Some “getting ready” advice

If you can pack up your house (or sub­let it, or swap houses with an Ital­ian fam­ily), the finances of the dream become sud­denly much more within reach.  Since mort­gage, or rent, is not due in the US, then you have these expenses to apply to your adven­ture.  Also, you can sus­pend your home phone and your US cell phone (if it does not have GSM 800/1900 global fre­quen­cies – more on this later).  And your util­i­ties can either be sus­pended or cov­ered by your sublettors.

There are sev­eral prac­ti­cal­i­ties, how­ever, that are worth know­ing ahead of time.   

House­hold insurance

If you choose the “put every­thing you own in stor­age” option, your renter’s or homeowner’s insur­ance pol­icy may no longer cover your items in stor­age.  You must have a valid US mort­gage or lease agree­ment to keep house­hold insur­ance.  There are a few insur­ance com­pa­nies that cover items in stor­age:  Ten­ant One for exam­ple.  And fail­ure to notify your insur­ance com­pany of a change in occu­pancy may inval­i­date your pol­icy and pos­si­bly future insur­a­bil­ity, I was told.

Health insur­ance

Call your agency and check their pol­icy.  It varies.  Many require you to pay for any med­ical events aboard out of pocket, and reimburse—with proper paperwork—upon your return, and pos­si­bly at a lower per­cent­age rate than for US claims.  So, you may be cov­ered, but under­stand your finan­cial vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and plan accordingly.

Check around for med­ical travel insur­ance plans.  For instance, Amer­i­can Express offers an excel­lent Med­ical Travel Pro­tec­tion plan, cov­er­ing you for the first 45 days of any trip, includ­ing med­ical evac­u­a­tion if necessary—and you need not be an Amer­i­can Express card­holder to pur­chase the policy.

For trav­el­ers apply­ing for an extended VISA, the Ital­ian con­sul­tate in the US may require you to sign an affi­davite promis­ing to pur­chase health insur­ance in Italy, which is equiv­a­lent to the insur­ance offered by Assi­talia.   You can pur­chase this when you arrive in Italy.  More about this at www.expatsinitaly.com

Stay­ing in touch

Phone cards are the cheap­est and eas­i­est way.  A web­site that has par­tic­u­larly low rates for trav­el­ing is www.nobelcom.com .  They offer a “vir­tual” phone card—your num­ber and PIN are assigned to you online, and you print out the instructions.

For trav­el­ing in Italy alone, I strongly rec­om­mend get­ting an unlocked GSM phone BEFORE you leave the states.  Buy one with 800/1900 GSM for Italy.  You can pur­chase them from eBay, or from Simon Cells (www.simoncells.com), which gave me excel­lent ser­vice.  Then, when you are in Italy, find a Voda­phone or Omni Tel store and buy a SIMS chip for  about 5 Euro, and – you have your own Ital­ian cell phone!

If you are only going for a week or two, rent­ing a phone may be over­all cheaper, but for the longer explo­rations, buy your own phone.

You can add min­utes as you use them (“top up”) by buy­ing more time at a Tabac shop in 10 Euro incre­ments.  Calls to your phone are free, and on Voda­phone, calls within Italy are charged cur­rently at 19 cents per minute, and to call the US is 50 cents a minute.

The refurbed Sony Eric­s­son phone I pur­chased from SimonCells.com dou­bles as an alarm clock and stop watch as well.  If you are going for a remote adven­ture, buy the car recharger—it will serve you well.

Com­put­ers and electronics

If you are tak­ing your com­puter with you to Italy (as I have) you will want an Ital­ian surge pro­tec­tor.  I brought my depend­able US surge pro­tec­tor multi-plug with me, and it blew the house cir­cuits twice with quiet an accom­pa­ny­ing sound­track.  When I finally found the local inter­net place (20 minute drive), I pur­chased a Kraun “Mul­ti­presa 5 posizini” with “pro­tezione da impulse di rete” (aka surge pro­tec­tion).  It s 8,90 Euros, and worth the piece of mind!  Kraun’s web­site is www.kraun.it, and it is model num­ber KR.C5.

You’ll want to bring at least two US-to-Italian plug adapters with you, that takes our 2 prong and fits it to their 2 prong, or our grounded three prong to their grounded 3 prong plug.  These are avail­able at Radio Shacks and most places where travel items are sold.

