The nice thing about living in Hong Kong is that most of these stupid edge cases have been sanded out of the system already. Probably because they doesn't just affect immigrants, but "local" people too (the 10% of the population who emigrated in the 80s, but kept their flats and bank accounts cuz they're intending to come back sometime). I've never had a problem with foreign mailing addresses, or my name being too long for the input field (like in Korea where they give you 4 characters max), or needing a citizen's ID number to complete transactions (you can use your passport number for literally everything from government forms down to supermarket loyalty cards), or any of that nonsense.
It's always a rude reminder of "normal" to deal with businesses and government bureaux in other countries. Like "another Brian" said in the blog's comments, the third world isn't even the worst in this regard, cuz at least there you can rely on personal relationships, or at worst bribes. It's the less efficient countries of the first world, where clerks generally won't take bribes and don't care who your friend's daddy is, but will go through their triplicate forms at the speed they please (and make a series of blocking calls to you to clarify each piece of information when you don't fit into their check boxes), and close the office at 4 PM, client be damned.
As an American living in France, I can sympathize. Dealing with the bureaucracy here for any reason is a nightmare.
One piece of advice for those in this situation: get the best American Express card that you can qualify for. It doesn't solve all your problems, but there are many cases where it magically just works. One example is ordering things online: AmEx is much more flexible about the shipping/billing address not matching up, and as a result I can often use it with a shipping and billing address from France with no problems.
In addition, their customer service is fantastic, and they can often give you good advice or help you out when you get stuck in these situations.
My favourite Amex customer service story is closely related to this expat edge-case theme.
I was flying back to Hong Kong from a business trip in Japan. I'm a citizen of a third country, but live in HK. The Japan Airlines desk agent, and her manager, refused to issue me a boarding pass, because I didn't have a "re-entry permit" for Hong Kong. Japan and many other major countries have this concept for non-citizens, so I'm guessing whoever wrote the Japan Airlines "avoid Fooland Immigration Department fining us to pay for deporting our Barlandese passenger, for all values of Foo and Bar" checklist explained it badly and made it sound like a universal requirement or something. But in Hong Kong, there's no such thing as a re-entry permit --- they give you one visa, stamp it "Journey completed" when you arrive, and then let you come and go as you please.*
This was in the days before WiFi in airports, so I couldn't just surf to gov.hk and show her the page that says "no re-entry visa required". And it was a Friday night so I couldn't phone the consulate either. At my wit's end, I called Amex --- my employer had paid for the ticket with an Amex card. Their customer service guy commiserated with me for a bit, and said he'd make a phone call. After a bit of a wait, a Cathay Pacific (major Hong Kong airline) manager showed up with a copy of the Hong Kong immigration regulations. Brilliant and creative solution --- and it forcefully demonstrated to me the value of filling customer-facing positions with creative and talented people rather than checklist-wielding drones who you don't screen as carefully as your "core function" staff.
* Years later, the HK gov't changed the wording; now it's a tiny bit clearer that you don't need a re-entry permit:
I'm a Canadian citizen who was born and lived in UK all his life who lives and works (legally) in the US for 4 years on a non-resident TN visa,
I'm not allowed to be considered even a temporary resident in the US despite the fact I've lived here for 4 years, oh but I am considered resident for tax purposes (ie I pay tax here and do a US tax return - but no other residency benefits).
When I arrive back in the country I have to say on my landing card that I'm temporally visiting the US and that I'm a resident of the United Kingdom. However, I don't pass the "residency test" of the UK as I've not lived there for 4 years. Technically I'm not resident of any country, which is kinda unsettling. And I'm 'temporally visiting the US' in that I drive out of the airport in the car that I own here and drive home to my apartment where I live with all my furniture and all my stuff in it.
US Immigration finds it difficult to accept that I am a Canadian citizen (and have Canadian passport) yet I've never lived in Canada nor do I have a Canadian SSN nor do I have an address in Canada nor have I filed a tax return there (my father is Canadian but I was born in UK).
I can't get any loans in the US as I don't have residency (although I don't really want a loan) and I can't buy property in the US, although I do have a US credit rating (I have a US SSN) and I managed to get a US credit card by already having an Amex when I lived abroad, and they carried the relationship over to US card (and started to add up my credit score against it).
I believe I traverse a lot of terms and conditions for things like insurance because I'm not a resident and end up being considered in the same category as an illegal immigrant - where the companies want to take their money and turn a blind eye to lack of documentation. Except that I am in the US legally and do have documentation, I'm just not a resident.
