious benefit here is that you can ship mail and packages to this box and not your front porch.

Worried about porch pirates? No need to worry about that anymore.

Worried about drone delivery? Not relevant to you.

Mail and packages are sent to a secure location: your local post office. You pick up your stuff whenever you want.

Street addressing

But wait, you say! Don’t many shippers not ship to PO Boxes? Why yes, you’re right!

But the US Post Office has a handy workaround, called “Street Addressing“. This is a service that allows you to use your PO Box with a regular street address.

Let’s say your post office’s address is:

1234 Main Street
Anywhere, US, 00000

Ordinarily, you’d send mail to:

PO Box 5678
Anywhere, US 00000

But with Street Addressing, you can send to:

1234 Main Street #5678
Anywhere, US, 00000

And boom! No PO Box anymore. UPS, FedEx, all of them can ship to your PO Box with no problems.

Billing address

One of the most common places to put an address, aside from a shipping address, is a billing address during online checkout. This is the address associated with your method of payment (debit card, credit card).

You can use your PO Box address as your billing address The bank doesn’t care; you can update your address and they’ll be fine with it.

And if you’re shipping to this address, you can check the box that says “My billing address is the same as my shipping address” when you go to checkout somewhere. It makes the whole thing seamless.

Getting a PO Box

Getting a PO Box is easy. Almost all post offices have them, and there’s guaranteed to be a post office in your ZIP code.

Just find the nearest or most convenient branch and sign up there. You can even do it online.

It’s a bit more expensive these days than it used to be, but for the smallest box in my neighborhood, it comes down to less than $20/month. Considering that’s basically the cost of a burrito these days. I consider that a reasonable price to pay for privacy.

Oh, and don’t think that you need to get a large-sized box either. If you get a package that won’t fit in the slot, they’ll hold it for you. So unless you’re getting a huge volume of mail, the smallest one will do.

Other options

I love my PO Box and have had it for years now. But for me, there are two downsides:

1. Limited hours. When I first got my PO Box, I could access it 24 hours a day, but they changed this years ago and now the hours are very limited.
2. Not always convenient. It once made sense to get a PO Box downtown, in a central area, regardless of where I was living. But these days, I barely go downtown. So now I’m in the odd position of having a post office location a five minute walk away from my home, but I drive 15 minutes to get my mail. It’s not a big deal though, as I don’t need to check my mail every day.

If a PO Box doesn’t fit the bill for you, know that there are alternatives too.

• You can rent an address from other places, like FedEx or The UPS Store. They may be more convenient to you.
• You can rent an address from a private office space in your area. They also may have better rates or be more convenient.
• You can use a virtual mail service. These will scan your mail and allow you to forward some of the pieces on. I’ve long heard of Earth Class Mail, but there are other services as well.

You still have a physical address

I can use a PO Box for almost all of my needs, but not all of them.

There are times when you will need to provide your physical home address. For example, you can’t put a PO Box on a drivers license.

But the nice thing is that you can always default to your physical address whenever you want. Having a PO Box doesn’t mean that you need to use it for everything, all the time. You have control over what you share and what you don’t.

And with an alternate address, you can shield your physical address from companies that don’t really need it, while still living your life without much of any inconvenience.