Australia, The Great Adventure

“No Fixed Address”

We are currently in a rental house. Therefore when we leave, we will no longer have a residential address. I guess that means that we will officially be of “no fixed address”!

We have a post office box (through my company), and we can get this mail forwarded to another address (ie. a relative’s address). Then we could get the mail forwarded to a post office near where we are going to be.

I am contacting the various different organisations that we deal with, that may need to know our physical address, to find out how they would like to deal with this.

• Australian tax Office (13 28 61) - PO Box is ok.
• Bank - PO Box is ok.
• VicRoads (13 11 71) - License and Car Rego: Can set postal address different to residential address, so PO Box is ok for that for both the licenses and the car. For residential address on license and garaged address on car rego, a relative in Victoria is fine. Technically if we stay anywhere for more than 2 weeks, then we should update our address to that, but in our situation it would be ok to leave it as the relative’s address.
• Car insurance - Postal address can be the Post Office. Risk address must be residential - can remain at current address, or use relative’s address.
• Family Assistance Office (13 61 50) - Can nominate a PO Box for our correspondence address. We will still be able to get Rental Assistance, so long as we notify them of our movements. Because we have 14 days to notify them of any changes, if we call in once every 14 days then this will be sufficient. Must keep all receipts!
• Australia Post (13 13 18) - How to forward mail to a Post Office: (from our current residential address, from PO Box) Put in a form to get it redirected from the PO Box to a set address (eg. a relative). Put in another form for mail that is addressed to us at our current residential address, to get it forwarded to a set address (eg. a relative). Then we can tell them which post office we are going to be near, and they can send the mail on to us c/o that post office, and we can just walk in and pick it up from there. We don’t need to prearrange anything with the post office to do this.

For my company (a $2 pty ltd company) the only one we need to be concerned about is ASIC. Here are details from my acountant about what we have to do here:

• There are 4 items that ASIC require an address for 1. Registered Office, 2. Principal Place of Business, 3. Officeholder address and 4. Members address.
• Registered office and Principal place of Business require a physical address which, as we discussed, could be a relative’s address. If so you need to have consent in writing from them that it is okay to do this. The address details that would be written on the form is eg. C/- Mary Jones, 12 Green Way, Melbourne
• The Officeholders address, which is yourself as director, also needs to be a physical address and it does not matter if you do not actually live there. Again you could use your relative’s address here as well or even our office address. It is the officeholders address that is used by ASIC to send correspondence that is outstanding eg. If the annual filing fee has not been paid on time the reminder will be forwarded to the Officeholders address.
• The members address can be a PO Box.

So in summary, we only need a relative’s residential address for:

• VicRoads (License and Car Rego)
• Car insurance (Risk address)
• Australia Post (mail forwarding)
• ASIC (Registered Office, Principal Place of Business and Officeholder address)

And we need to call the Family Tax Office every two weeks to notify them of our latest details.

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