Business is Personal (Finance)

If moving into a new home is a lot of work, moving overseas is even more so. Here's roughly how the move went down:

3+ months before

• Obtain passports for my kids. I wanted to wait until my youngest was at least 1 year old to get a decent passport photo. I kept hoping for more hair to grow out but my hope was in vain.
• Sell my wife's half of the business to her partner. We ended up negotiating a price just a little bit below our initial investment. However, some of that initial investment was for the 1st month rent and startup inventory -- costs that were used to produce income already distributed. Hence, if we subtracted that out, we had a slight capital gain.

2 months before

• Get visas from China. 6-month multi-entry L (tourist) visa is the best way to start. To stay the max 6 months, you have to go to Hong Kong or Macau every 30 days. Once in China though -- if you have the contacts -- it's pretty easy to get extended visas without the 30-day exit requirement.
• Give landlord 30-day notice.
• Change addresses on all accounts we plan to keep to my parents' mailing address.
• Change every account to online delivery-only where the option is available
• Add my parents to our safe deposit box. Some banks are very aggressive -- if you don't visit your box every year, they'll classing your account as inactive and escheat your holdings to the state of California. Then it's a hassle and a half reclaiming your money.
• Renew credit card opt out at http://www.optoutprescreen.com.
• Freeze credit files with all 3 credit bureaus. For instructions on credit freezes, go to http://www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/learn_more/003484indiv.html.

1 month before

• Triage all our possessions to determine what to give away, throw away, store for future and bring to China. It took roughly 3 weeks to take everything apart and then give it away. For a regular move, it's pretty simply -- everything goes into the moving truck. For an overseas move, you have to coordinate with friends and family separate pick up times for the items. By the middle of the 3rd week, I started just dumping things into the Goodwill and Trash piles because the coordination was too much of a hassle.
• Set up wire transfer accounts to the wife's family in China. Bank of America offers free wire transfers up to $3000 per month to China Construction Bank. Wells Fargo also offers free wire transfers up to $1000 per day to Agricultural Bank of China. With this in place, we don't need to bring cash with us.
  

2 weeks before

• Clean up apartment to return the apartment to our landlord.
• Pack up possessions we would bring to China or put in storage for when we come back
  

1 week before

• Turn in apartment to landlord. Landlord deducted $375 for wear-and-tear. Some of the items he mentioned probably should not have been deducted but we'd have to fight it out in small claims court and we were already in China by the time we got the remainder of our security deposit back.
• Move into my parents' home for final days.
  
• Change of address at USPS. Done online at the cost of $1 per name.
• Order worldwide Skype package. Free calls to USA, China and 40 other countries for a cost of $140 per year.
• Call up Bank of America to notify we were travelling in China so our ATM cards would not be locked. These instructions must be renewed every 90 days. BofA lets you withdraw $300 per day from China Construction Bank ATMs at no charge. Unfortunately, CCB limits you to 1000rmb ($147) per day which is half the BofA limit.
• Wire transfer cash via Western Union to the wife's family so we had money ready for us the moment we arrived.
  
• Buy plane tickets. Ordinarily, most people buy plane tickets far in advance but from checking the prices, last minute 1-way tickets to China do not seem to cost much more than pre-planned 1-way tickets. It seemed less risky to set the travel dates after we were for sure done in cleaning up our USA foot print.

1 day before

• Blow out party. Friends, relatives and co-workers all having fun late into the night.

Day of

• Fly out. After 15 hours, arrive in a whole new world.

(Filed in china, life changes)