Your First Time American Passport – Getting One Can Be Not As Hard As You’d Think

Applying for a First Time Passport for the first time can be very confusing. Don’t worry though, because it’s perfectly fine to feel that way. After all, you need to deal with a lot of things for the first time, fill in forms, and submit documents. The truth is that applying for passports doesn’t have to be confusing or even stressful. We’ll show you in the following paragraphs how you can easily apply for one minus the confusion and the hassle.

Because you’ll be dealing a lot with forms, it pays to be familiar with the different forms used in passport applications. Some forms are used to apply for passports; others are used to renew passports; others are for reporting the loss or theft of passports. Now since you’re likely applying for a passport for the first time, let’s deal with the first type of passport.

For first-time passport applicants, the DS-11 form is the one that needs to be filled out.  Unlike the pre-Internet days where you had to go to the passport office to obtain the form, now all you need to do is download this form at the US Department of State’s office website. Once you’ve downloaded it, you can fill the form in before printing it, or you can just print it first then fill it in by hand.

Once you have submitted this form along with all the necessary requirements for your application, your passport will then be processed. There are two ways of processing this: routine passport processing, and expedited passport processing. The routine passport processing is what you can choose to use if you are not planning to use your passport for foreign travel in the next ten weeks. Routine processing typically takes four to six weeks to complete.

Meanwhile, if you need to have your passport processed in less than four weeks, then you need to have your application expedited. As the name suggests, an expedited passport takes a lot faster to process than those that go through routine processing. In other words, expedited passports are given priority over routine ones.

In the case of an expedited New Passport, they are usually processed within two to three weeks and is thus the choice of travelers who need to have their passports quickly.  If you need to travel within that period, getting an expedited passport is an obvious choice.

Speeding up the process of your application takes more resources. That’s why expedited passports have a small additional fee on top of the regular passport processing fees. Don’t worry about this though, as the price you have to pay isn’t the hefty, and it pays for itself in the form of speed and convenience that you get.

When it comes to applying for a New Passport Application, you have two options to go about it. First, you can choose the routine passport processing that doesn’t require an extra fee, but may be too slow if you need to travel soon. Then there’s the expedited passport processing. The price that you pay for this kind of service is offset by the convenience and speed that it affords you.

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