SharksBelow

I think we are ready!

We have:

Cover letter

I-130 Form

G-325A x 2, passport photo x 2

Payment

G-1145

Petitioner's US Passport (all pages)

Marriage certificate

My (beneficiary's) birth certificate

Bank statement showing mingling of financial resources (joint bank account)

Bank statement showing Australian address of petitioner

Statutory Declarations sworn by: a) my father with whom we reside and share living expenses; b) a friend who will attest to an ongoing relationship & genuine marriage

Wedding photographs

Proposal photograph

I'm including on the cover letter a list of other evidence available but not putting it in the packet because I don't want to send them unnecessary stuff.

I am attaching everything together with paperclips and then a bulldog clip to secure the whole thing before putting it into the envelope. I have some small plastic flag markers at the bottom for each section.

T-1 hour until post office!

So much stress but I really hope we are going to be okay.

Do you mean affidavits towards your relationship? They're really low on the list of evidence. But you could have your father do one because you are both living with him. But where you're from, they don't require as much as other places and also they don't expect a tonne from newlyweds.

http://www.visajourney.com/wiki/index.php/EZGuideSpouse

there's a big list at the bottom of the wiki about kinds of evidence you can send.

Thank you! I think I'll still send what we have already collated, since I worked so hard to do it. Good to know I can send copies of things.

So should I get affidavits / statutory declarations of support or not worry about it? We're going to have my father do one because we're living with him and as such have no tenancy agreement or anything, but we are splitting the bills with him and doing a lot of manual labour type things around the place and at his work. We thought we could also get one from the guy with whom we were both staying when we met, also from a long-term friend of mine here in my home town with whom my fiance has become very good friends.

Thoughts?

If you file from Australia to the Chicago lock box you are likely to be expedited. There's a thread on here somewhere about it. Most are routed to CSC. We are in Oz and were approved at the CSC in 20 days. We are already upto filing the 864 at the national visa centre and we only stated the process in March. Hoping to have the interview within 7 months of starting this whole process... You might be lucky and get through quickly!

Wow, that's AMAZING! We will hope like hell for that!

I see my thread got moved, oops. Not really weighing up visa options! We only have one option and have not changed our minds ...

Oh yeah cool I have visited USA on the waiver program before! Sorry, yes, I know what you mean now.

I'm probably organised in strange and unnecessary ways. For example, I have my new passport form filled out all ready to have my new name on it, because we are applying for the visa in my new name so that will need to be done ASAP.

Apart from the obvious things like forms required and my birth certificate and my to-come wedding certificate, I have:

• every single itinerary (and SOME but not all boarding passes, booo, wish I knew we should have kept those!) of ours that we ever used to travel together or visit each other
• lots of emails
• IRC chat logs (including the one where we first exchanged "the L word")
• invitations to things we received in both our names (wedding invites)
• our own wedding stationery
• announcements of our relationship and engagement on Facebook
• statutory declarations from lots of our friends and family (some still to come)
• a joint bank account statement
• letter that had his secondary credit card off mine with his name and address
• correspondence sent to him here from places like the NH & VT bar association
• emails to me from his lovely parents who are co-sponsoring me
• cards that we sent each other on occasions such as birthdays and Christmas
• cards addressed to both of us from parents & friends at above occasions
• Receipts for things such as the engagement ring, wedding rings, wedding photography etc

Gosh there's probably some things we don't even need to worry about in there! But I'd really rather be over-prepared than under.

What are some common RFEs? I suppose I should just look around the site..

You can make it better by making sure you don't get RFE's or checklists later on for sure.

Some of it is luck though and how the USCIS is moving. That is the part where you don't know what is happening etc... It's the hardest because you just sit on your thumbs and wait.

But you are VWP and can visit, and vice versa! YAY

Please pardon my ignorance! What is VWP? I was always nervous about the visiting thing in case they get wary of travellers who are in the process of attempting to obtain a visa and it might look bad for us. Then I saw the thread on this forum saying that it's okay to visit as long as you have proof of returning to your country!

However, flights between AUstralia and the USA are pretty expensive! The other thing we could probably do is have my then-husband pop over to New Zealand (or we could go together!) before his WH visa is up, and come back on a tourist visa so he can stay another three months. The immigration person I spoke to said to be careful about doing that, and make sure that the country we visit doesn't mind that happening, before we go, which is good advice I feel.

Why not DCF....he does have proof of residence in the USA home address,

active bank account and current License?...there's no guarantee K1 will be

much shorter based on current movement, I say go ahead and get married

No DCF in Australia! How ridiculous is that! Apparently you used to be able to, but no more.

