Kimkathleen

Hi Steve, Thanks for your very prompt and helpful reply and is exactly what I wanted to hear as it means a few long holidays and we’ve met the requirements. I believe we will probably be processed in Adelaide for our 188C as we’re based in the UK and our funds will mainly be from the sale of my husband’s business which has recently completed with the balance from the sale of a second home, so it should be a fairly simple audit trail. We have already completed our own due diligence on investment companies and plan to go with of the larger companies mainly due to their rigour in ensuring our funds will always be compliant. We’ve been nominated by Western Australia and their only stipulation regarding our investments is that we must agree to reinvest our $5m in any WA assets which could include our main residence once we get PR, so we wouldn’t need to pay the eye-watering additional 7% stamp duty. We’ve also agreed a further sum which will be invested in WA prior to applying for our 888. Fortunately, our $5m complying investment does not need to favour WA during the 188 stage so it makes it easier to choose which funds to invest in. We’ve received a request today to send a signed letter specifying exactly which of our funds from our SALP will be used for the complying investment, so I’m hoping it means things will move quite quickly now, although we did only lodge our application end of November. Thanks again for your reply and I’ll let you know how quickly our 188C gets processed.

We’re in the process of applying for our 188C under the new rules and trying to do a bit of forward planning for when we are able to apply for our 888 and are a bit confused about it. We understand that we’re able to apply after 3 years assuming we’ve met the residence requirement. Does this mean the minimum period of grant is now 3 years instead of 4 as some of the documents still say you must have had your investment for 4 years? If so, I assume everything will be updated to reflect that? Also is the 40 days per year the requirement so it would be 120 days after 3 years or would it still need to be based on 4 years? If the processing time is shorter than 12 months then we’d have a problem if we applied after 3 years but need the investment in place for 4 years.