Building a Life from Scratch

There is something quite surreal about being handed the keys to an apartment, opening the door and finding absolutely nothing inside.

I had moved from a fully furnished house in the UK (where years of accumulated possessions had gradually turned a building into a home) to an empty apartment where almost every object I needed had to be deliberately acquired again. A bed, plates, cutlery, chairs, somewhere to work, somewhere to sit, something to cook with; all of the ordinary things you stop noticing once you own them suddenly became individual decisions.

The approach quickly became one of good enough for now. Goodwill was particularly useful for that. There is something strangely grounding about standing in a second-hand shop choosing which mismatched plates are going to become your plates. They may not be things I keep forever, but they work, they are mine, and they help turn an empty apartment into somewhere I can actually live.

I Wasn’t Buying Second-Hand

The first major priority was a bed.

There are plenty of things I am perfectly happy buying used, but a mattress was not going to be one of them. The combination of somebody else’s sweat, unknown history and the possibility of bugs was enough to make that decision fairly easy. My sister has had her own experience with bed bugs, and I had absolutely no interest in adding that particular adventure to the relocation story.

The other thing I quickly discovered was that American bed sizing does not map particularly neatly onto British sizing. Broadly speaking, a UK double is closest to a US full-size bed, although I soon found that a full is actually shorter than I was used to. Given that I am already tall enough to notice these things, that was not especially appealing, so I ended up settling on a queen instead, which only just fitted comfortably into the bedroom.

There was also another layer of bed terminology to learn. In the UK, I would generally think of a bed as two main parts: the mattress and the frame. In America, traditional setups often seem to introduce a third component, the box spring, which sits beneath the mattress and then rests on the frame or platform below. One salesman at the more boutique store gave me a very earnest explanation about how the mattress, box spring and frame all needed to work together properly to provide the correct support.

I mostly heard: three things to buy instead of two.

After some Marketplace browsing and trying to work out whether I actually needed the full American bed ecosystem, I decided that a simple white IKEA frame was probably the most sensible answer.

So we went mattress shopping.

We first tried a smaller, more boutique-looking store and tested a few options, including an inflatable bed system that measured your ideal mattress and pillow thickness. However the prices quickly established that it was not really aimed at somebody simultaneously trying to furnish an entire apartment.

That led us to a chain called Mattress Firm.

Yes, I noticed the name too.

We tried a few mattresses and found one I really liked, which included an electronical adjusting basic metal bed frame, which on the whole was a bit of a gimmick. Then we discovered a shop-floor model.

Normally, having just declared that I was absolutely not buying a used mattress, this should probably have disqualified it immediately. But a shop-floor mattress occupies a slightly different category in my head. How many people had actually walked into this fairly random Connecticut mattress store, only opened about a year, chosen this exact model and laid on it for five minutes?

Probably not many.

More importantly, it had been massively reduced.

So I went back first thing the next morning.

Different salesman. Very different energy.

He immediately seemed unhappy that the mattress had effectively been held without a deposit. Although bear-in-mind I was still the only person I saw in that store. Then, as he started putting everything through the system, there was a pause.

“Urm… you’re not going to like this.”

Apparently, he could not sell me the mattress for the price written on the label.

My response was: What?

A manager was called. Some discussion followed. It turned out the advertised price was actually lower than the amount Mattress Firm had originally paid for the mattress, and company policy prevented them from selling below cost.

Unfortunately for them, I had taken a photograph of the price displayed in the store.

After a little more back and forth, they honoured it (or honored I should say).

It was only when I eventually saw the invoice that I realised quite how ridiculous the deal had been: a mattress originally worth more than $1,000 for about $275.

Sometimes moving country apparently involves paperwork, immigration lawyers and government departments. Sometimes it involves accidentally defeating the pricing system at Mattress Firm. Also as an aside, the US is much more of a coupon or discount driven shopping experience, but much more on that later.

Connecticut also introduced me to another new concept: a mattress recycling fee. When you buy a mattress, you pay a $16 fee upfront that contributes towards its eventual recycling whenever, presumably many years later, you decide to get rid of it.

It is probably quite a sensible system.

It just feels peculiar to be paying for the disposal of something before you have even slept on it. A little nihilistic, really.

Building the Rest of the Apartment

Once the bed was sorted, the rest of the apartment could gradually follow.

There were plenty of Goodwill trips, an IKEA trip (or trips once I found out I’d picked up the wrong size bed frame!) and visits to various stores looking for whatever happened to be next on the list.

A TV is clearly not an essential item when you have just moved country. You can survive very happily without one. On the other hand, I do watch quite a lot of television when I am relaxing at home, and the World Cup happened to be on at the time, which was an extremely convenient argument in favour of buying one.

