Being an expatriate doesn’t sever all ties to the motherland (what I call the USA). Before I arrived in Montevideo I set up an account with USABox.

With USABox you will have an address in Miami, Florida. You have all your mail (including FedEx and UPS packages) sent there. When you receive anything in your box they scan the outside of the envelope or, if it’s a package, they enter a description and email you. Your online inbox shows each item waiting to be sent to you. If something’s obviously junk you can simply delete it from your inbox and they’ll throw it away. If you like to shop online and receive several boxes of merchandise you can request that they repack everything to save you money on shipping. You can control when items are sent to you. They have different monthly plans which include varying amounts of shipping included. Their default shipping company is DHL (which really sucks here in UY) so I pay $9 per shipment to have them use FedEx. USABox is cool for expats who haven’t decided on where they’re going to live yet. Maybe you’ll give Uruguay a try for a year then move on. If that’s the case all you do is change your forwarding address with USABox and they’ll send your packages to your new address anywhere in the world including anywhere in the USA. It’s great also for people who do a lot of traveling for their jobs.

If Uruguay is going to be your home then you should check out Miami-Box. I discovered them by accident last week. I was in a taxi stopped at a red light and I saw next to us a mini-van with Miami-Box (miami-box.com) painted all over it. When I got home I checked out their website. Their name is the only thing in English on their website which is probably why I didn’t find them before moving to Montevideo. If they’d maintain their site in more languages than Spanish I’m sure they’d do a lot more business, after all Montevideo is a capital city with diplomats from all over the world. Since it’s a mailing service from the motherland to Uruguay they should at least have it in Spanish and English. Oh well, seems obvious to me but I guess they must have enough clients that they don’t want to be bother. I digress.

Their service is simpler. You’ll have an address in Miami. Once a week they load up all the mail for all of their customers and send it via air freight to Montevideo. You pay each week based on the weight of your shipment. If you receive nothing you pay nothing. They have their own delivery fleet in Uruguay and they will take care of clearing customs for you if necessary (at a fraction of the price of DHL!).

A nice feature of Miami-Box, which might make the service interesting for everyone in Montevideo including locals and expats from other countries than the USA is that they offer free magazine subscriptions. Of course nothing’s ever really free. You do have to pay the shipping on the magazines. Then again if you paid for the magazine subscription you’d still have to pay extra to have it shipped to Uruguay so it’s a pretty good deal.

Another service they offer is letting you shop online without a credit card. Good for people without international credit cards. I didn’t pay much attention to this part of their site but I think the way it works is you email them a link to what you want to buy, they calculate the cost, you deposit the cash in their bank account in Montevideo, and they buy the item for you.

There are a lot of people in Canada and Europe reading this blog so if you folks know of similar services available in your countries go ahead and post them as a comment. If anyone has used USABox or Miami-Box feel free to share your experiences as well.