Dear all,

I see that a lot of credit cards and mortgage lenders state residency restrictions on their application – to permanent residents or US citizens only.

We hope to be tying up a deal for a house in the next month or so and I think that one of the conditions is that I meet residency requirements – I know that it certainly is for a gas credit card I’m thinking of getting.

My AoS is pending and I have my EAD. Might these establishments accept my receipt of the pending AoS application instead of my green card – which is yet to arrive and I suspect might be one of the ones which take a while to turn up…

Anyone had any experience?

Mark

My experience with lenders is that they mostly don't care about residency (I got loans, credit cards no problem when I was here on H-1B), but they do care about credit rating. My guess is if you came here on a K-1, you're unlikely to have any credit rating and that will be your biggest hurdle.

I have no idea how this happened, but I have excellent credit rating and I've only been here three months. And I didn't need to use a global transfer from American Express to shift some of my UK rating to the US.

I think I basically piggybacked on my wife's credit rating - we've got a car, cellphones, credit cards and pre-approval for a mortgage. We made sure she was the first name on the application but that the application was joint and I seem to have benefitted from that.

Good news about the residency - thanks for the reply!

Yeah, you'll be fine. Every single credit card, loan and bank account I've had has has something about "residency required" in the small print, yet no bank has ever asked for anything other than my SS number.

I've heard that people have had trouble with mortgages without the actual card, but not all mortgages, depends where I guess.

I have credit cards and stuff like that and I don't have my card yet.

To be fair, I don't have a mortgage, so can't comment on that. I have a Honda car loan though that was verbally smallprinted "residency restrictions required" on the TV ad for it, but they never asked me to prove residency.