US Passport cards

Our family is in the process of obtaining passport cards to make our border crossing experiences go smoothly. Some of our US guests are also working on obtaining US passports and so we wanted to share from our experiences.

One of the items we have already found to AVOID is the United States Immigration Support website which has something labeled "Apply for a United States Passport Card" - reading the fine print this looks like this is just a Guide for how to fill out the passport application. The Guide costs about $50 or $80. I would suggest most of you should look over the passport application prior to spending $50 for this Guide.

New passport applications would use the DS-11 application form.
http://travel.state.gov/passport/for.../ds11_842.html

Most of the questions on the DS-11 application were easy to answer without having to research - the most difficult part of the application for me was finding my parents date of birth and my parents place of birth.

The DS-11 application has an option to select if you want a regular passport or a US passport card. The US passport card is the credit card sized passport that works for land crossings to Canada and Mexico.

A new US passport card is presently a total of $45.00 for an adult and only $35.00 for those under the age of 16. A renewal is less expensive and Photo and Birth Certificate fee's could become additional.

The Passport Photo ID can be created with a digital camera, photo editing software and photo printer. We created our photos, but for most I would recommend going out to someone offering to create ID photos.

Estimated time from submitting our application to when we are expecting the passport card is about 8 weeks.

The United States Department of State website has a great deal of information about passports and passport cards.
http://travel.state.gov

Regards,

To our surprise the US Passport cards arrived already.

We will be working on Passcards for Jenny and Amy during their holiday break from school.

Regards,