I eventually discovered that some of the larger electronics stores sell open-box televisions for roughly what people were asking for used ones online. To me, that seemed a much better deal: similar money, but with the reassurance of buying through a proper store and retaining some form of guarantee.

Then you notice that going slightly larger costs only a little more.

And then slightly larger than that is only a little more again.

I may have gone slightly too large.

The whole setup process became a balance between trying not to waste money and recognising that I actually needed things in order to live comfortably. I needed somewhere to sleep, somewhere to work, somewhere to sit and enough kitchen equipment to feed myself. I could technically have survived with much less, but I did not want every evening after work to become another reminder that my life was still sitting half-unpacked in boxes.

Looking back at the total amount I spent setting everything up was slightly alarming. I almost certainly spent more than I imagined I would before moving.

But there is another side to that.

Much of what I bought retains some resale value. More importantly, most people who have visited the apartment have been genuinely surprised by how quickly it has become properly furnished and comfortable. Given the uncertainty surrounding when I would have a car and how easily I would be able to get around afterwards, there was something reassuring about getting as much sorted as possible while I still had transport.

I think, subconsciously, I wanted the apartment to stop feeling temporary as quickly as possible.

My advice to anyone planning a wholesale move like this would be to think realistically about what it will cost to make a new apartment genuinely liveable, and then build in a healthy buffer beyond that. It is very easy to budget for rent and a few obvious pieces of furniture without accounting for the dozens of smaller things that quickly add up. Cash flow matters too: at the time of writing, I have been in the US for an entire month but have only received one week’s worth of pay, simply because of when I started and how the payroll cycle fell. Having enough money set aside to absorb that gap has made the whole process considerably less stressful.

Shopping in America is an Expedition

One of the stranger adjustments has been discovering how exhausting basic errands can be in America.

Back in the UK, if I needed several different things I could often walk into town and cover multiple shops within a relatively small area. Even where the traditional high street has declined, the basic concept remains: park once and move between shops. If I wanted a different selection I’d go to the next town or city over.

That is not how much of suburban America works.

Here, you drive to one shopping plaza for one store, get back into the car, drive to another plaza, park again, buy the next thing, return to the car and repeat.

Even shops located within what appears to be the same shopping plaza can be far enough apart that you end up driving between them.

During one Saturday with the rental car, I think I visited three different Goodwill stores and nearly ten shops in total. By the end of the day, it felt less like shopping and more like some sort of endurance event. I literally packed sandwiches and snacks for the road because I knew it’d be an all day event.

There are bargains to be found, though. American retail seems to operate in a permanent state of discounting, clearance and promotional pricing. You can find something surprisingly expensive at full price sitting next to something inexplicably cheap. Oh and why not throw another 15% off because why not. And a $5 coupon for your phone, yes sure why not!

The other adjustment is that the price you see on the shelf is rarely the amount of money that leaves your account. Sales tax gets added afterwards.

Then, depending on what you are buying or where you are, there may be a tip.

Something advertised as $10 has an uncanny ability to become $12, $13 or $15 by the time the transaction is actually finished.

Coming from England, where the price displayed generally includes VAT and is therefore the price you pay, it takes a little getting used to.

Existing Financially Before You Have a Bank

Fortunately, I had prepared reasonably well for spending money before obtaining an American bank account. Wise, which I had already used to move money into dollars before arriving, became my main bridge between the UK and US systems.

The virtual Wise card on my phone was particularly useful. Anywhere offering contactless payment, I could simply tap my phone and spend directly from my US-dollar balance as though I already had an American debit card.

The only problem is that America has a slightly inconsistent relationship with contactless payments. In shops it generally works well, but restaurants still quite commonly take your physical card away to process the payment. A virtual card sitting inside my phone is not tremendously useful when somebody wants to walk off with a piece of plastic.

Wise would happily have sent me a physical card. I simply forgot to order one.

Between that and a couple of UK cards with no foreign transaction fees, I was never actually unable to spend money. But Wise still had its limits. It was an excellent way of holding, spending and transferring dollars, but it could not completely replace being an established customer of an American bank.

And America really likes you to be an established customer of an American bank.

Becoming an American Bank Customer

My Social Security card arrived on the Saturday after I applied for it. The following Monday, I went to Chase.

Opening the account felt like a surprisingly significant milestone. Until then, I was living in America but financially operating around the edges of it. Once the checking and savings accounts were set up, I could finally receive my salary, pay bills in the normal way and most importantly pay my landlady without inventing increasingly creative methods of transferring money (or so I thought).

One important detail for anybody moving from Britain: Chase UK and Chase US may share a name, but for practical purposes they are completely separate institutions.

Having a Chase account in England did not give me any useful shortcut into the American system.

They even have separate apps, which are helpfully almost identical except that one is blue-on-white and the other white-on-blue.

Setting up the accounts took somewhere around an hour or an hour and a half, and then we encountered another problem.

