Regarding Fred Wahl, maybe many years ago you would be lost without help, but these days there is a ton of support, like this website/forum, youtube, etc., if you cannot afford an attorney.
We used Fred Wahl and our experience made me believe that any testimonials in praise of his service was absolute fake, I could not believe it is the same service. His service could not have been less professional.
I should have known from the start when they sent me their own forms to fill out, from which they would take the information I provided and use it to fill out the govt. forms.... why not just have me fill out the govt. forms?
Their forms were broken English, bad grammar, bad spelling, duplicate questions, just horrible!
At first there were three basic things to fill out, background on myself and my foreign wife, and a financial on myself.
I was waiting on the IRS for some information and was unable to complete the financial questions right away so I let Fred Wahl's "office" know and the answer I received was:
"We already received your spouse's questionnaire, but not yours. We need both questionnaires to prepare your forms and doc, please email us ASAP.
If that is the main question you don't know the answer to, just send us the questionnaire anyway. Plenty of time to provide this info later."
Now maybe I am thick headed sometimes but the urgency they put on me getting the questionnaires to them with the ASAP, and the idea that we have plenty of time later to fill in additional information that I don't have from the IRS caused my wife and I to believe that the initial forms Fred Wahl so urgently needed was to secure my "place in line".
In the following 8 months I made a couple more trips to see my wife, gathering more and more proof of our relationship, etc., trusting in our "visa coach" to let us know what we needed to give them and when, but we didn't get much coaching, in fact we got generic answers days after asking, or pretty much "I don't know" answers in the form of a link to a google search for the topic of my question. After 8 months I decided that I had enough and sent it in to them to add to the package, still thinking that we had secured our place in line 8 months earlier.
No, no we had not, our visa coach sat on those urgent documents for 8 months, put together a middle school craft project and sent it to me(everything I paid to ship to them, they shipped back to me so I could then ship it to the govt), with instructions on how to ship it, where to ship it, etc., and that is when we found out we had NOTHING submitted to the govt to establish our place in line, we were sick, we stopped using the "visa coach" and did EVERYTHING after that ourselves and had much more confidence in our work than theirs.
I would still ask every question in an email to our visa coach even though I only looked at their answer for amusement, they told us to DO things that the govt explicitly instructs in bold words NOT TO DO, and told us things not to do that we absolutely had to do.
I could vent this for many paragraphs of details, but here is the short of it, the stress my wife and I experienced had to do with Fred Wahl, not the US Govt!!!
Whatever we researched and did on our own, which was most of it, was fairly straight forward, I won't say completely stress free but when I was leaning on our "visa coach" for answers, life was not good, once we went on our own, life was so much better.
I would not want to steer anyone wrong, but if we had found it to be too difficult to go on our own and felt like we really did need help that we could not have got from Fred Wahl, I would have paid for an attorney, sold a car, whatever it took, but if we found that we really did need help we would have found a way to pay for an attorney even though we already spent a ton of money on the "visa coach", but we found that it was not really hard, it is just confusing sometimes but places like this website will most likely answer your questions.
From the things I read in this website, it is a much better visa coach than the one calling himself the visa coach!
My wife is now here in America, we are married over three years, she is all set with green card etc., in three years she will become American citizen, we breezed through all the processes in Manila, so my grudge against the "coach" is not because we failed, my wife and I worked VERY hard to succeed in this process and I can honestly say the only thing we got from the "coach" was a person to organize all the paperwork that I shipped them, that's it, they just filled in the forms, but actually did not do that correctly, they made grammar and spelling mistakes, and even I made one and didn't correct it because I though for sure they would... nope, whatever mistakes I made were copied verbatim to the govt forms!!!
I had to correct all mistakes before sending to govt.
I did not tell half the horror story, don't really want to re-live my dealings with the "coach", I want to forget it ever happened, and when we apply to sponsor family members, we will either do it ourselves or hire an attorney.
It is my opinion now that hiring anyone for immigrations help that is not an immigration attorney is a huge mistake, hire the real deal or DIY with help from places like this!
