More UK spouse visa fun
Whew! So I just submitted my UK spouse visa application a couple of days ago. It’s changed a LOT since the last time I did this 13 years ago.
Over a decade ago, we gathered all of our documents in a binder, complete with photos and screenshots of all our emails to prove our love (so romantic!). I had to include a copy of my college degree, a copy of my CV, and a letter from a friend in the UK saying we could stay with them. There was no financial requirement and no NHS surcharge. Ah, simpler times.
Now, it’s all digital document uploading (no surprise there), and it’s VERY focused on finances and our savings. There were hardly any questions about our relationship and no questions about my job or income. Here’s how it went:
You complete your application online. You can save it and come back to it again and again, I think for up to 10 weeks before it’ll expire, which is helpful because it takes awhile and there are lots of random things you need to go look up. Definitely have your passports handy.
You can go back and review all your answers and make edits if needed. And there’s a section where you can add any other info/explain anything that might need it. I struggled with my application at times, because I lived in the UK previously and there were questions about if I’d ever seen a doctor in the UK (yes) and when (sorry, I do not remember the date of my pap smear in 2013).
What hasn’t changed? Still lots of unnerving questions about if you’ve committed crimes against humanity or are wanted for acts of terrorism in any country. Who is applying for this and answering yes?! That’s what I want to know.
The financial requirement if you are using cash savings is £88,500 in a savings account for six months. We sold our investment property last summer so that we could meet that requirement, although reading the fine print now it says we could’ve sold within the last six months and just show that sale paperwork, but whatever. It’s probably easier to just have the six months of bank statements and not be trying to coordinate a house sale and this visa so close together.
Another way you can meet the financial requirement is if your sponsor has a UK job. My husband owns a small business and plans to keep running it in the UK, so I was hoping to include his income as backup, but they don’t let you combine cash savings + self employment in your application to meet the financial requirement. Something about it not being clear what’s savings and what’s income. Not the end of the world for us, but damn, they make it complicated.
You need to be ready to pay the eye-watering fees when you submit your application. The NHS surcharge is over $4,000 and the visa fee is over $2,000. Two of my credit cards thought it was fraud and declined the transaction before I was able to get my husband’s card to go through. You only get five chances to submit payment. What happens after the fifth time? Do they just delete your application?! Ahhhhhh!
After you submit your application, you get sent to a third-party website to upload all of your supporting documents and schedule an in-person biometrics appointment. (It’s kind of a money grab - Do you want text updates? That’ll be $6. Need help uploading your documents? Just $99.)
The site times out pretty quickly so you need to have everything ready to upload. Nothing like a little extra pressure: you’ve bet $6K on this thing, there are dozens of bank statements to sort through, and a slightly janky website will log you out if you don’t hurry the F up.
I haven’t had my appointment yet, but after I do that I’ll need to mail in my passport and wait for an answer. I think the wait time right now is about 12 weeks.
The supporting documents definitely take awhile to organize. Here’s what we included for our “cash savings only” application, note that everything has to be in A4 size for extra funzies:
6 months of bank statements for each of the 3 different banks that we listed in our application (we included more savings than was needed because why not)
3 “declaration of savings” letters, one for each of the banks. You need to write a letter confirming the money is yours and you can access it, but there isn’t clear guidance on what needs to be in the letter or how many letters you need - one for each account? one for everything? I found that if I had a question, someone had already asked it on Reddit, and the answer is usually a shrug emoji.
6 months of mortgage statements, water bills and our property tax bill to show that we have shared financial responsibilities. This was one of the requirements in the application, and I didn’t realize how few accounts are in both of our names. Gas bill and childcare are in my name and we have separate phone bills. At least we’ve got the mortgage!
Our marriage certificate
The bio page of my husband’s British passport
I included a couple extra things too - a copy of my husband’s birth certificate, a note from our financial advisor verifying some of our account details, and the closing statement from the property we sold last year that details how much money we made from the sale.
I’m a little nervous about the financial requirements. Our savings is mostly in brokered CDs and money markets, and the guidelines say that they can’t be brokerage accounts. They’re not, but the statements come from a brokerage firm. So… I dunno. There’s nothing I can do about it now. And the comments online are all over the place. Some people had trouble getting approved, some had no problem, some used this account or another and it was fine, while it didn’t work for someone else. The problem is that it’s all kind of arbitrary and obviously depends on the person and situation. It’s like those signs, “you must be this tall to ride” except it’s “you must be this rich to live in the UK”.
