In Bangalore

Quick update from me. I've now physically moved to Bangalore. Still figuring out some of the basic stuff. I'm going to write up small posts which mostly describe my immediate reactions/observations. I reserve the right to change my opinion over time :)

Transferring money to India

At the time of writing this post, one of the best ways that we've found to transfer money is via State Bank of India in San Jose. They offer much better exchange rates than some of the other services and money transfer takes a single day. You'll need to carry a cashier's check for the amount you wish to transfer. It might be worthwhile chatting with the manager to get a better exchange rate. We had bad experience with Remit2India - they messed up account verification and couldn't help me out despite repeated requests.

Craigslist

Craigslist (www.craigslist.org) is your friend if you want to get rid of old stuff before your move. Managed to sell my wife's car within 6 hours of posting the ad. My wife and I were totally unprepared to lose the car in such a short span of time. We also sold our old TV, stand, some old handycams. One thing my wife and I disagree about is selling low-value items. In my opinion, you have to treat your time as money. If you end up spending your evening waiting for someone to come by and pick up a $20 item, then its probably not worth it. We have few evenings left in the US. If it is a $1000 item, then I'm all for it. I don't know what the exact value of my evening is - but its probably somewhere over $50 :) My wife thinks I'm a fool and we should sell everything we possibly can.

Credit Cards and Airline Miles

I cancelled quite a few unnecessary credit cards - easy enough to do on the phone. Takes about 5 minutes per card. I also had a credit union account from a long time ago that I closed out over the phone. They'll mail me a check with the balance that I hope to put into my regular checking account with a big bank. I guess I'm going against the trend right now with the 'Occupy Wall St' movements :)

Also spent a few minutes trying to redeem credit card points and airline miles. Credit card turned out to be easy since it had a cash-back option. Airline miles were a pain - many programs don't seem to have a gift card option and take up to 8 weeks to deliver merchandise. That's too late for me. Thankfully, didn't have a whole lot of them left.