Cruel Reality!
For at least the first six months winning a Greencard is like living in a dream cloud! You just can’t stop to dream about how your new life abroad is going to be, how nice you will live (at the beach in our case) and how good the jobs you get may be. But someday you wake up from that dream and hit reality!
I have tried to convince myself that it will be a long and hard road from the beginning. But you just seem to catch yourself hanging by dream clouds. Flo and I are grown up enough to know that we have hard paths in front of us, so right now (six months before our actual moving date) we are doing a lot of research on emmigration and about the US in general.
What scares us the most ist he money part! Not the actual money, because we do have enough to move, but the money and credit card situation in general. As you already may have heard as an american you pay by credit card the most! You pay your rent by credit card you pay your car by credit card and you pay your food by credit card. The only problem about that is: You don’t get a credit card in the US, when you don’t have a credit history! And I guess you can figure out by yourself what that means!
To make it short: Your credit history is a certificate that proves your credit reliability. It is a record (made by Equifax, Transunion and Experian) that states your past usage of your credit card and how fast and constant you paid back your credits. The higher your score (between 300-850), the better is your credit reliability (the so called FICO score).
First thing that may come to your mind is: I do have a credit card in my homeland, so why can’t they just write me a credit history for the US? Well, they just can’t! The only credit card company that does that is American Express. And, oh wonder: No, we don’t use American Express!
Right now we are trying to figure out ways to help us with the credit history problem! I will keep you updated with it! But anyways: If you have some advice, you are more than welcome!
Tags: American Express, credit card, credit history, dream, emmigration, Equifax, Experian, FICO, Greencard, job, money, Transunion, US
July 8th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
It’s really not that big of a deal as some people might want to make you believe. We’ve been in the US for one month now and have a checkings and savings account, a secured credit card, various customer cards, cell phones, a California Driver’s Licence… in short: everything we need to survive – also without credit history
I guess as long as you have enough money, you don’t really need a credit history, because you don’t need credit. There might be issues with landlords, ConEd etc, when you don’t have a credit history, but as long as you have enough money to make a deposit, all is good!
Just make sure, you get a social security number before you come to the US, so you can quickly open a bank accoutn here and get a secured credit card.
There’s only one thing where we wished we could get credit. That was when we thought about buying a car. Since the EUR is not the stronges right now, we didn’t want to exchange too much EUR into USD, but without credit history, you won’t be able to lease a car or get an auto loan. Right now we live in the middle of San Francisco and don’t need a car desperately, since public transport around here is ok… but as soon as we move out of town we will have to make a decision…(either buy a really cheap car and get a better one as soon as the credit history has been built up to a solid level or transfer more money to our American bank account).
There’s one more thing you could try and it’s supposedly really working: get a credit card from American Express while you are still in Germany. Then your chances for getting one here in the US are pretty good – they will just change the address and associated bank details. But as far as I know AE is the only cc company that does that.
July 9th, 2010 at 12:32 am
Don’t stress! Like Alexa already mentioned, the only “problem” you could have is with landlords, but in most cases they just let you pay the whole rent for the lease period (rent for 6 months at once, for example) or increase the security payment. I don’t know how I managed it, but my FICO score was already at 711 after 4 months in the USA. It’s now at 723-730 and hasn’t changed for 9 months. Still negative impacts: Length of credit history and credit limits given by lenders. I “only” accumulated $4.000 in credit limit so far, but I was already offered an up to $40.000 car loan by one of my credit card companies. That was only a little over a year of waiting… and 16 months after moving over here, I’m still driving the $2.000 car I bought in my first 2 weeks in SoFlo.
By the way, it’s not like everything over here is being paid with credit cards. After the financial crisis it has dramatically decreased and people are now using their regular debit cards (kinda like EC cards in Germany) that have to be associated with a CC company, so that they work at the point of sales , but offer no credit. By the way, my apartment complex for example no longer accepts large sum credit card payments. Any amount over $200,- has to be either paid with a check or per money order. Apparently there was too much fraud happening.
So again, BREATHE, CHILL and stay excited!!! It’s really not that much too worry about. More to worry about once you moved over here is how not to quickly ruin your credit history unconsciously… because if you don’t know what all has impacts on it, it happens quicker than one can blink
but I’m sure you will be well informed!
Enjoy your last months overseas!
July 9th, 2010 at 2:17 am
Hi, as Alexa already mentioned, it is not really that bad.
I opened up a bank account while I was on vacation. Without having a social security number and a US adress. It is a checking and savings account and works out well. With that comes a debit card. As long as you have money on your account, you do not have any problems.
As soon as you want to start building up credit history one way might be purchasing a car. Three quarter you pay cash and for the fourth quarter you take a loan. And pay that back. That is the first step to a good history. And so you can go ahead with that.
In most shops you can pay cash, but a debit card is also welcome. You do not necessarily need a credit card.
If you have monthly income on your bank account you can easily get a secured credit card with a small limit on it.
July 5th, 2011 at 9:42 am
Such an interesting little blog, so glad I discovered it. I will let my my friends about this site & revisit again.