My Passport Renewal Experience

Recently my wife and I had to apply for new passports. We did not look at our passports and were under the mistaken impression that they did not expire until Oct 2020. Well, it turns out they expire in Jan 2020. That brings up a problem. Since, at this time, we are not allowed to travel military Space-A out of the Philippines (Clark), we have to buy commercial tickets someplace. This someplace could be anywhere that does have Space-A and/or to the US all the way. Since we are not rolling in dough and people are not donating thousands of dollars to my blog, we have to travel to the nearest place that has military Space-A flights. That place is Singapore.

In order to travel to Singapore, you must have at least 6 months left on your passport. We will only have 3 months as we need to be off the island by 10 Oct. So, we either get new passports now or spend at least twice as much money to go to the next nearest Space-A location that we would not need the 6 months, which would probably be Guam. We’ve been to Guam and the tickets were like $340 each round trip. That’s $780 versus the about $300 it would have cost to go to Singapore. We opted to get the new passports instead. This problem, plus a couple more, all lead to one bottom line, we will not be able to travel to Texas this year as we had hoped. This will be the last time we have this problem though. More on that in future posts.

You can acquire your US passport through the US Embassy in Manila. It is a relatively easy procedure and I will be running through our experience, hoping to prepare you more for the things that we did not know about.

The first 3 things you need to accomplish, in no particular order is to fill out the DS-82 (Application for Passport Renewal), 2 identical photos that are 2″x2″ (5 cm x 5 cm) with a white background. Do not wear a hat or glasses. The no glasses is a relatively new thing. The final of the top 3 is a $110 Dollar Demand Draft which MUST be acquired from one of the following 3 Philippines banks for each passport: Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), Banco De Oro (BDO) or Security Bank (SBC). At the time of this post, they do not accept Dollar Demand Drafts from any other financial institution. Make the draft out to the U.S. Embassy Manila. For the Form DS-82 there is a checklist at the top. You must be able to answer “Yes” to all the questions to be able to use that form. We were able to answer “Yes” to them all.

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