Posts Tagged ‘dream’

…even, if people tell you better not to! And that happens an awful lot, when you are a Greencard owner with plans of moving abroad!

Being only a few months away from moving to another country, you naturally doubt your decision a lot! I honestly know that we need to do this. That we don’t risk losing much! We are young, our english is pretty good, we are experienced workers and work in jobs we can do in the US, too! And we don’t have kids that we need to bring abroad with us, yet. But even, if I know that I won’t lose much more than a dream when we might come back after a year, I sometimes am seriously scared!

In this situation you somehow hope that your family and loved ones will try to take that fears away from you. But they won’t! Because they are scared of you getting hurt! Their fears added to yours, sometimes is way too much to handle! After every serious talk we have with our parents, I need to calm myself down and tell myself that this is a chance I waited for a long long time and that Flo is with me and that everything will work out fine – no matter if we will make it in the US or not!

We always laugh about the people they show in these emigration documentaries on TV, because they don’t care about anything and don’t prepare theirselves enough. But sometimes I actually wish that I might have a bit of their naivity and careless nature. Because being as serious and realistic about the whole emigration thing (as we are) might be healthy, but is nowhere near easy!

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!

I check the Facebook page of the American Dream on a regular basis and it kind of amazes me how serious this years lottery entrants are about winning the Greencard. I told you before that I only got it through my husband and that I never joined the lottery myself. It also was Flo’s first time as an entrant. When he received the winner notification, it totally took us by surprise, because we hadn’t talked or thought about the lottery for ages. To us it was fate that chose us to win. Had Flo won the Greencard only a year earlier, we now wouldn’t have the chance to make this dream come true together. And he actually doesn’t know, if he would have moved to the US alone!

I don’t want to destroy anyones dreams, but this whole thing isn’t just about winning. It is about changing your whole life! It is about pain, about loss and about having to start all over! You have to give up your whole life in Germany (or any other country you happen to live in), get a new job, a new home, new friends and so much more! When we won the Greencard we didn’t expect what we had to deal with after it! This whole Greencard process isn’t easy! I often wonder, if we are doing the right thing and it nearly breaks my heart when my family members and my friends tell me how afraid they are of letting me go some day.

I really wish everyone who wants to win a Greencard a lot of luck! But I hope that you all are aware of how much this will change your life! And that you know that winning a Greencard is not only a dream coming true, but a lot of struggle, work and sadness! So, let fate decide, if you are ready or not! And make the best of what happens – no matter if you win this year or not!