Many health care professionals who travel from assignment to assignment usually love it.
But the main drawbacks, if you don't have a home base, a place you are renting or buying, are what do you legally put on your drivers license for an address? How do you get your mail?
Quite a few people try to get around this by using a relative's home address or a friend's. Then using the friend's address as their home. They try to take advantage of the tax breaks traveling health care professionals get by taking a job more than 50 miles from their home base.
This is clearly illegal and if the IRS were to check on your claim, however remote, you would be hard pressed to prove your residence. The government could require you to show rental receipts or mortgage payments. Even if you home is paid for, they could ask you for property tax payments, utility receipts, any number of records regarding your home.
You're better off just taking the higher tax hit, assuming you're trying to get around the home requirement. Afterall, if you travel for a living, you will have a large number of tax deductions without the added benefit from home/rental ownership.
For those of you who are clueless as to what I am referring to about the tax benefit of having a home base, I am talking about your pay structure.
If you have a home or rental unit and you are more than 50 miles away from it, a good portion of your pay is not taxed. But if you don't have a home, you just get straight pay.
The point here is that if you don't have a home you are maintaining while traveling but still need to have a legal drivers license and mail sent to wherever your current job assignment is, what do you do?
Use a mail forwarding service. You can use the address on your drivers license and all your mail will be sent there and then forwarded to you wherever you're at.
I am not recommending any particular service. You can get pages of them just by putting "mail forwarding service" in your favorite search engine.
Nearly all of them that I looked at offer scan services. They will open your mail in a secure facility, color scan it for you, and put it on your own email service. Many also offer private shredding for mail you don't want forwarded to you and shredding of junk mail. They will scan just the envelope so you can see if you even want it sent to you or just scan it and then shred the document.
Moreover, the nice aspect to this is you can lgitimately use the service's address as your own.
Essentially, you may be homeless. But at least you have a legal drivers license and your mail can reach you wherever you are.
In the past we have used a UPS service and rented a mail box. Once a week they would stick our mail in an envelope and mail it to our current location. We would keep them apprised of our moves. Not all the UPS shops offer mail forwarding, but the one we used did.
You will just have to investigate and see which of the services meets your needs.
(If you are trying to stay fit, check out my articles on fitness at http://www.newstrength4life.com/.)
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