Your Address Is Not Your Identity. But the Government Thinks Otherwise.

I’ve been doing some planning for my life on the road, and I fell down a rabbit hole that I can’t climb out of – and have decided to bring you with me. 

Here’s where it started: I need a new mailing address. My UPS Store box just hiked its rates to nearly $50 a month to only receive mail and packages and nothing more. So, I started shopping around for virtual mailbox options that would not only receive mail, but scan it (so that I don’t have to pick up junk mail) and will forward both mail and packages upon request. If you’re hoping to nomad or even travel for just a couple of month, you need a plan for timely mail. Trust me, parking ticket fines don’t care that you’ve been away…$37, $57, $109….  Don’t ask me how I know! 

That’s when I hit a wall and got mad. 

 

A Street Address Is a Street Address. Except When It Isn’t.

In New Jersey, where I’m based, you can register your LLC using a virtual address or a registered agent’s address. The law — N.J.S.A. 42:2C-18, the Revised Uniform Limited Liability Company Act — requires only “the street and mailing addresses of the initial registered office and the name of the initial agent at that office for service of process.” No requirement that anyone actually lives there. No requirement that the address be anything other than a real physical location that can receive mail. By the way, I do the same thing for my Pennsylvania business mail. Although it only runs me a few bucks a year, I don’t see why email, which is free, isn’t enough. I mean, they email all of the notices anyway! Shouldn’t I be able to assume the risk of not receiving mail if I forego the registered agent? Unless a signature is required, there’s no guarantee that I’ve received a piece of mail, even if it comes to my home.  

But back to the point – the street address that doesn’t count. 

Now let’s get into what the business address requirement actually means in practice, because this is where it gets genuinely absurd.

New Jersey doesn’t require that a business have a specific person at a specific desk. It requires that the business have a registered agent — someone available at that address during traditional business hours to receive legal and official communications. That’s it. The agent doesn’t have to be a named individual. It doesn’t have to be the business owner. It doesn’t have to be the same person every day.

I register my business in Pennsylvania, and my registered agent is essentially a virtual mailbox service. When a legal document arrives, whoever happens to be working that day signs for it. That person is my agent. Tomorrow, if a different employee is at the desk, that person is my agent. The objective is not to track me. The objective is to ensure there’s a reliable point of contact for official communication. Continuity of access, not continuity of person.

So for my business: any warm body at a commercial address during business hours will do.

For me personally? My driver’s license? My vehicle registration? That’s a different statute entirely — N.J.S.A. 39:3-4 — and it specifically requires “the street address of the residence of the owner.” I gotta produce a specific residential address where I physically live, report any change within one week, and keep my driver’s license, vehicle registration, and MVC records aligned to that address at all times.

The same state that says your business can live anywhere turns around and says you personally must be anchored to a specific spot.

A corporation gets a registered agent. A person gets surveillance because they don’t want a lot of headache when they need to arrest you.

 

The Fraud Argument Doesn’t Hold

The obvious pushback is fraud prevention. Virtual addresses are a risk, right? Criminals could use them.

Except… the state already accepts them for business purposes. If virtual addresses were a meaningful fraud issue, wouldn’t NJ have banned them for LLCs? 

The real objection is trackability. The government needs to know where you are. For taxes. For fees. For compliance. And paradoxically, it doesn’t apply that same logic to corporations — entities that generate far more revenue, employ far more people, and carry far more legal liability than any individual nomad/road tripper ever will. 

My friend had a boyfriend who lived in New York but registered his car at her New Jersey address for years. Nobody checked. Nobody verified. The system that claims to NEED your residential address for accuracy didn’t notice a thing. The address requirement isn’t foolproof.

 

What RV Lifers Know That the Rest of Us Don’t

The full-time RV and nomad community figured out a long time ago that there are three states that are the default domicile choices for road lifers: South Dakota, Texas, and Florida. South Dakota, in particular, has essentially built an industry around this — no state income tax, explicit DMV accommodations for travelers, and a mail forwarding infrastructure purpose-built for people who are never actually there.

