Visas, Banks, Storage, Cell phones and more
We arrived at Heathrow around noon London time. We all got at least a few hours of sleep on the ~9 hour flight and were ready for action. The most stressful part of of this phase of the trip was certainly getting all of our baggage through customs and to the nearby storage facility.
Aside from it just being a lot of bags to move and somehow load into a European sized taxi/uber, we also needed to make it through customs. We had read mixed things about whether or not you need to declare and pay duties when bringing a lot of stuff into the country like this. When moving, you can apply for a “Transfer of Residence” with the HMRC (UK equivalent of the IRS) which makes you exempt from duties when moving your things, but we did not get around to doing this with all of the other moving related stuff, so we knew there was some risk. The plan was simply to load the bags onto a couple of baggage carts and try to walk through confidently. This was going as well as it could go with Jen and I each pushing a very heavily loaded cart and the kids trailing behind with 2 roller bags each, until… the final doors out of custom were too narrow for our carts to fit through. We had to get help from a customs agent who had to call her manager to get him to come and open up a separate, larger door. We stood there with our 14 bags plus 4 backpacks in the midst of all of the customs agents waiting for the door to open for at least 10 minutes. It was pretty comical, but no one asked us any questions, and when the doors opened we made it through with no problems. All of the agents were super friendly. We then found our driver who was great at loading all of our luggage and then we were off to the storage place. This driver was the first of the locals to be baffled at why anyone would want to move to the UK and he spent most of the drive talking about how awesome Saudi Arabia is and how that would be a much better place for us. I told him that we’d consider it.
We got the bags into storage, breathed a sigh of relief and headed to our AirBnB… then 20 minutes later, we got a call from the storage place letting us know that we had left one of our suitcases on the street, so turned around and went right back to pick it up… good start. Then, we went to the AirBnB. Jen picked up the keys around the corner and we tried hard to get them to open the door, but they didn’t seem to fit. It turns out, we were at the wrong address and basically just trying to break into someone’s apartment. The person who lived there eventually came out to ask us why we were messing with his door… it’s been pointed out to us that in the US, this may have lead to being shot. In London, the guy was super friendly, gave us directions to where we needed to go (just a block over) and even offered to help us move our bags.
Our actual apartment was on a great pedestrian-only block full of restaurants, cafes and with a pub on the corner. It was great.
We got moved in, took a quick power nap and got to work.
Residence Permits
The first order of business was trying to get our Biometric Resident Permits known as BRPs. These are government ID cards that identify us as having the right to stay in the UK based on our Visas. We had been told by our immigration attorney that they would be ready ~2 weeks after we passed through immigration and activated our visas. Once you activate your Visa, you aren’t allowed to leave the country until you pick up your BRP, and she told us that we should plan to spend around 3 weeks in the country waiting for them. The only way to know if they are ready is to go to a specific post office identified in your visa paperwork, wait in line and ask if they are there. If not, go back the next day. Through some internet research, we had read stories of these sometimes getting delayed for up to a few months, but we had also read many accounts of them being ready for people upon arrival. We needed these BRPs in order to start travelling and also as a perquisite to getting bank accounts, so we were eager to get them. After our power naps, we realized that if we hurried, we could take the tube and make it to the post office just before they closed and figured that we might as well check it out. It turns out they were there! This checked off a major checkbox on our to do list within hours of arriving. We celebrated with a decent Italian dinner near the post office.
We slept well that night (though the pub crowd right outside our window was a bit loud). The next day was Saturday and we figured more stuff would be open on Saturday vs. Sunday, so wanted to tackle getting UK phone numbers and trying to setup bank accounts. Of course, we started with what Emma likes to call “Australian breakfast.” On our prior trip we had found Granger & Co in Notting Hill and had a great breakfast there. Emma has been raving about the ricotta hot cakes for months and was very eager to return. We went to the Chelsea location and it was just as good as remembered.
Cellphones
After breakfast, we walked around Chelsea to show the kids our likely future neighborhood and headed to an O2 store. I’d read that O2 was a decent UK mobile carrier and also had free roaming across the EU, so that seemed like a good fit for us near term and we needed UK phone numbers for a variety of reasons. Within 5 minutes, we had new pay-as-you-go SIM cards in our phones giving us both UK phone number in addition to our US phone numbers. It was super simple and super cheap. It has taken a little tweaking to figure out how to choose which SIM to use for which contact and a few other minor things, but for the most part, this was very easy to accomplish. The only catch is that you can’t sign up for a monthly contract without a UK bank account and for reasons that don’t make sense to me, you can’t even pay online for pay-as-you-go unless you have a UK credit or debit card. We bought a month of service, but our only option to renew it would be to go into a physical store and pay for the next month unless/until we could setup a UK bank account. Relatively minor issue, but still a bit of a challenge since O2 stores are only in the UK and we would be out of the country for most of the next 3 months. Our next stop was to the bank. It did not go as well…
Banks
We knew going into this that many new UK expats had a very hard time setting up bank accounts. One of the tricky parts is that most banks require a permanent UK address that you can prove through utility bills or a mortgage statement. It’s virtually impossible to get those things without having a UK bank account to pay for them, so it’s sort of a chicken/egg problem. I had read that Lloyd’s Bank (a major UK retail bank) would setup new accounts without an address as long as you have a BRP and that others had luck just walking into a branch and were able to get it setup pretty quickly. We tried this. We waited in line in a very overcrowded branch and were told that we could easily set up our new account online and would not need an address. The woman seemed very confident of this. So, we said thank you and left. I later tried to setup an account online and the 3rd question in the application asked for my UK address. We decided to scrap that project for the day and instead went to see Frozen The Musical… it was decent.
The next day, I tried again to setup the account online and this time put in the address of a hotel we had previously stayed at. It worked. Sort of. It accepted my BRP in lieu of asking for proof of address and actually setup the account and gave me an account number. BUT… then when I tried to login, it said that they mailed me an activation code that should arrive in 2 weeks (to the hotel address I had put in…) and I would need that code in order to use online banking… So, yes, in order to do online banking, you first need to be mailed a code that takes 2 weeks to arrive. I called support, they said they couldn’t help me, but they could setup an appointment at a branch for Monday and the branch should be able to solve everything. We spent over an hour with a not very helpful branch guy on Monday and he completely failed to do anything useful for us. Ultimately we left and decided Lloyd’s Bank was not for us.
We were going to give up on banking for now, but on a whim decided to walk into an HSBC branch and see if we could do any better. It was MUCH better. We now have UK HSBC accounts. We also set up a local mail box at a Mailboxes Etc. just so we would have an address for them to send debit cards and things like that which helped a lot.
So, we arrived Friday afternoon and by Tuesday had BRPs, UK cell service, UK Bank accounts, a UK mailing address and all of our stuff in a conveniently located storage unit in Chelsea (we moved stuff from the original unit out by the airport closer in to where we are likely to live). There were some hiccups, but all in all, it was an incredibly productive few days and a great start to the adventure. We also spent some time at the Science Museum (which is great, and free), saw some amazing street performers around Covent Gardent, showed the kids the outside of their new school, and spent some time in Battersea park. All in, we were there for a little less than a week, but accomplished everything we needed to get some infrastructure in place and were ready for our next phase – a Wrexham football match!