To complete the credit-card application, I needed at least $250 in my new checking account.

Fine. I had money. I had a UK Chase debit card.

Surely I could simply transfer $250 from one account called Chase into another account called Chase while physically sitting inside a Chase branch?

Apparently not.

The teller could not process my British card because the payment system required a US billing address. There was no contactless option available either.

Eventually, I walked back out into the foyer, put the exact same debit card into the ATM, withdrew $250 in cash, carried the cash approximately twenty feet back to the teller and handed it over.

He then deposited it into my new account. Technically, the system had been satisfied.

It may be the most unnecessarily physical bank transfer I have ever completed.

My Glorious $500 of American Credit

Alongside the checking and savings accounts, I applied for a Chase Freedom Rise credit card.

This is essentially designed for people with little or no credit history, young adults, students and, apparently, thirty-year-old immigrants who can demonstrate years of perfect financial behaviour in another country but have had the audacity to arrive in America without bringing their credit score with them.

I was approved.

Credit limit: $500.

Honestly, $500 is almost comically useless when you are furnishing an apartment.

The card earns 1.5% cashback, which is actually quite good, so naturally I want to put as much normal spending through it as possible. Unfortunately, it does not take very long to reach a $500 limit when buying groceries, furniture and various household essentials. Plus a mini-holiday, car rentals and excursions…

I therefore keep using it, reaching the limit, manually paying it down and then using it again.

Because of how the first billing cycle has fallen, the normal automatic payment apparently will not properly kick in until September, giving me roughly six weeks of manually clearing the balance myself.

It is slightly ridiculous, but it is also doing exactly what I need it to do: beginning to create a credit history.

That is another strange part of emigrating. I have a perfect credit history in Britain. I have had credit cards for years, paid bills on time and have an established financial life.

In America, none of that really exists. I am effectively a financial newborn.

Zelle: Because Paying Rent Needed Another Obstacle

Having a US bank account did at least mean I could finally use Zelle, which is one of the main ways people transfer money directly between bank accounts here.

My landlady uses it for rent, so this should have solved the payment problem completely.

Naturally, it did not.

As a new Chase customer, my initial Zelle transfer limit was only $500 per day.

My rent was considerably more than $500.

Even better, because I did not yet have an American photo ID that the system could scan, all transfers require additional identity verification by telephone.

One evening I tried to pay the rent and was placed into a telephone queue with an estimated wait of around forty minutes. I gave up.

It has become easier.

But that first successful rent payment felt like another disproportionately important achievement.

The Amex Problem

One financial setback that annoyed me more than I expected involved American Express. Yes I will call them out here.

I have been an Amex customer in the UK for years. I have an excellent credit record there and had assumed that this established relationship might make moving into the American credit system slightly easier.

Amex actually offers something called Global Transfer, specifically designed to help existing international customers apply for a card when moving country.

Unfortunately, somewhere between my research, their website, multiple phone agents and the application process, I managed to apply through the normal American route instead.

From the perspective of that system, the application probably looked absurd:

• I had barely been in the country a week.
• My US bank account was brand new.
• I had no established American credit score.

So they declined me.

Which is completely logical if you ignore the fact that I had already been their customer for years somewhere else.

I later tried to go through the correct Global Transfer process, but that has not exactly gone smoothly either. I have finally received a formal rejection letter, so the next stage is to telephone them and try to untangle what has happened.

Naturally, their customer-service hours largely overlap with the hours when I am supposed to be at work. Another problem for another day.

When Visiting Became Living

Somewhere amongst the furniture, bank accounts and paperwork, there was also a more subtle change taking place.

For the first couple of weeks, having my sister with me made the whole experience feel slightly like an extended trip. We had crossed the Atlantic together, gone shopping together and then spent a week driving around New England. There was always another destination, another store or another thing to arrange.

Then, on the Saturday night before I started work, I dropped her off at the airport.

It was relatively late by the time I began the long drive home.

That journey felt different.

There was no sightseeing planned for the following day. Nobody was staying with me. The holiday part was finished.

I drove back to my apartment, sat down and had the rather stark realisation that this was now simply my life.

Work started next.

The first day itself was strangely normal. I already knew the company and most of the people because I had worked with them remotely for so long, but there was still something surreal about physically making the journey into the office, coming home again that evening and realising that this commute was going to repeat itself over and over.

However long I remain here, for now this is home.

Receiving the Social Security card had felt like an official milestone. Opening the bank account had made me financially functional. Paying rent made the apartment feel properly mine.

But driving home alone that first weekend was probably the moment when everything shifted from moving to America to living in America.

The exciting part is that things were coming together.

The slightly less exciting part was that another major piece of American life was still missing.

A car.

And, as I was discovering, Connecticut was not going to make getting one particularly straightforward.