THE MOVE
Depending on how you intend to move over and also what your company is sponsoring in terms of relocation package, your plans here can vary from shipping all worldly possessions with you down to simply pitching up with a suitcase and some beer vouchers.
Talking about our experience only, we elected to move over the majority of our furniture/clothes and other misc items by ship instead of starting afresh in the US. As this could take up to 2 months, we also had an air shipment paid for (basically a giant wooden coffin that you could fill with stuff) and finally, some extra baggage allowance on the flight itself.
The entire process here was handled by a shipping company, in part because they had some kind of authorization to sign off on the contents of the shipment for customs, the insurance company and also the bill of goods required by the freighter. To this degree, the removal company has to pack all the items personally that are being shipped which was fine with us - packing is super annoying.
I believe we used the now named “Global Relocations” company for our relocation but there is a full list of vendors below with reviews if you are seeking out one privately:
The air shipment was the easiest to pack, although in hindsight, the majority of the things that we packed were never used in the US at all and could have come in the main sea shipment. This was probably an exception however as when we moved over, the first 4 months were spent in corporate housing and then a fully furnished sublet and didn't really need forks or plates during this time.
For the sea shipment we elected a moving day, prepped all of our stuff to be boxed and then sat back whilst the shipping people came and took it all away. They had to hand pack each item, inspecting it, taking a record of what was in each box and then carting it away to a truck outside. In our specific case, we lived down York Terrace in Cambridge at the time which was a tight culldesac and as such, the moving people had to load the boxes in to a temporary truck, drive it around the corner to where a low loader was waiting with a 20ft shipping container on the back of it and then unload and re-pack it all into the container.
Things I can recall we specifically took with us were:
- Sofa, beds, tables, chairs, rugs and other soft furnishings (bath mats, shower curtain etc…)
- some lamps - specifically ones without dimmers that had screw threads (as the US bulbs will fit into them)
- Kitchen items - plates, mugs, glasses, bowls, utensils, cutlery, pots and pans, baking stuff etc (Kirstin was most grateful to get this lot shipped because this stuff can take years to restock/collect).
- Bunch of electrical items (WiFi router, XBox, blender which sort of works via an 110v to 220 inverter, but as the frequency is different over here, the motor spins at a different speed and isn’t quite the same)
- All our clothes & shoes (although we really didn’t need most of the cold weather jackets etc…) and sports wear (Ski jackets etc…)
- Bikes and other sports stuff
- Entertainment (CD’s, books, guitars)
- knick knacks i.e. ornaments and stuff - made the transition of living abroad easier having old home comforts around,
Things we did not take:
- Most electrical stuff - TV, CD player, alarm clocks, fairy lights, dvd player, kitchen electricals
- Large collection of CD singles
Things we were not allowed to take:
- Alcohol or medicine
- Food items (including the pepper in the pepper mill - had to be emptied and thrown away)
- Items of outdoor wear / tools or garden furniture that had exposure to ‘agriculture’ (this wasn’t hugely clear to what level you could wash these items, but we didn’t really have much in this category)
Things we did not take, but wished we had done:
- Nice set of HiFi speakers (amplifier might have been an issue as inverters don’t supply a huge amount of current over here)
- Large collection of CD singles!
- Marshall guitar amplifier (convertible to 110v it turns out)
- Dining room table and chairs
We did buy a lot of furniture in the US since we arrived, a lot from Crate and Barrel or CB2 (its sister store). There is an outlet store in Berkeley that some great pieces were obtained from at a major discount, the issue being it is likely a floor model and secondly, you need to pick it up by hand and end up renting a truck and 2 people to help you lug it upstairs (or rather stand at the bottom with your heavily pregnant wife and look helpless until someone walks past to offer help!).
The shipment, once it leaves your house takes around 6-12 weeks to make its way to the US (assuming the west coast here). For the bay area, it arrives at Oakland dockyard and once it clears customs, you get a choice of delivery date when a team of people turn up with the shipping container on the back of a truck and unload it. You can have this dropped at a storage locker (surprisingly cheap) if you are not quite ready with a new abode, or spit it into 2 destinations (half locker, half new apartment) as a colleague did.
PREP BEFORE ARRIVAL
Photo Driving License
If you don’t already have one of these, get it ASAP. Its needed for day to day identification (i.e. at banks) and also for driving until you get a US license. In addition, a lot of places ask for ID when using a credit card and without this, you might find it hard to pay for things.
If you already have a photo license, I would still consider renewing it just before you leave as once you depart for US shores, its much harder to arrange this and although in theory you should give up your UK license once you get your US version, it doesn’t really matter in practice.
