Photo by Abbie Bernet
The first month is the US is extraordinary. Time flies so fast, but after when you look back, and compare what you did in the first month versus second or third, you realize how special it was. I was able to do so much during a day, I had full energy as everything was new, I woke up at 6AM everyday and went to sleep at 10PM. I was not used to it, because in my home country, I used to wake up at 9:30AM and go to sleep at 2AM, so I was thinking to myself "what a good start in the US".
Currently I realize that it was just the jet lag, I changed 11 timezones and it took me a whole month for it to pass. But it gave me the opportunity to find and rent an apartment, lease a car, buy furniture (yeah, you rent an empty apartment in the US, only the kitchen is there), buy electronics: In few words create my new home from scratch.
You can never guess what was the first thing I bought in the US besides coffee :) I realized it when I took my first Uber. It was car seat for my son. Uber does not provide one, so you need to have your own and put it into the Uber car. In my country it is not required to use a car seat, but here it is a must. I was advised to check Toys”R”Us store because they were closing at that time and had huge clearance sales (80%), but it was just waste of time. Prices were still high, so I just went to Target, and they had many car seats to choose, and my son helped me to choose one.
So, first thing to do was to find a good apartment/condo or a house to rent. The prices went up few years ago in this area, because some big companies moved their offices to here, and more than 20.000 employees moved to live here. In June 2018, you could rent a clean 1 bedroom apartment in good area in Glendale, LA for $1700-$1800 and 2 bedroom one for $2000-$2300. There are always expensive ones, that are in new building and are in big complexes with gyms, swimming pools, offices included for free usage, but they are around $1000 more.
I used to visit 3-6 open houses every day, for 2 weeks, until I could make a decision and rent the apartment. Advice from me, besides visiting rental websites like Zillow, just walk in the area you want to find house, and check signs on front of the buildings. People are so lazy to add their listing to online directories, they just buy signs and put at the front yard. After checking around 40 houses I finally understood that they all are almost the same. The criteria for choosing the right one are:
- Does it have laundry inside unit?
- Is there enough light?
- Does it have central A/C?
- Does the owner provide parking spots, how many?
- Any food markets near?
You can always add you custom criteria, but the houses are almost the same.
It will be super hard to rent an apartment or a house by yourself because the US has the "Credit Score" concept, and as you are new, you don't have it yet. So what you need to do is find a co-signer, any cousins, relatives who will be ready to help you. I have cousins in LA, who helped me with this and I did my paperwork fast and was approved fast. So after 20 days stepping in the US, I had my apartment, it had only kitchen in it, all the rooms were empty. The apartment did not even have refrigerator. As my contract in the hotel was for 1 month, I still had 10 days to make a sweet home out of this empty apartment.