In preparation for our upcoming trip to Greece, we needed to renew Bird’s passport and update it with her new married name. My current passport will not expire until 2012.
Renewing your passport is actually a fairly simple process. You just need to fill out a form and then mail in the form, your old passport, your marriage certificate (if changing your name), new passport photos and a check to pay for the process. It seems a bit sketchy to mail off your current passport as well as the certified copy of your marriage certificate but they will return it with your new one. You can also use delivery confirmation and/or delivery tracking to minimize the risk.
I’m not exactly sure how long the process takes, but I know you can expedite it if you need your passport in a hurry and are willing to pay an additional fee.
As it is, it cost us $110 for the actual passport renewal fee, $9 for passport photos at Walgreen’s (kind of a rip-off) and about $2 to ship it all off to the passport office.
Just the first of many travel-related expenses to come, but one you might not consider right away.
Subscribe in a Reader
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Very wise of you to get this done early!
I agree that passport photos are inordinately expensive. I had one of my kids take my passport photo when I had to renew a few years ago. I stood against a white wall in our our house and had my kiddie take several headshots that would yield different sizes (my photographer kept stepping back, ha ha!). I printed the photos on my inkjet’s quickprint mode and measured for the right dimensions. Then I printed out hi-res photos on some 4×6 photo paper from a pack I had picked up at an office store clearance for 50 cents. It worked great, and we fixed up some of the kids’ passport photos the same way.