When you’re getting ready to travel, especially if you’re planning to be gone a long time, it’s tough to focus on details like coming home. If you’re planning to travel around the world, perhaps staying on the road for months at a time, home can seem like a strange concept. But having a home base can make all the difference in the world to your abilities to travel.

Your home base can be anything you need it to be: a storage closet in a family member’s basement, an apartment you rent once you’re abroad, anything. The most important consideration is thinking of that location as a home base, no matter how often you see it or how you use it. There are some reasons that having a home base is particularly important.

1. Having a mailing address: Even if your mailing address is care of whoever can scan in your mail, having a mailing address is crucial to traveling. If you’re going to stay in one place long enough for your mail to catch up with you, that’s wonderful — but otherwise, having somewhere that can make sure you see any important documents is crucial. A relative with a scanner can be a good bet, especially if they can stick your income mail with any other stuff of yours they’re storing (and you may even get the added benefit of being able to list your address as ‘The Cupboard Under the Stairs’).
2. Important possessions: Downsizing entirely is rarely possible. You can get rid of 90 percent of what you own, get everything you need to live into one backpack, and still have that quilt that Grandma made you when you were ten. Most people have at least one or two things they don’t want to get rid of, but aren’t exactly practical to take on the road. Having a home base allows you to keep those precious memories, without feeling badly that you can’t simplify your life enough.
3. Entrepreneurial plans: Are you planning to create your own business in order to support your traveling? If that’s the case, then you have to have an address somewhere, if only to have something to put on your tax forms. It’s generally best to make sure that address is located in the country where you are a citizen, rather than where you’re traveling, unless paying taxes in two countries interests you.
4. Decluttering: If you have a home base separate from the places you stay as you travel, there’s a psychological benefit. Most of us start to think of wherever we are as home, unless we have a good reason not to. That can lead to cluttering up the place with stuff that we don’t necessarily need when we get back on the road again. But if you’ve got your home base firmly fixed in your mind, you can often avoid that build up.
5. A safety net: Sometimes things happen while you’re out on the road. From needing a place to recuperate to having a place to store backups of your work, a home base can provide you with a safety net for all sorts of mishaps and problems.