All about the UK Spouse Visa financial requirements

Allow me to start with the (hopefully obvious) caveat that I’m not an expert, just a bureaucratic red-tape hobbyist . . .

The old UK Spouse Visa financial requirements

I got a UK Spouse Visa once before in 2012. Boy, those were the days! No financial requirements in sight. The British government seemed mostly interested in weeding out arranged marriages and mail-order brides. I remember having to provide a bunch of documentation that my spouse and I had actually met and knew each other and had a relationship - we did this by providing screenshots of our emails to each other, photos from our time together and utility bills since we lived together.

At that time, the government was only mildly worried about foreigners mooching off the system. Like, one weird requirement was that we had to provide a letter from a friend or family member stating that we could stay with them and that they owned their home - no government-subsidized housing for us!

The new UK Spouse Visa financial requirements

Fast-forward more than 10 years and how times have changed. Now the British government seems determined to keep poor people out of the country at all costs (pun intended?).

You are welcome to go read the long and confusing appendices, but here’s my paraphrased takeaway:

Since we want to move together and won’t have UK jobs yet, I’ll need to provide proof of sufficient cash savings to cover the entire two-and-a-half-year duration of the visa. For the government, this equates to £62,500, or about $80,000. To make it an even bigger pain, the money needs to be easily accessible in a savings account (i.e., not in retirement accounts, not tied up in assets like property). And you need six months of bank statements showing that this money is just sitting there in your savings account.

(You’d need even more in savings if you were bringing kids who were not UK citizens. Luckily, we have our daughters’ UK passports, so cross that one off the list.)

Who has $80K sitting in a savings account?

We make a decent household income and I’m a ferocious saver, and there’s still no way we have that much money just kicking around our savings.

What makes me sad is thinking back to the first time we applied for the UK Spouse Visa - we were in our 20s, I was a student and my husband was bartending. In other words, we were normal 20-somethings, figuring things out. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we got the spouse visa, moved to London and made a great life for ourselves. I was gainfully employed the whole time we lived there. I paid rent, paid taxes, bought stuff, was a contributing member of society. And if this $80K financial requirement had been in place then, there’s no way we could have met it. Moving to the UK would simply not have been an option. What a damn shame for anyone in that situation now.

Alternatives to the cash savings

There are other ways to meet the financial requirements. If your UK spouse has held a UK job with a decent salary for at least six months, you can go that route. For us, that’s pretty impossible. It would mean living apart for a year - my husband would have to move to the UK, get established, find a job, work there for six months before we could apply for a visa, then wait for it to be approved, then reunite. C’mon.

I guess he could try to get a UK job while still based in the US, but that seems like a stretch too. With the time difference and not knowing yet where we want to settle, it’s tough to summon the motivation to start a job search. I’m also not sure about the details - like, do you need your paychecks deposited into a UK bank account? Probably.

Our plan to meet the UK Spouse Visa financial requirements

So what are we going to do? Lucky for us, although we didn’t plan for it this way on purpose, we have an investment property that we can cash in and use to meet the financial requirements.

I guess the alternative would be to sell our owner-occupied home and then rent for a year until we could move. Again, such an unrealistic and disruptive ask for a family to undertake just to meet this random requirement. Ugh!

What about the other requirements of the UK Spouse Visa?

The financial requirement is the doozy I’m most focused on. The other aspects of the visa process should be pretty straightforward (famous last words), and it helps that we’re in an English-speaking country, otherwise there’s the extra step of getting everything officially translated. Plus, we’ve been together for so long (approximately five hundred years) that we’ve got stacks of documentation. There’s a big fee to pay and last time there were extra steps where you had to go get your biometrics done. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Another reason why I’m giving us lots of time to prep and plan for everything.

One note if you have questions about the UK Spouse Visa

Since the financial requirement is so steep and will impact our lives in many ways, we thought it might be prudent to talk to someone and make sure we understood what we were reading on the UK government website.

My husband called the number on the website (even though it warned us many times that we’d be charged by the minute for the call!) and the person who answered was hilariously unhelpful. They said they couldn’t advise us on anything about visas. When we said we didn’t want advice, just clarification on the murky website info, the person repeated that they couldn’t tell us ANYTHING. And that was basically it. I ask you, what is the point? So maybe don’t waste your time calling a government customer service phone number.

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