The visa I am on has no route to Green Card and so I will be in this limbo status indefinitely.
US Immigration finds it difficult to accept that I am a Canadian citizen (and have Canadian passport) yet I've never lived in Canada nor do I have a Canadian SSN nor do I have an address in Canada nor have I filed a tax return there (my father is Canadian but I was born in UK).
There's an easy fix for that. Get a Social Insurance Number and file a tax return. As a non-resident with no Canadian-source income, your tax return should take less than 5 minutes to fill out, and you won't owe any taxes.
You are a Canadian citizen. I think it's fair that they would look at your situation (a Canadian who hasn't lived in Canada and never paid taxes, etc) as something unusual. This is the type of thing immigration get's bagged on all the time when something goes wrong. If all it takes is a few simple things from you to establish yourself a bit more, why not do it? Would save you a lot of hassle. Not doing it just doesn't add up.
Simply: Don't get all self-righteous. It's a small thing.
Canadian here. Been in the US for two years doing grad school. When I went back to Canada once the Canadian customs told me I should declare myself as a "US resident visiting Canada". I am a resident of US for tax purposes obviously. I think the IRS and the CBP have different standards for residency, the one that benefits them more.
> You have to live at least 6 months in the UK to open a bank account or apply for a credit card.
I moved to the UK and this was not the case. It was difficult to open a bank account but not because you need to live here 6 months but because the banks require all sorts of identification which you normally don't have as a recent immigrant (stuff like proof of address).
The worst thing was when I moved from the US to Canada one year, and from Canada to the US the next. Both years I had to file tax returns in both countries, and various amounts had to be prorated based on the number of days of the year that I was a Canadian resident. And my Canadian wages had to be converted to USD based on the exchange rates from each day I received a paycheck....
And yeah, none of my US banks or credit card companies could handle my Canadian address on their web sites.
Moving from NYC to CA involves a bunch of state tax bullshit. Each state is so broke they have insanely aggressive collection policies, and acc. to my accountant they can end up both claiming > 11% of your income based on overlapping residency rules.
On a similar note, I made a payment to my creditcard back home(from China) using SWIFT method of international payments(it's an interbank payment system).
On the form there is a section to leave a mesasge or comment for the reciever. My credit cards co told me to put only my CC No. with no spaces or nothing else.
Told my wife all this (wrote it down) and she went to make the payment (she's Chinese, it's just easier that she does this kind of thing, from a paperwork efficiency point of view.
So of coarse she also puts my name after the card number. The next week I call the company, they can't find the payment, dissapeared into their system. POOF, gone. Will be spending the next few weeks making international calls to chase that one up.
The one thing that I didn't hear which I expected to was confusion about whether forms should be month/day/year or day/month/year. Being a Canadian living in the USA, I never remember which is which in which place, and just want to use the ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD instead.
"The friendly folk at H&R Block had no idea how to handle my situation."
I was shocked when I went to H&R block, and all they did was type data into the software on the screen in front of them. I realized I could do that myself, and have used TurboTax since, which has worked well for me needs. (I'm sure if I had more complex need, a real tax accountant would be important, but I don't think there is any case where H&R Block is the right choice.)
Not as much of a problem as you think it is. Canadian companies can pull US credit reports -- like your bank did -- and do so on a regular basis. Not so regular that every car salesman will know how to do it; but any large company will have figured out how to handle this, even if not everybody at the company knows that it's possible.
Great post. By the way, I have the answer to this:
> No credit
I had the same problem because I avoided credit cards when I was younger because I thought it was a bad habit, and I was self-employed so I couldn't verify any salary. It meant I had no credit and I got rejected for low end credit cards - a yucky cycle. Eventually a smart bank manager I knew gave me a plan to fix this:
I went into the bank and got a "secured loan" - what you'll do is deposit about $1000 into the bank (or whatever amount you want) and get a CD for it that you can't touch. It'll pay something like 2% in today's climate. Then you get a loan secured by that CD for something like 2.4% - seriously, the interest rate on a secured loan is very low because the bank has your CD sitting there and you can't get it... there's virtually no risk.
Okay, now, have your loan set to auto pay so you don't have to worry about it. You'll get 12 "paid on time" records in the next year and it'll cost you very little. Actually, it's a little better than that even, because it's a different kind of credit from a credit card. Credit cards are "revolving", this sort of loan is something else... so it'll permanently boost your credit a little bit for the next 7 years until it falls off your record.
