Hi. Who’s this?
One of the most essential things to have in the US is a local phone number. Without a local number you can’t sign up for a lot of services. Therefore, we went to the local AT&T Store on Wednesday. During vacations we normally just buy a prepaid sim card, but since we’re planning to stay we signed up for a subscription plan. Unlimited texting and data seems to be pretty common here, so hey, why not? Then we can always make (video) calls without the need of searching for a wifi hotspot.
Bank account
Besides a phone number one will definitely need a US bank account. Banks in the Netherlands charge extra fees for international withdrawals and life is already expensive enough, right? But you would assume that opening a bank account isn’t that big of a deal. Well, you’re wrong. It took us 3.5 hours to open up a checking account. Why was that? First, you are considered a non-resident alien. That means they want to have proof of your residency in your home country (the Netherlands) but they want to have proof of your residency here as well. We ended up with opening a bank account with our Dutch address as residency address and will change that later on to our US address. At the time of the appointment we didn’t have all required documents to proof our residency here in the US. We will probably change that in January, as we will probably need to pay taxes in the US in 2023 anyway.
Getting around
We got ourselves a great rental car through Hertz, but renting a car is more costly than buying a car. Also, a car is really a necessity in the US. So we visited some car dealers in Fresno. We started with the Nissan dealer. Unfortunately there were no cars that met our expectations. We were confident that we wanted to have a car with Apple CarPlay since driving is so much easier when you aren’t familiar in the area yet. Eventually, we went to a local branch of CarMax. Riley, our sales rep, was really nice and showed us some options. At first we test-drove in a 2019 Chevrolet. It was a nice car, but was already pretty high on the mileage and it had some scratches on the trunk. For less than $2,000 more we could buy a nice Ford Ecosport 2020, with just over 40,000 on the odometer. We test-drove with that vehicle as well, and it was definitely worth the extra money. Let’s do it!
In the US, they seem to be obligated to inform you very well. We were told when the tires were replaced, how many owners there were before us (just one) and if it was ever involved in an accident (that was not the case). The car is very comfortable, so we ended up buying it. Right there we needed to get the car insurance policy, because it’s obligated by law that one has to have a minimum insurance. We will get the car upcoming Thursday. We first need to transfer some money across the ocean to our new US bank account. Curious to see what the car looks like? Click here