anka

There are Americans who own business and property in Russia. The climate is going to become tougher and tougher, IMO, but not exactly because of this law in particular.

I agree with neonred--just think logically about this. The articles I have read state that yes, they want to be able to keep track of people better, especially people with citizenship from countries like the US--but if your wife is a regular person with no real business interests or governmental ties in Russia, then she has nothing to worry about, I think. She always has the option of renouncing her citizen if it seems necessary, but for now I think it would be not that big of a deal to just follow the law and write a registered letter to whomever saying she has been an American citizenship since x date. They are not going to care about someone who is living a normal life with her husband in the US and not doing anything that would be detrimental to Russian interests. That is what I think is the impetus behind this law and things I have read have said as much.

Anyone else heard about this??
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/20/us-russia-bill-dualcitizens-idUSBREA4J0MJ20140520
Honestly I'm surprised no one started a thread on the topic when the law was first being discussed about a week ago. I came home from work, and my wife was so upset- I told her "they" can go to h*ll and she won't be "registering" at the Russian embassy in DC because who knows what Russia will try to do with that information in the future!
It's funny because now I see we should have just stuck with the permanent residency for her When we were debating whether to apply for her citizenship, I asked all our Russian-American acquaintances how they handled traveling to Russia, since I knew dual citizenship was outlawed in Russia. I drilled down for details, explaining how suspect it would look to leave the USA on one passport and enter Russia on another, when the Russian one wouldn't have a visa or exit stamps on it. The Russian friends looked at me like I was crazy but now it looks like I was being quite sane...
What do you all think of this? Do your wives plan to register at the Russian consulates? Or risk paying the fine or going to a soft-labor camp ("volunteer" work)? Or something else??

You can see everything you are following here:
http://www.visajourney.com/timeline/subcriptions.php
Topics can be revised here:
http://www.visajourney.com/forums/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=followed
On th eleft side you can view what forums you subscribe to and change them as well .

I keep getting email notifications of new topics posted in the UK board. I went to notification options and I don't seem to have anything checked that would mean I would get email notifications for these new topics.
Almost all of the notification checked mark boxes are greyed out and I can't click on them at all to uncheck.
Any ideas?

Among things not to say when one is married: "When is our wedding adversary, Dear?"

There's just no hope with some people.

Adversarial? I wouldn't call any forum on VJ truly adversarial. Not by Internet standards, anyway.

We need the -1 for the the Current Affairs forum. It's not adversarial enough, the way it is.

Do not assume that reputation has anything to do with immigration experience. People usually get reputation for being snarky.

Try that creditkarma site. It shows your credit lines and utilisation, and grades your usage in a fairly helpful graph. They're showing best score given to a <20% utilization (but obviously more than 0%).When we did our mortgage application, Chase said they expected to see at least 2 lines of credit open to get a good score. Credit Karma seems to concur that 2 or 3 is good.
Incidentally, I'm not on the mortgage (just deed) because my initial score was obviously low (hub's is in the high 700s) and it would have increased the interest rate. 3 months of our CC reporting and my score is already 658! I'm hoping getting a second line, and using it well, will boost me up over 700.

I just started to look into this whole thing with secured credit cards also. I was rejected by Capital One, but approved by Merrick Bank, and my card from them arrived in the mail yesterday.
From research, I found the largest thing which will affect your credit and credit rating is the amount of utilised credit. You should attempt to keep your utilisation below 30% for every line of credit you have, for example if you have a $1000 limit on your card, try not to exceed $300 in charges. Going the other way, having $0 charged, won't work either. Lenders like to see you using some credit and managing it responsibly, rather than applying for cards and then never using them.

We haven't gotten this far in our process (the beneficiary's SS card hasn't arrived yet) BUT I can tell you something I (as the USC) have had really good luck with: Credit unions. They seem to be more "forgiving" and trusting than regular banks. I had my credit absolutely destroyed by a previous marriage, and was still able to get a $1,000 unsecured loan at my CU, after having been declined through a bank. They also can offer secured credit cards, if that's a safer route for you.
I've heard community banks are also a good route.
One thing about credit cards that I learned when I worked as a home equity loan processor: It actually looks better if you DON'T pay off your credit cards completely every month. Banks like to see a leftover balance. If they see you paying your balance off every month, they know this means they'll just be maintaining an account for you for free, and they won't be making any money. It's a weird quirk of our credit system that (some) debt is a GOOD thing, credit wise. (Before I bought my house, my credit line was $1,200, and it took me nearly eight years to get it that high... within months of buying that house, even though I'd just taken on a HUGE debt, that credit line shot up to $21,400 without me even asking... no joke!)

