DMV experience State ID card · Cloud Residents

DMV experience State ID card

Hello all,

The past week I travelled to the USA, to open my bank accounts and get my state ID as well. Out of everything I had to do during the trip. This was the most unnecessary and stressful part.

I had two addresses that I was thinking of using. A friends address and a paid residential address.

(I ended up using my friends address just for the ID, and the paid address for all the banks)

Since my friend agreed on a late notice, they could not add me to any utility bill or anything. So, for his house I had a lease agreement that was made from a website and renters insurance.

For the paid address I had a lease agreement and a utility bill.

I went to the DMV and asked them to apply for the Identification Card. After waiting in a painfully long queue, I was asked to proceed to the desk and to provide two proofs of address. I gave my lease and renters insurance and they said that only the lease is accepted because renters insurance is not accepted. So, she turned me away and asked me to go get a SSN ineligibility letter from the Social Security Administration. I went there and asked for the paper to be printed and also stamped just in case with my friends address. When I went back to the DMV, they accepted the renters insurance but not the lease because there was a clause in the lease that said "The term of the Lease is a periodic tenancy commencing at 12:00 noon on March 10, 2026 and continuing on a year-to-year basis until the Landlord or the Tenant terminates the tenancy." and they told me that the lease needs to have a specific start and end date so now the lease agreement is dismissed and can not be used as proof. They wanted to turn me away and told me multiple times that the documents are not sufficient but I stayed persistent and told them that the SSN ineligibility letter and the renters insurance count as two different proofs. They were still not happy and asked for my renters insurance declarations. On the spot I went to the contact page on the website asked for help from the renters insurance policy declarations only to find out that I had already printed it and she was looking at it the whole time. Then when she saw my ITIN letter, she was very confused as she could not understand why I do not have a SSN. She was constantly moving from her desk going to ask her colleagues which were not very helpful and friendly either. And finally she could not understand how the ITIN letter had a foreign address on it. So, I recommend for the people that do not have applied for the ITIN yet and want to use a friends address, to send the document to your friends house as it will be one more document you can use to the DMV if you want to apply for an ID. After a lot of back and forth she finally made the application and I got the license 10 minutes after we finished. The whole process of her trying to fill in my details and asking me for more and more proof of addresses took 3 hours!

And because I had already planned the bank appointments and managed to open the accounts Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning with Chase, Citi, Capital One and BofA, the ID at this point was basically useless for my case since all the accounts were already open!...

p.s. The i94 was also needed

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