How to avoid having to store extra information about padding (for byte size alignment) with Huffman coding

Question

When storing the encoded Huffman bit stream in bytes, in general, either

1. the final byte gets padded or
2. a pseudo end-of-file symbol gets used

In the former case, the number of bits padded needs to be stored somewhere, requiring another 3 bits. In the latter, you will lose some efficiency due to the additional pseudo symbol.

So how can I avoid the extra cost of a pseudo symbol, and also avoiding the need to store/transmit extra bits to hold the number of pad bits?

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N.B. On the one hand, I'm interested in compressing short strings, so saving 3 bits on average can shave off another 1% or so of the data.

But more importantly, getting rid of the need to send the padding info (which is only known after compressing the whole string) before the encoded data means I can more easily perform the algorithm in a streaming fashion. This is not really necessary for short strings, where everything may be kept in memory, but sometimes my strings actually do get much longer, and I don't want to have to keep that in memory (considering there are hundreds of simultaneous encodings going on).