Banking
One of the hardest parts of moving to the US is the lack of personal history. Credit is the biggest issue, making you basically start from scratch when you arrive. Maybe getting a mortgage is not high on the agenda, but a credit card probably is (especially one that gives 5% cash back! Crazy not to use these for the protection they offer and pay them off every month).
One of the main tips is to establish a line of credit in the US before you arrive. When I originally moved over, I did this by taking out an American Express card in the UK, using it for 4 months and then when I arrived in the US, opening an account over here with credit based on my UK history. This worked great at the time - 15k USD in credit out of the box. Sadly, this seems to have changed to now require the card for 1 year in the UK before you can transfer it over - however an AMEX card in the US is almost mandatory as a primary or secondary card (if you want to reduce your fuel / supermarket bills by 5%) and its still a useful trick.
A colleague who moved over a few years after me recommended a similar trick but with HSBC. Quoting:
I got a HSBC premier bank account in the UK a couple of months *before* I came over and immediately, applied for a UK credit card from them (with my income at the time they gave me something like 16k quid limit/month). Then, because I had a UK credit card, the US HSBC branch gave me a US credit card (whilst I was still living the UK) with a 20k USD limit on it. For this to work, you need to open the premier relationship in the US branch as well. HSBC premier has a balance requirement but the US branch waive this for anybody earning 100k USD or more/year.
I can highly recommend doing either this or similar trick to establish a good credit line for when you arrive.
Car Insurance
Several companies in the US (Geiko, Progressive and State Farm) will take into account UK driving history to reduce your monthly premium. Trust me, if you do not do this, you will be paying the same as an 18 year old joyrider fresh out of juvenile hall. Usually, the insurance companies ask for the following - make sure you have evidence of this when you apply.
- Paper + photo card driving license (you need both)
- No claims proof from the UK insurance company
- Any traffic offences in the US
Medical History
If you need prescriptions or have some ongoing medical care you want to transfer over to the US (include dental care), get the documentation in writing before you leave for the US otherwise is makes things so much more difficult.
Google Voice
This is a little oddball, but a super useful tip.
Google Voice in the US offers a free US phone number, down to a specific area code (i.e. 415 is the area code for San Francisco etc…). Note that cellphones and landlines both get the same area code prefix so you can’t tell what kind of device you are calling (as the owner of the cell phone pays for the caller to use the mobile network, back to front compared to the UK / Europe).
This number allows you to VoiP dial from a browser (or smart phone) any company in the US, receive voice mails to this number and finally, when you arrive in the US, have all calls to this number redirected to whatever phone you obtain for free by Google Voice (or multiple phones, such as home and 2 mobiles that will all ring at the same time with an incoming call). We use this to give to banks and the like so when we change number, there is no need to keep updating them.
Further reading
There is a whole bunch of info in the British Expats forum here about moving to the US - far more than I could ever cover, plus lots of articles on the main site about peoples experiences in making this move that gave a large boost in confidence when originally planning the jump:
ARRIVAL
So you happily board your plane with extra baggage checked in for all the items you need for the first week (before the air shipment arrives), passport with visa in one hand and the GIANT collection of paperwork from the immigration attorneys in the other.
When you first get to SFO (or other airport), you will queue up in the normal visitor line. However, the people behind you are in for a shock as the immigration officer will take his sweet time, going over your application and all its details, collecting 10 finger/thumb prints and a few head shots. This really only happens the first time through, the other times its much more like being a tourist in processing speed. Sometimes you might be asked to go to Secondary Processing (especially if the queue is long or the officer is having a bad day) where you sit in the waiting room from Beetle Juice and somebody gives you a ticket that takes 2 hrs to be processed, even if there is only 3 people in the line ahead of you.
MAKE SURE that the white piece of paper (the I-94 that you will fill out on the plane) that you get back at immigration and stapled into your passport has the expiry date of your visa on it, not your birthday or some other random date. If this card is wrong, its a real pain to get it corrected again OR you have to leave the country and re-enter again. I had this happen twice, both after trips to Asia with heavy jetl ag on the return where I wasn’t feeling the sharpest - the first time I left the US before it expired, but the second time (after I did spot it and failed to get it corrected) I had to spend time in a long queue in SFO airport one afternoon to have my case heard and the card fixed. This date is recorded on their system and if you overstay your I-94 date, its logged and makes things much more complicated in the future (and make it highly likely that you end up in Secondary Immigration each time in the future.
It’s worth noting that whenever you leave the US, you should take a copy of your I-797 form with you as its required to get back into the US (in theory). A lot of officers don’t ask for it, but if they do, its usually bad news if you don’t have it available and its off to Secondary again where they look it up for you.
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