Posts Tagged ‘Greencard’

…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!

No, I am not mixing up holidays accidentally. I know that today is the 4th of July and not Halloween. Unfortunately I can’t be in my new home country to celebrate, today! But I will be there on Halloween this year. Right now we are busy planing our next trip to the US. Finally after weeks of struggle, Flo’s boss accepted his application for some off days and now we are looking for flights. We will fly to Orange County, California, again not only because we love it there, but because we want to move there in January and have to get a lot of things done. but let’s leave this part to one of my next posts.

Right now I am much more excited that I will be in the US for Halloween. Halloween is one of my favourite holidays, because I love spooky stuff and dressing up. Our friends plan to take us to a Halloween hunt at a amusement park called Knott’s Berry Farm. I am not very pleased about that, but I think I will have to fit in with the traditions in my new home country!

But more scared than of that Halloween hunt, I am of the officers at the airport. Last time we went to the US our Visa expired a week later. The officer was nice, but made a joke about that. This year it is the same! Due to our work and the wedding we will enter the US last minute again. I hope this won’t make any problems. For all of you who don’t know: As a Greencard winner you have to enter the US every six months minimum. You practically are also allowed to leave the US for up to 12 months, but in this case the officers at the airport are in charge to decide, if they take your Greencard or not! (FYI: These are just the basic facts, we will talk about it another time)

I hope that this year’s entry will be as easy as last one’s, but I am afraid that the officer might give us a little Halloween scare and will “trick” us!