Hello!
We're due to apply for ILR around early June and we're fortunate in that we can currently meet the income requirement through savings or employment.
What we can't decide is which one to use. For the first visa we used a combination of income and savings. Then for FLR we used just my employment income.
Using savings would be easier (less documentation), but we're a bit concerned with how to declare the source.
In our initial visa where we used income and savings, we declared it as life savings and employment income which it is. But we did receive maybe a couple grand as wedding gifts which we mentioned. My wife also had been gifted like £2000 as a 21st birthday gift years ago. We mentioned that as well.
When applying for ILR we meet the savings requirement with room to breathe so those gifts don't even really affect anything.
So if we did use cash savings isn't there a chance they could want signed letters verifying all of those things as gifts from the people who gave it to us? That's not really possible for some of it. In our initial visa we weren't asked to provide anything like that but because there's a chance it's something to think about.
So would it be better to use employment income?
Possibly over-thinking..
Thanks for reading.