It's Go Time for me!

[Ms Hogan 295]

Some of you know I've been here trying to prep ahead of time as we aren't married yet but were going to be soon... well we set our date so it's time to get to work.

We are getting married on October 20th. We were going to do New Year's Eve but we're hoping to time all of this well enough to hopefully make the transition between school years so the disruption to the kids is minimal. So we're set for October 20th! The place we're getting married is actually going to hand-deliver the paperwork after our ceremony, to the city hall immediately so that we'll actually be able to leave with our marriage certificate in hand. This will save me the hassle of having to apply and wait for it. I will be able to come home and immediately update my name on everything including passport, driver's license etc.

So questions at this point are:

1. Do I use my newly acquired married name on the applications?

2. We do not have any joint accounts or ownership yet. I do have TONS of history, everything including phone bills, photos, airline tickets to Florida to take my kids to Disney World a couple years ago. The list is long but I'm not sure what to actually include.

3. I read something, somewhere in a post here, stating that you only need the past two years' worth of documentation? Is that true?

4. Do I assemble items in a binder?

5. For photos, is it helpful to put a note on the front of them, like embedded on the photo using photoshop or something to show the time, date, event etc?

6. Speaking of photos, I don't have any of us really, but lots of him with my kids. Is that going to be enough?

7. I know I have to do a complete package for me and each of my 2 children BUT can they be sent together? Or do they have to go individually?

I think that is PLENTY for me to be asking about right now. I'm nervous and excited but I want to get everything ready so all I have to do is add the marriage certificate to the package and send it off.

[alizon 77]

I'm assuming we're talking about a regular I-130 here, right? (It's not listed under your username.)

2. We were fine without any joint ownership/accounts/leases/etc. We included photos, plane tickets, minimal email logs, summary pages of text messages, and a couple affidavits. We probably over did it.

3. Maybe you read that about removing conditions? I would include stuff from the entire length of your relationship, just snippets from each period.

4. I don't think you should use a binder because they're going to tear your file apart when they get it anyway to put it in whatever order they want/need. We had a title page and everything in order, but nothing stapled or attached in any way.

5. We just copied each digital photo into a Word doc and added a description (names, date, place) under each one.

Edited September 21, 2012 by alizon

[Ms Hogan 295]

I shall update my profile right away! Thank you for pointing that out. I do like the idea of the Word document for photos, perhaps I'll start putting that together.