The letter with the ITIN felt like a finish line. Nine digits, starting with 9. I put the letter in a folder called "done" and went back to the rest of the year. Two things in that folder were still unfinished, and both of them are quiet. Neither one sends a reminder.
The first is the number itself. An ITIN expires if it is not used on a federal tax return for three consecutive tax years. I had treated the letter as a document that sits there, the way a passport sits there until a trip. It is not. A year with no return that uses the number is a year counted against those three. I did not have that sentence until I went looking for what "keep it" actually means.
The second quiet thing is a credit file. The number does not open one. A bank account does not, by itself, become a score. Something has to report. I learned that by checking and finding nothing, which is a strange kind of result: the page loads, and the person it describes is missing.
The year after the letter
ITIN Club is the free community that writes the path in one order: get the ITIN, open a US bank account, start a credit file, grow a score, then look at travel or a card, and stay current so the number does not lapse. I had done step one and then stopped, because step one came with a letter and the later steps do not.
The course that walks the first year is Your first year with an ITIN. I read it the way I read assembly instructions, one step open at a time. The bank guide is How to open a US bank account as a non-resident. The card guide, which I am not ready for and which I read anyway so I would stop applying early, is How to get a US credit card as a non-resident.
Checking was its own page, and it is the one I now keep: How to check your US credit score as a non-resident. "No file yet" is an answer. It is not an error message. It means the later step has not happened.
What "stay current" turned out to be
Stay current is not a mood. For the number, it means a federal return uses the ITIN often enough that three tax years do not pass with it sitting out. I put the three-year line on a piece of paper next to the letter. I am not a tax adviser and I am not going to pretend the paper is a plan for anyone else's return. It stopped me calling the folder "done."
For the file, stay current means something is reporting, and then time passes. A score is not a prize you collect the week the account opens. The guides are dull on this in a way I trust. They do not tell you to apply for the travel card first. The travel card is the last step, after a file exists and a score has had time to be a score.
If you also run a US company, do not mix the company's EIN into this folder. The EIN is the company's number. The ITIN is yours. A foreign-owned single-member LLC usually files Form 5472 every year even when the company had no income, and the penalty for missing it starts at $25,000. That figure is the club's summary of the IRS rule, not advice from me. I mention it because I almost filed the EIN letter in the same sleeve as the ITIN and called them both "tax numbers."
The list I keep on the folder
- The ITIN letter, with the year it was issued written on the outside.
- A note of the last federal return that used it, so the three quiet years are visible.
- The bank account that accepts the number, personal or business, and which one it is.
- The date I last checked whether a credit file exists.
- The card applications I did not send.
None of this is tax or financial advice. It is the maintenance I did not know a nine-digit number needed. The pages, in the order I actually used them:
- ITIN Club
- Your first year with an ITIN
- How to open a US bank account as a non-resident
- How to get a US credit card as a non-resident
- How to check your US credit score as a non-resident
The letter is still in the folder. The folder is no longer called done.
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