August 1, 2018 – In April of 2013 Roy and I gave up our Louisiana drivers licenses, vehicle registrations and voter registration. When we lived fulltime in our motorhome we really lived in all the states we visit. Because of that we were allowed to choose a state for our domicile that had the best benefits for us. A domicile state is the state used for voting, Dora and Boots insurance and motor vehicle registration, jury duty, health insurance, inspection stickers. I had to go back to the original blog I wrote about this subject because I really don’t remember all that was taken into consideration back then.
Because Louisiana had one of the highest auto insurance rates in the country and South Dakota
had one of the lowest rates, we chose South Dakota for our domicile. Several other factors were in South Dakota’s favor so once the decision was made we set out to find a mail forwarding service there. We signed up with My Dakota Address in Madison, SD. There are other ones but since this one is in Madison and our little granddaughters name is the same but spelled Madisyn we chose that one! The mail forwarding service give you a physical street address to use for all these things since that’s a requirement on most of them. They receive your mail at their address and at either predetermined times or when you ask for it send your mail to you wherever you are.
Now that we are actually living in a house in Louisiana we decided it was time to become Louisiana residents again. Our address here is in Amite, Louisiana.
We decided to get Louisiana insurance quotes for our truck Boots and our motor home Dora. We were quite shocked to see that now the rates in Louisiana were almost the same as in South Dakota. Not sure what’s changed but we were happy with that finding! We also found that the annual registration we were paying in South Dakota was five times what we will be paying in Louisiana. South Dakota is not a state that refunds the remainder of the year’s registration fee so that stunk.
We now have our Louisiana Drivers license. We were happy to find out that the DMV now handles voter registration so Louisiana now has two new registered Republicans!!! No more voting by mail!
Boots, our truck, is sporting a new Louisiana license plates. Its taking a bit longer and a dozen phone calls Roy had to make to the bank and the Hammond DMV to get Dora’s transferred. We learned in this process that the DMV in Hammond is not owned or operated by the State of Louisiana but rather by a private company. The DMV in Amite is operated by the State of Louisiana. The DMV in Amite is working with Roy to do something for us that the DMV in Hammond couldn’t do. If you ever run into a problem in Hammond, go to the one in Amite. It’s not nearly as nice looking as the one in Hammond but they are very helpful and can do more.
South Dakota did not require an inspection sticker (known by us native New Orleanians as a brake tag!) but Louisiana does so Boots has her cute little inspection sticker now.
We also cancelled our mail forwarding service with MyDakotaAddress in South Dakota after making sure all companies we do business with have our current address and you have it now also!
We got an email from MyDakotAddress just a couple of days ago that the business is closing as of July 31 and all mail will be returned to sender. I am so happy we were already closing our account and had gone through notifying everyone of the new address. It may not seem like such an awful thing to have the mail forwarding service closed. However, they provided you with a physical street address for all legal things (registration, voting, etc.) Now all of those people have no legal physical address. We have no idea what happened that caused it to be closed so quickly with such little notice.
Most of our traveling is behind us and sometimes that is a little sad. We’re mostly very happy to be settling back in as Louisiana residents and all that includes!
The video below warmed my heart and I just had to share! Other than the skin slipping down off my face I actually love being old. This video says it all!
Ya’ll come back now, ya’ hear!
Click on the links below to go there!
Some Things I Learned About Dementia
BECAUSE HE LIVES 