I had no credit. Got a secured loan like this. 3 months later, was able to get a crappy credit card from Capital One, very low limit, high interest, no benefits. Just charged some small purchases to it and paid in full each month. After a perfect year between the secured loan and the Capital One card, was able to get an AMEX gold card with no limit on which was important because I was having business-related payments that'd sometimes be a lot in a short period of time. Also wound up getting two free one way international flights from the points from the card. So yeah - secured loan is the way to go. The difference you pay between the CD's interest rate and your loan interest rate is well worth it to have credit.
My wife and I ran into this problem in grad school when we first wanted a credit card. (We discovered the hard way that hotels prefer to be paid with credit cards than cash. When this happens on the same day the ATM system breaks down, well...) We asked for one with a $200 limit and got denied. We went to the manager of the branch, pointed out what our bank account was at, pointed out how many months in a row we could max out the card we were asking for out of the bank account we had been keeping there, and said that if we didn't get the account, that money would move to the bank across the street.
The next thing we knew we had a card with a $500 limit. :-)
My father did this for me while I was in high school. If you have the opportunity to do this for your kids, do it. It's a hundred dollar jump start to life.
Yeah, when I first moved to the US the bank offered me a "secured credit card" deal whereby I would lend them my money for no interest and they would lend some of it back to me at some nonzero rate. I told them that they could go fuck themselves, and if they wanted proof of my creditworthiness they can damn well phone up my bank in my home country and ask them about me.
Four and a half years later I still have no US credit cards and no US credit rating. I haven't really found a need for it, though locals occasionally look shocked at the idea.
> Four and a half years later I still have no US credit cards and no US credit rating. I haven't really found a need for it, though locals occasionally look shocked at the idea.
This might turn out to be very penny wise and pound foolish. Sooner or later you might want to buy a property to live in or for investment reasons, and oftentimes you'll only realize you want to buy a place six months or a year before you want to buy. That's not long enough to build a good credit rating to get a decent mortgage - you're very possibly throwing away thousands of dollars of your future money to save yourself... like $20 now.
And you don't pay interest on a credit card unless you carry a balance - pay in full each month. I only spent $150 on a credit card once because it had excellent benefits and I got $600 of free airfare from that card. I've paid $0 in fees or carrying a balance besides that in my life, aside from that $20 for a secured loan. Why not build a credit score? - there's no real downside, it doesn't take long to do, and might make a big difference for you later.
Just curious, no pun intended: Why is it so difficult to get a credit card in the U.S., the land of credit cards itself and, for what I've read, where credit card applications seem to virtually pour in all the time among junk mail?
Credit cards in Finland are the third payment option: debit cards and cash are the two most important ways to pay. But you can get a credit card quite easily, and you will definitely get one if you have regular income.
I got my first credit card when I was maybe 20 or 21. The reason was that I was going to a vacation abroad and didn't want to carry loads of cash with me. I just walked into my bank and asked for one; as soon as I told them I was permanently employed and had regular income, it was no big deal. It didn't matter I had only started at this job a few months earlier and I had no existing credit record whatsoever (no loans, no credit cards, no other credit). I didn't have to proove it, just tell them my income and some other facts and sign below.
If I had been a Swedish citizen living in Finland, I think it wouldn't have been no different. You have income, a bank account and an address: that's probably it. I can easily understand if you had bad credit record but not having one at all being a showstopper really puzzles me. Most people pay their credit card bills anyway so any random newcomer to the business is probably a safe bet.
The problem, I think, is that the US credit rating system is formalised. As far as I know, in most countries your creditworthiness is secret information which the banks may or may not pass among themselves. In the US it's all wrapped up in a three-digit number which anyone can access -- this means that other indications of creditworthiness tend not to be taken into account.
Come to think of it, the overreliance on the number could be another consequence of the US's obsession with race: if your bank takes anything into account except the magical number then you leave yourself open to a racial discimination lawsuit.
Oh yeah, and the third problem is that most adults without credit histories seem to be illegal immigrants, who make very little money and can vanish at any time. There are so many illegal immigrants in the legal immigrants are a tiny afterthought.
So, just guessing, if you have no credit record, then even if you have a successful business up and running and you can prove that you do, and how much money you make, and that you have an established life with no intentions to take a hike to Mexico next week, the banks may be forced to ignore all that and rely on the credit rating only?
