Ask HN: Changing addresses when moving
I am moderately hesitant to move out of my apartment simply because I do not want to go through the hassle of updating all these accounts. According to the Census, 10 to 20% of the US population historically moves each year, so this is a decent user base to work with who probably share a similar pain (http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/mobility_of_the_population/cb11-193.html). I haven't looked beneath the headline stat, but I'd venture to guess the mobility rate is much higher for urban, technologically advanced demographic, for whom this pain would be greater.
Potential problems with this idea:
- I know you can have USPS forward mail for a period of time Mitigant: From experience, this doesn't always work for all pieces of mail for some reason. Also, this doesn't solve updating your driver's license and car insurance, for instance. This delays the pain, not solves it.
- Mail is slowly disappearing. Mitigant: Same as above and you can't replace packages/parcels with email. Maybe some day.
- If you are going to take all this time to enter each of your accounts on the hypothetical service I am describing, you could just individually visit each account's website and find the profile / change address section. Mitigant: This is probably more time intensive than entering accounts on the web service given each website is different. I can envision the service working like Mint.com where you pick the account from a list, enter your user name and password, and the website does the rest.
- I don't want to share my user name and password for other accounts on a new website. Mitigant: Some form of incredibly secured storage. Password security isn't my baileywick so I can't speak intelligently on how to protect user's data.
Maybe I'm just exceptionally lazy.