CR1 can be timely. I've seen them as fast as 4 months total, but the average is about a year from filing to interview. You get a green card upon entry, you can work right away, or travel outside the USA if you want to visit Canada etc. There are some very good advantages to the CR1.

To me, when I was engaged, that was pretty much the same as being married. IMHO an engagement is time to plan a wedding, not see if the relationship is going anywhere.

I hope you have a wonderful wedding!!

Thanks so much! Honestly, he and I are such a perfect fit, I had not a single twinge about getting married "early" in our engagement because I'm 100% sure that we are going to continue to be the excellent married couple that we are unmarried. I completely agree with you, the engagement is about planning the wedding! Even though we are getting the legal paperwork stuff out of the way nice and early, we feel that the "real" wedding is about the love and support of our amazing family and friends so though there'll be no documents signed on the day of the wedding in October, that's when we feel our journey will really begin.

That is reassuring that some people have had theirs done faster. I guess it's just a matter of making sure every i is dotted, and every t crossed.

Looks like there's no way we can extend his visa unless his employer sponsors him which won't happen, he's just doing admin/clerical work, his American law degree isn't transferable here without a lot of money and study!

I guess all we can hope for is a timely processing for the CR1

Calling immigration today. Wow a year to a year and a half for the whole process, huh? Sigh.. lucky I love him.

It's just really unfortunate because we have made plans to get married here. So we can't get a K1 because we'll be married soon. Unless the USA decides it doesn't recognise marriages outside of Australia, which seems pretty unlikely. So even if we started K1 right now, it's less than 5 months til we get married. Sigh. I guess we've gone about this the wrong way huh?

As for him staying here I actually don't know. Something to ask immigration I guess.

Congrats fellow Aussie!!! The marriage visa def takes longer than the K1. My Fiancé and I met while she was studying here in and fell in love, we applied for the defacto Visa and she has now been living here with me for almost 5 years. We applied for my K1 on the 28/4, got approved 12/5 and will be having the interview on 15/7 so all up about 2.5 months to get my K1. Were pretty lucky! Good luck with the process and best wishes on your up coming wedding! Not long to go!!

Are you living in Australia or the USA? Wow that is really fast isn't it! Still not sure how that would help us though; would we not then have to go to the States and get married there within a certain amount of time? Isn't the K1 a fiance visa? I live in Rockhampton and would have to go to the consulate in Sydney for an interview. I'm so confused now!

That does help! Thanks!

Delay the wedding and apply for a finance visa and fly to the USA together at the end of 12 months? Just a thought.

We definitely thought about it. But there's a couple of reasons why we can't.

1. There's no guarantee that we will get a fiancé visa any quicker than a CR1. It may take just as long and we have delayed our wedding for nothing.

2. The October celebration is all booked and paid for. Not just by us, but by friends and family who have sunk a few hundred dollars each into flights to get there. It wouldn't be fair to cancel it. And when would we delay it to? No way to know what the timing of this process will bring.

But we did think about it!

Hi everyone

I'm a wordy type so I'll try to keep this short.

I travelled around the USA in February 2013 and stayed with / visited a bunch of friends with whom I share a hobby / lifestyle (weightlifting). Completely to my surprise, I fell in love with one of them and we've been together ever since.

We visited each other a bunch of times last year. I went to Guam three times where he was working a 12 month contract at the Superior Court as a judge's clerk, and he visited Australia three times as well. On New Years Eve on Guam, on a beautiful beach, he asked me to marry him and I said yes

In March, he moved here to Queensland, Australia on a working holiday visa for 12 months. We decided due to the short amount of time that he is here, that we would get started on the visa process ASAP by getting married formally (legally) sooner rather than later, at the end of June. Our celebration with our friends and family will be in October, in Tasmania. Aren't we lucky?!

We're currently living with my father, which is great, because I get to spend my last bit of time in Australia with him and he is bonding amazingly with my future husband. They are proper bros! It's wonderful.

Obviously we are looking down the barrel of a long and arduous process with my visa, and Ray will definitely have to go home to the USA before it is granted. We have come to terms with this, and wish to do all we can to ensure this is only a brief period of being apart. That's why I've joined up here! What an incredible amount of knowledge and advice there is on this amazing forum.

I am starting to collate all our "proof of relationship" stuff at the moment. Obviously, we can't apply for our visa until we have our marriage certificate, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared. I'm trying to figure out what the best way is to display it all, and how to label it appropriately. I'd love some help with this, I will have a look for appropriate threads.

I think that's it for now. I've blabbered on for long enough!

xoxo