And the illegal immigrant who is planning to scam the banks could do this money deposit thing mentioned to build up credit rating out of nowhere, wait a little, then apply for credit cards, max them out, and leave?
> Why is it so difficult to get a credit card in the U.S., the land of credit cards itself and, for what I've read, where credit card applications seem to virtually pour in all the time among junk mail?
It's not hard for most people - it's only a problem if you don't have a credit history at all, aren't in college, and can't prove a stable salary. But for those people, it's really the suck - and that's a lot of our demographic. Freelancers, business owners, and self employed people often have a very hard time getting their credit started.
> I can easily understand if you had bad credit record but not having one at all being a showstopper really puzzles me. Most people pay their credit card bills anyway so any random newcomer to the business is probably a safe bet.
I thought about that too. The credit card companies have very sophisticated metrics and algorithms though, and they seem to think lending to someone with no credit is a very bad idea because they're incredibly hesitant to do it. My best guess is it's a defense against fraud.
Are there prepaid credit cards yet? I've heard about them but I'm not sure if it's still vaporware for the vast majority of people.
That would solve those problems where paying with a credit card is almost a required practice. Actually getting credit is another issue but I would guess most people use credit cards as the medium for transactions and not for getting credit itself?
I've read on Dave Ramsey's site (he's a finance guru that advises people to never use credit, though for reasons very different to my own -- I'm no follower, it's just the only place I've been able to find which discusses living without a credit rating) that it's generally possible to get a mortgage without a credit rating as long as you can prove you're a good risk in other ways (steady salary, large downpayment). I don't plan on ever having a mortgage in the US, but if I do I'll figure it out at the time.
"No real downside" is only true if you have perfect discipline and no bad luck. If that were very common, credit wouldn't be such a phenomenally profitable industry.
Betting on credit is like betting against the house in Vegas.
It's more like decent habits. It's not all that hard to look at the bill, see your "Total balance", and then write that number on the check. I think you can even set up autopay to do it for you.
The folks who get in trouble with credit cards are the ones who look at the bill, see "Minimum payment", and write that number on the check. Up until recently, that number was a lot more prominent, so maybe people who had no idea what credit was could be forgiven for this. But they're the ones who get in trouble with debt. People who understand that having a credit card means paying it off in full each month usually end up coming out ahead (via cashback) of where they'd be if they always pay in cash.
Debt is a useful tool if you use it to buy something with a positive net present value. Revolving debt is so very rarely used for that though.
I can't count the number of smart, successful people I've personally seen hit a minor bump in the road and then get behind on their revolving debt. Just a few months of penalties and interest quickly eclipses anything you'll gain through incentives, and makes it progressively harder to get back to even.
A checking account autopay would only have added an NSF fee to their problems!
For me, it isn't worth the gamble. You have to take enough risks to get ahead in life as it is. Why reduce your odds with unnecessary risks of convenience?
If you always pay off your credit card in full on time, then it's effectively the same as a debit card that has fraud protection and cashback built into it.
There is a really simple way to avoid getting behind on your payments: don't buy things that you can't cover with the money in your checking account, and pay your bills on time. Heck, if you can't do this with a debit card, you'll get socked with overdraft fees that are on par with what the credit card would get you for.
The problem isn't the logisitics of paying the balance on time. The problem is how easy it is to get into a situation where you get (even slightly) behind the ball.
I don't want to argue with you about it here. This isn't the right place and maybe the debt trap is something you have to witness firsthand to appreciate. I would submit that if it were as easy as a checking autopay, then this wouldn't be happening: http://www.mybudget360.com/american-middle-class-debt-serfdo...
I once had to visit a doctor in Japan. Everything went fine until they went to print me a prescription and tried to enter my name. After explaining that no, I can't provide my name in kanji they went ahead with it in English.
My name broke the layout of the form on their screen and when the prescription was printed only the first half was shown because the rest ran off the side of the paper.
I guess they don't get many foreigners showing up at the local family doctors clinic.
No need to quote chequing and cheque. Them words is real.
Gotta love how Americans go against the grain by changing spellings, dropping letters, etc. Then they try to spin it like everyone else is odd for spelling it differently. We're on to you! ;-)
While 'going against the grain' might not be the correct way to phrase it, you have to reali[sz]e that the entire rest of the English speaking world spells things like that. England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. . .
