lain09

My wife finally got her passport with the CR-1 visa on Feb 8th. It took slightly longer than it should've been but I'm glad we finally have it. 
I figured I'd share what I learned through out the process and experience submitting an I-130 and subsequent I-864 forms through the Direct Consular Filing at the Seoul USCIS office. I don't want to dig through to get exact date but will provide an estimate.
 
Early Sept '18 - Find out about the long process for I-130 spousal visa.
  -Look up I-130 submission appointment slots on the USCIS Seoul website, they only do one day per week and open slots one month in advance one day at a time.
 
Now after making an appointment for when I come back from my trip, we gathered the documents and because I filed taxes online with Korean address the IRS website must have exact match or you can't get the tax reports for the 3 years e-mailed. Luckily I was visiting US for our transition and making an appointment with the IRS website took a week. Info is hard to find to get you to find your answer online but to get print outs you can make an appointment. Police reports, hospital visits, etc.
 
Last week of Oct '18 - We made the first of the day appointment to avoid the rush and you wait on the upper floor to be called. The younger Korean lady was  rude and slightly condescending. I had everything labelled in order with a cover sheet but she went down the list collecting the documents, the labels helped make it go faster. We didn't have the strong evidence for bonafide marriage with no property or finances merged except our shared living and marriage family documents. We included photocopies of our tickets, letters, photos of our relationship and they took all of it.  
Slightly problem that she kept grilling us on was that my US name spelled out is slightly different from my no longer used Korean name printed on my ARC card. The correct English name was written in parenthesis but the old Korean name was on the ID so she needed a document to prove it was certainly me. We call around and find that F4 holders may have their old Korean name printed even though it's not really used anymore and can update it if you choose to delete it. We had no time to go through another form procedure so we wrote that in writing explaining and mailed it in to the office. It got accepted and got a notice for the incoming packet3 after one month I believe.
 
We scheduled our interview appointment for Dec. 21 which worked out perfect as I was leaving for US. Well it got delayed without notice for first week of Jan, we suspect because of the government shutdown. My wife went alone first in the morning and she got the same rude lady again. But it was my fault that I left out the last signature of the I-864 since I wanted to wait on the day of to get the date when we submit it but since it was delayed, I forgot about it. This caused her circling everywhere signatures are missing including the preparer and translator which we did not use. She made my wife wait until every couple has gone through then gave her the 221(g) for the missing signature. 3 Hours just waiting. Wife had to go on a family trip to Japan and couldn't mail her passport in so we waited and submitted last Monday or Friday and passport came back within the week. 
 
It took about 1.5 months for the I-130, 1.5 months for the I-864 interview, 3 week delay from rescheduling and missing signature, few days to get passport with visa. Oct 30 2018 - Feb 8 2019.

It looks like it's taking people 3-4 months until their spouse gets their visa when submitting for DCF while in Korea versus the typical 8-12 months it takes when filing from US. It sounds like it might even be faster to wait and file when I get back from the work trip.