Hi all! You may or may not remember me - I'm the Brazilian one! - from a couple of months ago when I came here asking for help to fill up my fiance visa! Well turns out this visa thing won't be finished anytime soon so here I am again trying to sort out the the next step after the fiance....getting the FLR(M)!!!
Just to get it out there, we do meet the financial requirements by miles and are going for category A. We own a 1 bed flat and I have the english language certificate.
We are going to get married on April 27th and have a reception on May 4th so we plan on submitting our application after our reception so we have more photos - is it necessary (?), otherwise might as well submit after the registrar's.
From my understanding, the requeriments are basically the same (if someone has a checklist I'd love to see one please), only changes are that we do not need to provide communication evidences and that we now have to provide a marriage certificate and utility bills. And here is where I need more explanation.
Apparently we need "proper" mail which means bills sent on the post. The thing is, for the fiance visa, we submitted printouts of online bills that we downloaded and it seems like everything went smooth. All of our post is paperless except for the water bill. So my question is, how does the online bill differ from a physical one? Because they are identical! Can we just continue with our paperless post and download bills every now and then so we keep hold of them all? If we can't then can someone please direct me to where it says in the guidelines that paperless aren't accepted? I ask because my other half is a bit stubborn and he doesn't want to believe paperless aren't accepted.
Also, seeing this is my first FLR(M) am I expected to provide 6 joint bills (or a combination) ? I arrived on Feb 15th and as I said plan on submitting the aplication early May.
Thank you all for always being so helpful!
It is not necessary to wait 'til after the reception to apply, and you don't need loads of photos. You must be married (and have your marriage certificate in hand) when you submit your application, but there's no need for a reception at all. In my case, my husband and I got married at the Registrar's office, and the next day we applied for FLR(M).
For the fiancee application, you didn't need to provide correspondence addressed to both of you to prove you were living together. But now you do. This is why you need official post that was physically sent to you, rather than printed online utility bills. You need to have things that arrived by post to the both of you at the same address from at least three different "official" sources (utilities, banks, GP, government agencies, etc.) to prove that you and your fiancee are receiving your post at the same physical address. Printing bills/statements off of PDF don't prove this.
You will need to provide these items of correspondence for both FLR(M)s and for ILR in five years' time. So convince your partner to turn off paperless and get your name on as much as you can, or you're going to have some
stressful application times!
Requirements are very similar:
Financial (Category A, you said?):
- Six FULL months of sponsor's payslips
- Six FULL months of sponsor's bank statements showing wages paying in
- Letter from sponsor's employer verifying employment details
- (Optional but recommended) Sponsor's employment contract
- (Optional but recommended) Sponsor's latest P60
Accommodation:
- Land Registry document showing sponsor's ownership of your flat.
- Most recent mortgage statement (if mortgaged)
Relationship:
- Marriage certificate
- Six items of jointly-addressed, or twelve items of individually-addressed correspondence from at least 3 sources to show you two live in the same place.
Edited to add: And your English language certificate, of course!
That's the basics of what you need to show.
