docj

Over the years we've stayed in all 50 States and DC but we've also been fortunate enough to have been in all 10 Canadian provinces plus the Yukon Territory. Admittedly, we only were in Yukon for a couple of hours, having rented a car at a cruise ship stop in AK just so we could drive into Yukon and see Emerald Lake. Last summer, we left the MH on PEI and took the car over to NL to spend two memorable weeks there! As for business travel, I ran a Lockheed Martin subsidiary that was doing work for the USG in Russia. At one point my passport had so many stamps and visas that I had to have pages added. >15 trips to Russia including unique opportunities to visit places like Vladivostok and Archangelsk. And, of course, there were trips to more "normal" places like China, Japan, Korea ,Taiwan, Norway, France, Belgium, Ukraine, and the UK.

If you're not going to actually go all the way to FL, why not consider staying in TX? Both the Corpus Christi area and the RGV have large numbers of snowbirds each year. If you stay along the coast, the low temps in Corpus rarely get below 35-40.

I hope your wife is well. Mine also had cancer surgery ~5 years ago. My wife's cancer was rare enough that she has since then been under the care of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I just verified that MDAnderson essentially doesn't accept Medicare Advantage Plans. I'm not saying that your plan wasn't good for your wife, but when my wife needed more advanced care it was available to her at no cost and with no questions asked.

Thanks, I'll try it again

I briefly tried to put my Visible SIM in my 7730L and it rejected it. I thought I had used the correct APN. It identified it as a non-Verizon SIM. What did you do to get it to worK?

We feel the same way. Despite the fact that we would love to see our family (who are all back East), we've stayed put in TX since the pandemic broke out. We were lucky that several children had visited in the Feb-Mar timeframe before the case counts got too high. IMHO it's hardly worth the effort (and risk) of going sightseeing only to find that many things are closed or severely restricted. We've decided that the safest way to try to ride out the pandemic is to stay in our small town and venture out only when we have to. JMO

We, also, just use Visible as a hotspot; I've never made a call from the phone. It is the weakest of my several "low cost" cellular connections (at least at my location). I use them all in a load balancing router so I don't have to worry about switching from one to another.

I wouldn't mind saving $15 for doing nothing, but I figure that what just happened to you will periodically re-occur and I'm not sure if the nuisance is worth the $15. JMO

In our part of TX you buy groceries at HEB or you pretty much don't buy groceries. And HEB doesn't take either of these

Here it is: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B000KFSLMO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Although I usually carry printed copies of those, it's worth noting that Progressive (and maybe other companies) have legally accepted online versions that can be downloaded to one's phone.

Here's how we handle our spices.

Although I do have a printer that gets used occasionally, lately I have shifted to saving documents to "the cloud" rather than accumulating paper. It's pretty easy to "print to a PDF" rather than to a physical printer which yields a stored copy that is no different than what you would have printed. That way, if you ever need it in the future, it's there for you. At one time cloud storage seemed "scary"; these days it's a routine part of many businesses standard practice. I happen to use the Microsoft Cloud, but there are quite a few of them to choose from.

FWIW we don't get any credit card or bank statements in the mail. We've signed up for electronic delivery with virtually every entity we do business with. Most of what we get in the mail are Amazon packages and none of those have ever been lost.

This article is about the effectiveness of the Mail Recovery Center (MRC), the so-called Dead Letter Office. It's not an analysis of the overall performance of the USPS with respect to lost mail. I think the 3% number is far too high. Think about the number of bills you receive (or used to). If 3% of them were lost you'd be missing a lot of mail.

With all due respect that is NOT what the article you referenced says. Here's a quote from the article: According to the United States Postal Service (USPS), the amount of mail that was undeliverable as addressed (UAA) was near 4.7 percent in 2010. The percentage rate of lost mail cannot be measured, because the amount actually lost is unknowable. There's a big difference between 4.7% of mail being "undeliverable as addressed" and saying that 5% of daily mail is lost. IMHO there are too many "sound bites" that get quoted as if they are truth when, in actuality, they are at best only partially true.

Very interesting video, but I caution people that the relative speeds of the plans measured in the video reflects a specific physical location and it's not clear if an attempt was made to measure speeds at different times of the day. I totally agree with the video's conclusions that postpaid plans are usually better than prepaid plans (including Visible), but I would suggest that people not focus on the specific speeds measured or the precise relative speeds of the different plans. I, personally, have a postpaid phone as well as a prepaid SIM in a Jetpack and a Visible SIM in an inexpensive phone. I have a lot of experience using these for streaming video, having cancelled our DirectV account a year ago. Joel (AKA docj)

No offense intended, but we also aren't fans of boondocking and desert camping and have had no interest in going to "Q" in the 10 years we've been fulltiming. We've never been fond of crowds even before COVID-19. At one time it might have been helpful to be able to buy RV "stuff" under the big tent, but in today's world, pretty much anything you want is no more than a "click" away. JMO

I think what sandsys was trying to say was that "disguising" the use of a PMB by using a # sign or calling it an apartment no longer works as well as it used to because many (most?) financial institutions use software which appears to identify most (all?) PMB addresses regardless of what is entered. Having been a full-timer for 10 years I routinely avoid use of "PMB" for exactly the reasons JimK cited, but lately I've found that my "account records" often show my address as a PMB even though I know I didn't enter it as such. Only once in the entire 10 years has a financial institution ever had an issue with the address and it was quite happy to accept my daughter's address instead. Lately, it hasn't been a problem and last month we financed a new car using the PMB without any issue.

Here's an Oregon mail forwarding service. Maybe they can meet your needs: https://mailforwardingservices.com/

With all due respect there's a big difference between the two. The slowdowns caused by network management can vary on literally a minute basis. Throttling, on the other hand, is something that gets imposed and you could be stuck with it until the next billing cycle, Sure, on any given day the effects of the two may appear to be similar but the underlying causes are very different.

Irrespective of whether or not the business vs personal issue is significant, it's well established that "postpaid" accounts have higher priority than do "prepaid" ones. So your daughter is possibly seeing the confluence of two different factors.

When Part D was enacted, Medicare was specifically forbidden by legislation from negotiating drug prices. The drug companies got what they wanted--a government program to pay for drugs and no ability for the government to negotiate prices!

I don't see Medicare as being a "mess" at all. Yes, it's more complicated than necessary, but it pays our bills and we don't have to fill out ANY paperwork. Neither my wife nor I have paid for anything other than prescription co-pays and premiums in >8 years. As for Medicare Advantage, that was foisted on Medicare by the managed care industry which lobbied Congress so it could get a piece of the Medicare "pie." They convinced Congress that they were so much more efficient in delivering care that they could provide far more services for the same or less money! I've personally never been a fan of managed care, since I like getting the best treatment I can, not the "best one my plan will pay for!" I'm sure we all have our favorite managed care horror stories. Mine is from a friend in TX whose plan wouldn't approve treatment of his wife's cancer at MD Anderson in Houston. By the time they did approve it, nothing could be done.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that our long term care policy was through Medicare; it's not. I went back and looked at our most recent tax returns. We paid ~$10.5k for health and dental insurance (including Medicare Part B, Supplementals and Part D) and ~$2k for long term care insurance in 2019. When I had said $8k I wasn't thinking of the Part B premiums.