It's odd that there are so many differences between companies on reporting to credit scores. My personal experience goes against those of other posters here, so I'll just chime in with what worked for us (but it may be very dependent on individual companies!). Just before my fiance/husband arrived here on K-1, I added him as an "authorized user" to both of my credit cards: Discover and Chase Visa. The online form for each specifically stated that this WILL be reported to credit agencies.
That was in August. Sure enough, they were reported very quickly: in late November we had occasion to get a credit report on him (we were applying for a secured card through our Wells Fargo joint account, but it had not yet been approved). And his credit report shows a score of 765 based ENTIRELY on the two authorized user accounts: his credit history now dates back to 1992 when I first opened my cards, even though he did not enter the USA until September 2013.
We still ended up being denied for a solo card for him -- not because of his score, which was great (765) but because he is not employed, and we listed his income as only $500/month from savings withdrawals. The agent told us later that if we had listed our household income from MY job, it would have gone through just fine. As it is, we got him a solo secured card via Wells Fargo, and that's working perfectly well.
So if your USC spouse has good credit already and the authorized user DOES report to credit agencies as it did for us, that may work perfectly well. But I guess it's just very dependent on the individual cards: Discover and Chase Visa have been perfect at reporting the authorized user for us. We didn't even need his SSN, didn't get that until long after they had started building credit for him.

Paying ahead of time doesn't really matter -what matters is whether you were ever late with your payment. When you pull your credit report (you can get it for free once a year from all three agencies) it shows each month for all your credit cards and provides info whether it was never late or whether you were late (there's probably couple of options but never seen anything other than never late).
The other thing is - credit score is not a single easily defined number. It's typically understood as FICO credit score, but different lenders pull credit score from different agencies (for example - Toyota Financial Services used Trans Union, others used Equifax and so on) and in addition to all that also length of history matters quite a bit. My score with Experian was ~720 after 6 months being here but it really did not mean anything... Would not get any serious loan with good APR (Trans Union score at the same time was just above 600). So bottom line - it's not all that easy. Takes time to build a score.

My husband got a non-secured credit card from Capitol one with a $500 credit limit. After a few months of paying that he was able to get a car loan without a co-signer.

Because of family owned concerns my husband is not jointly listed on accounts or real estate but was able to go to my band and get a low limit secured card almost immediately. He is now getting tons of credit offers and could get himself enough card to get himself into real credit trouble just like the rest of America

If your spouse has a relationship with a bank, try going there. I've banked with Chase for years, so we added my husband to our bank account right away. When we went to get him a credit card to start building credit, the banker told us that my husband would likely get denied on the first request....which he did. But the local branch of Chase we frequent was able to ask Chase credit cards to reconsider based on my (and now our) relationship with the bank. He was approved with a $500 credit limit. It's not much, but he uses it for things like groceries, then pays it off, so he's building credit and will likely have his limit raised within the year. As soon has he had his SSN, we added him to our electric bill, too, which will also help with building credit.

several bits:
secured loan.
1. get a bank account in your name with yer SSN
2. deposit 3000 into that bank.
3. walk in to that bank, get a secured loan, perhaps flipping your 3000 into a 2000 certificate of deposit, to be used as collataral (sp? ) on the loan. suggest 12 month loan.
4. about 3 months later, of paying the monthly payments, the loan and payment history will show up on your credit history report.
secured credit card.
get a secured credit card from capital one. use it, make payments for 3 months. you'll see stuff in yer credit history report 3 to 4 months later.
so, do both, and you'll have credit history on 2 credit lines that YOU started.
Go Get Em, and Good Luck !

They are rated "F" with the BBB, that seems like just too big of a risk IMHO.
http://www.bbb.org/new-jersey/business-reviews/mailing-services-international/meest-america-inc-in-elizabeth-nj-18001685/
If anyone works for a company that does a lot of shipping check with your shipping department to see if you can get the corporate rate on shipping. A company I used to work for let me do this and it saved something like 60% on FedEx shipping to Russia. Even if you can't do that set up a FedEx account so you'll be able to save a few % over the regular rate.

Good question. I shipped a package to Samara January 18th of this year and she just got it yesterday. Hard to believe it took that long and it was a small package and under 4 pounds to. I have sent some in the past that got there pretty fast, 1-1.5 months but not sure why this one took so long? That was USPS

to send a duplicate of my K-1 petition to my fiancee to Vladivostok from California...
note that, this is for a stack of papers, maybe 25-40 sheets?
FedEx: $100
USPS: Priority Flat Rate envelope (i forgot but it was a LOT cheaper) took exactly 3 weeks to arrive.

Well first of all, I am not going there. We're just sending boxes to my wife's parents. Also, USPS is about $70 to $130 depending on the size and weight. FedEx and UPS are complete rip offs. $400 to ship? Are you kidding me? Greedy bastards. I could just Western Union the money and have them buy stuff there =)
But thank you for the advice!
I will check out meest. I heard they are good
Thanks!

** Moving from Off Topic to Site Discussion***
Yes- go to "My Content" (on the left about half way down if you look at your profile page, or on the drop down if you click on your name on the top right of every page) and it will show you all the threads you posted in for the last 6 months.

On the upper right corner of your screen next to your username, there is a white arrow. Click that arrow and a drop down menu will appear. On that menu click " my settings" then click the "profile" tab and then click "change signature" option. You will have to input the information yourself. Once you have typed whatever you wish to type, click the "save changes" button. Your timeline at the bottom of your posts will then be visible.