As far as the divergence in spelling is concerned that's almost entirely due to Noah Webster who purposefully spelled things in a more Germanic way because he found the English spellings with the French influences to be distasteful.(1)
It doesn't go against most of your point, but the reali[sz]e example in particular isn't Webster's fault or an example of U.S. divergence--- it used to be spelled -ize in the UK too, and didn't really shift completely until the past few decades. It's still the form preferred by the Oxford English Dictionary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling
On the others, there's a bit more of a continuum than everyone using the British spellings, though I'll agree the Commonwealth probably tilts towards more similarity with the UK than with the US. But Canadian spelling, especially, aligns with U.S. usage in a lot of respects: it generally uses -ize rather than -ise endings ("realize", not "realise"), and sides with the Americans on a lot of specific one-off differences ("tire", not "tyre"), though it sides with the U.K. spellings on -our vs. -or ("colour", not "color").
That depends entirely on whether you were educated before the Canadian Press Manual of Style declared "ize" to be their preference. They weren't nearly as successful with the or/our thing, but folks of my vintage or older almost always use "ise" while kids (from my perspective, thirty-somethings are "kids") only slightly favour "ize" -- and that's probably just to get rid of the damned squiggles from the spell-checker. (The rule of thumb is derived from exercice/exercise -- the noun form ends in "ice", a noun, the verb in "ise", which contains "is". I believe we Canadians are the only bunch who actually used the "ice" spelling to any degree, and it was primarily in the context of exercices at the ends of textbook chapters, which one duly carried out in an "exercice book" -- call it a notebook if you aren't a fifty-ish -year-old Canadian.) There has yet to be created an app that ships with a proper Canadian English spelling dictionary -- I have a text file that contains nothing but words that get flagged by either US or UK English dictionaries but are, and have been, standard Canadian spellings. Open it in the current nightmare app with the best-fit dictionary (US, UK, Canadian or generic English) and blindly click "add" till the prompt finally goes away.
America has significantly more than double the number of native English speakers of England, Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, etc... combined. Unless you're arguing that speakers in the US somehow count for less than people elsewhere, it's actually the UK & commonwealth going against the grain. Canada is a bit of an exception, using US spellings at some times and UK spellings at others.
Unless, of course, you consider the rest of the world. In India English is an official language and they spell things in the UK way. In fact anywhere I've ever seen international English used the UK spellings have been used unless they were specifically dealing with Yanks. I don't know about all of China but I wouldn't be remotely surprised to find out they use the UK spellings when corresponding in English, given the Hong Kong connection. Singapore/Malaysia uses the UK English as well. . . .
Hey, I'm half American and half Australian so I don't really have a horse in this race (or perhaps I have two) but the provincial attitudes of some Americans when it comes to language and dialect differences is annoying.
The wikipedia statistics above were for native speakers.
I live in China and have spent most my adult life in a Mandarin/Hokkien language environment. Spellings and usage here generally follow the US, but very few people could even be considered to be fluent speakers. Hong Kong does still use UK spellings, but Taiwan and Singapore have considerably more US (and in the case of Taiwan, Canadian) influence. Japan and Korea also favor US spellings. So do Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and a lot of other places you may never have visited.
Maybe you see the attitude as "provincial" because you haven't seen much of the world yourself!
In any case, from a purely pragmatic view, the US usage is standard. I know the minority of native speakers on the other side dislike it, but let's face it. Just about everyone on earth is exposed to Hollywood and US television. Even in former UK colonies such as HK or India, North American usage is widely understood. The same can't be said for Irish/British/Welsh/Australian dialects.
Both sides changed. I think 17th century English was much different from either side today, and neither side can comfortably lay claim to it.
It was the Americans, and Webster in particular, who decided to go around rationalizing the way things were spelled. It was the English who decided to go non-rhotic. We're both changing the language, and we continue changing the language every year!
I ran into stuff like this all the time when I lived in Japan. Governments and businesses have a long time to go before they catch up with the realities of globalization.
It's always a rude reminder of "normal" to deal with businesses and government bureaux in other countries. Like "another Brian" said in the blog's comments, the third world isn't even the worst in this regard, cuz at least there you can rely on personal relationships, or at worst bribes. It's the less efficient countries of the first world, where clerks generally won't take bribes and don't care who your friend's daddy is, but will go through their triplicate forms at the speed they please (and make a series of blocking calls to you to clarify each piece of information when you don't fit into their check boxes), and close the office at 4 PM, client be damned.