On the surface, this looks like those states being progressive and flexible. And maybe it is. But let’s follow the money, because #MisalignmentIsTheRoot and the misalignment here is…you tell me.

Every person who establishes domicile in South Dakota — even if they sleep there maybe three nights a year — gets counted as a South Dakota resident. That means:

• Federal census-based funding flowing to South Dakota based on a population that doesn’t actually consume state services
• CDBG and HUD allocations calculated on headcounts that include people whose cars, mail, and legal identities live there but whose bodies do not
• Federal highway dollars partially driven by registered vehicle counts — and South Dakota has a disproportionate number of registered vehicles relative to its actual driving population
• A voter base that is geographically diffuse, unlikely to vote in local elections, and makes essentially zero demands on local government

South Dakota gets the revenue. It gets the federal funding multiplier. It gets the registration fees. And in exchange, it absorbs a population that will never show up to vote against an incumbent, never demand a new school, never put pressure on local infrastructure. It’s a near-perfect political and fiscal arrangement.

Isn’t this how communities with prisons also make out like fat cats?

 

The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Here’s where I have to go somewhere harder.

When I take extended road trips, my road life is a choice. I have a consulting practice, credentials, clients, and a plan. When I roll through a city in my RAV4, I’m a woman on a mission. #AllLeadershipIsPersonal

But the bureaucratic experience of having a fixed residential address is a headache. 

No permanent address creates real legal vulnerability. You can’t get a driver’s license without a residential address. You can’t register a vehicle without one. You can’t access many public benefits, open certain bank accounts, or fully participate in civic life. 

If you ask a family member or a friend to let you borrow their address, then both of you risk having your car insurance rates impacted and anything else that’s based on household income. 

The administrative wall is the same whether you’re a digital nomad or someone who lost their housing last month. I don’t believe this is an accident. 

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as punishment for crime.” That carve-out didn’t happen by accident either. Convict leasing in the post-Reconstruction South was slavery with paperwork, and the targeting of Black men specifically was not incidental — it was the point. Fast forward to today: every state in this country uses incarcerated labor. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. The incentive to maintain a steady supply of incarcerated people is baked into the economics of the system.

Criminalizing homelessness — anti-camping ordinances, loitering laws, sitting bans — doesn’t solve homelessness. It converts it from a social problem into a criminal matter. And once it’s criminal, the person enters a system that can extract labor. The bureaucratic barriers to legal address aren’t just inconvenient. For some people, they are part of the prison pipeline.

And just like South Dakota benefits from counting nomads who never show up, municipalities benefit from counting incarcerated people at the facility address rather than their home address — inflating local population counts, pulling in federal funding for communities that are warehousing people rather than serving them.

The funding logic of mass incarceration looks a lot like the funding logic of nomad domicile. In both cases, someone is counting bodies they don’t actually serve.

 

What I’m Going to Do About the Address Thing

I’m taking this to my locally elected official. The argument is simple:

If New Jersey accepts a virtual address for business registration under N.J.S.A. 42:2C-18 — with no requirement that anyone physically occupy that space — then the burden is on the state to explain why an individual cannot use a registered agent for the same purpose under N.J.S.A. 39:3-4.

If fraud were the real concern, they wouldn’t permit it for businesses either. The distinction between corporate flexibility and individual surveillance is a policy choice, not a legal necessity. And it’s a policy choice that falls hardest on people who are already most vulnerable — people fleeing domestic violence, people in transitional housing, people whose lives simply don’t fit the traditional model.

A registered agent framework for individuals isn’t radical. It already exists for corporations. It already exists informally in South Dakota for anyone willing to pay a mail forwarding service and call it home.

The question is who gets to access it, and why.

 

I’d love to talk about this more on the podcast — whether you’re a full-time road lifer, a policy thinker, a housing advocate, or someone who’s just had it with systems that treat people like liabilities and corporations like people. Come find me.

#AllLeadershipIsPersonal #MisalignmentIsTheRoot #AlignEverything #conflictisnormal #TheLeadershipDrives