benemar

We uploaded a lot of evidence. We saw a website/bloggers who had recently been through the process and were successfully awarded their visa after 6 months. We decided we would try and find similar types of evidence as used by them.

Social evidence included: 4 weddings we've attended, lots of holidays (abroad, camping trips, music festivals etc) and family gatherings, facebook posts, photos, email correspondence showing proof of hotels, flights, etc. We also included 3 stat decs from friends/family.

Financial evidence: Joint responsibility for house, utility bills, council tax, insurance. We do not have a joint account, as we both use our apps to transfer money to each other, when needed. We simply made a statement about that and provided lots of annotated bank statements.

Commitment: Engagement proof, party etc and our wedding certificate, photos, honeymoon. Relationship statement explaining how we run our house, commitment to each other and plans for our future.

We wrote a statement for each area in an attempt to explain our evidence to make it easier for our CO to understand, hopefully. It took us ages.

 

Three months today and still waiting. We have been together for 2 and half years and married for 8 months! I have a 15 year old son who has just received his Australian passport in the post this week. My husband is the applicant and assume we will get the 309, although not sure, as we both obviously now care for my child. Perhaps we will be assessed for the 100 (not sure when the Australian child is a step child)?

 

Really, really can not wait to hear anything; medical, more evidence, there's a long wait... I don't think we will be awarded our visa in 5 months.

I'm pretty sure we followed the same blog post! We uploaded loads and loads of evidence (the whole process took us over two weeks) and our visa sub. 100 was granted yesterday.. in under 5 months!

I'm fairly sure that having plenty of evidence doesn't hurt (and gave us peace of mind at least) even thought fair a few people in different forums are claiming that overdoing it might actually be unhelpful. I can finally say that overdoing things didn't slow the process down in our case and I just wanted to let you know! We did organise everything carefully too, with similar documents grouped together in single PDFs with a clear summary on the front cover.

Best of luck!! B

Update: VISA GRANTED! Straight to the 100 and it took just under 5 months - needless to say, we are over the moon! I hope everyone will get their visa soon, looks like things are moving rather quickly. If anyone has any questions please do let me know!

Hi everyone,

 

Since someone was asking, we applied in mid-July and we are still waiting!

 

This forum has been so helpful to us and I thought it was about time to share our experience: I am the applicant, I'm Italian and my husband is Australian from birth. Our case is pretty straight forward - we are a young couple but we have been together for 4.5 years and we have been married for 3 and a half. We have lived in the UK most of the time and we have applied from London. We have provided plenty of evidence covering every aspect of our relationship from when we first met until shortly before we sent our application in.

 

The application was sent on the 14th of July 2016, our CO contacted us on the 1st of September 2016 and asked for Police Check and Medicals - we provided them within 12 days. We are waiting now but hopefully it shouldn't take much longer! I can see that some people who applied at the end of June have got their visa granted now and that makes me feel quite confident, but I don't want to get my hopes up too much (especially cause it seems to me that most of those cases are of couples who have been together for much longer and have kids too).

 

Hi everyone,

Since someone was asking, we applied in mid-July and we are still waiting!

This forum has been so helpful to us and I thought it was about time to share our experience: I am the applicant, I'm Italian and my husband is Australian from birth. Our case is pretty straight forward - we are a young couple but we have been together for 4.5 years and we have been married for 3 and a half. We have lived in the UK most of the time and we have applied from London. We have provided plenty of evidence covering every aspect of our relationship from when we first met until shortly before we sent our application in.

The application was sent on the 14th of July 2016, our CO contacted us on the 1st of September 2016 and asked for Police Check and Medicals - we provided them within 12 days. We are waiting now but hopefully it shouldn't take much longer! I can see that some people who applied at the end of June have got their visa granted now and that makes me feel quite confident, but I don't want to get my hopes up too much (especially cause it seems to me that most of those cases are of couples who have been together for much longer and have kids too).

Fingers crossed for all of us!