One place tried to sell me a $40 trans­former for the com­puter, which was heavy, and was not for Italy cur­rent.  Most places in Italy have 110V, so an adapter (not a trans­former) should serve well enough.  And many lap­tops also have a built-in surge pro­tec­tor.  How­ever, good to be extra safe, and not fry your hard drive.

I’m in the coun­try­side, where the surges (da impulse di rete) varies, so the surge pro­tec­tor helps.  Sev­eral folks showed me that my com­puter has a built in surge vari­ance allowance, which is true.  But I’d rather replace an 8 Euro plug set than an $1000 lap­top any day.

Inter­net

If you are near a city, you should have no prob­lem stay­ing con­nected.  Many hotels offer “inter­net ser­vice” but they may not mean free Wi-Fi the way we enjoy it in the states.

You pur­chase a pre­paid card from Tele­com Italia at a Tabac shop (5 Euros for 5 hours), to use the one or few machines in a lobby or café area.  [See www.191.biz] Or if your own com­puter has Wi-Fi capa­bil­ity, you can log in once you pur­chase your Tele­com card and get a user­name and password.

Some hotels offer a net­work plug in your room, but you need your own dial up Inter­net Ser­vice Provider (ISP) to take advan­tage of that con­nec­tion.  AOL does have access num­bers in Italy.

Voda­fone sells an adapter that plugs into your lap­top, and con­nects to the inter­net using cel­lu­lar techn­ogy.  Cur­rently the adapter (here) sells for around 150 to 200 Euros–if you have an UNLOCKED adapter from the US, you can just buy the SIM chip from Voda­fone.  Then ask for a _no_contract_ month at a time acco­cunt.  For 30 Eruos you buy 100 hours of inter­net time, and can con­nect any­where in Italy.

More towns have ADSL lines, which, for longer stays, is def­i­nitely worth the invest­ment.  You can then use VoIP tech­nol­ogy to “phone home.”

You may wish to set up a web email address, such as hot­mail or yahoo, which are free ser­vices.  They are some­what eas­ier to access than smaller inter­net ser­vices email applications.

Pets

You will need tem­po­rary homes for your pets, your car, your valu­ables (if you are putting every­thing in storage).

Get your pets’ shots up to date, arm the pet sit­ter with their records, med­i­cine, a gift cer­tifi­cate to the local pet store for food, and a note and notice to your vet­eri­nar­ian that they are per­mit­ted to obtain med­ical ser­vices in your absence for your pet.

You can take dogs and cats into Italy, with no quar­an­tine time at this time.  Dogs must be micro chipped at least 30 days before leav­ing the coun­try, and recent rabies shots ver­i­fied.  See the Ital­ian immi­gra­tion web­site for cur­rent details.  Some US states also have their own procedures—for instance, in Maine, the vet­eri­nar­i­ans must have your pet’s inter­na­tional papers cleared and signed by the State Vet­eri­nar­ian.  Allow an extra week for that procedure.

Check with your rental agency about their pol­icy on pets, before you show up with your dog.  And check about screens in the rental prop­erty, if you are con­sid­er­ing trav­el­ing with a cat.  Agen­cies that rent to Brits or British land­lords are often quite wel­com­ing of pets, while other poten­tial land­lords may be more hes­i­tant or, in some cases, refuse.

And there is a prac­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tion for you and your pet.  It is hard on the ani­mals to fly, and their pres­ence, as com­fort­ing as it is, can make museum hop­ping and tour­ing more com­plex.  In the Tus­can heat, you do NOT want to leave a pet in the car.

Finances

Check with your bank to see what kind of an auto­matic bill­payer appli­ca­tion they offer.  Either use this, or pre-pay any accounts so your credit stays in tact while you adven­ture.  Also, call all of your credit cards, and ask what their sur­charge is for using the cards over­seas.  My cards ranged from 1 to 3% sur­charge.  When you have deter­mined which cards you will be using, call them and notify them of the dates that you will be using the card and in what coun­tries.  This will avert dif­fi­cul­ties for you, and they make a note on your account.

AAA has a VISA travel card, which you can pre-load with money.  This is use­ful if you are trav­el­ing with another per­son and shar­ing expenses.  You can both pre-load the card, and pay lodg­ing, etc. with the card.  Have some­one back in the US able to reload the card for you both, should you need it.

You may need to wire your pay­ment to your land­lord ahead of time.  Many banks now have online wire ser­vices.  Allow a week to 10 days for the money to be cred­ited to your recipient’s account.