But not without a good old grilling over our joint evidence which left us very confused, hence my post.
Although i really carefully read the evidence required section and had over the amount she wanted, the officer said she wanted more in my name? Im British born so could have given her lots, but i did thought the purpose was our joint evidence? She also said she wanted more than just financial evidence?? even more confusing when you consider our list.
here is what we had:
pay slips both 6 months each
letter from my employers pay role
letter from husbands employer
p60's all years
4 months each of personal accounts,
4 months of bill account (showing mortgage)
4 months joint accounts
home office letters – both names
tax credit letters – both names
phone bills
gas and elec bills (dual fuel) both names
life insurance letters – both names
car insurance letters (both names on, spouse insurance) both names
hospital letters regarding our little one.
The documents advice says evidence from 3 sources and lists them, I made sure i put more, listed the year and month on each packet and what evidence it was.
Further to the evidence i got together for the 2 years, i had a back up packet for each year with extra in, but we still struggled, till finally the officer said its better!
So my advice is to make sure you have lots more than 3, in sections for each year, selected across the months, and have some extra evidence for the settled spouse, because she kept saying she wanted to see more that we were settled. Try joint names on tv licence etc, as it was mentioned.
Arrive a good half hour before your appointment as its very busy (there is a free floor show were the security officer orders everyone about,not always in a good way, and a bit of a shock)
and our appointment was delayed by 3 hours so take food and drinks, although the croydon office did have a cafe/take away for drinks and sandwiches.I do recommend paying the extra for an appointment because, even though our application was straight forward, im sure if we did a postal application then we would have been asked for more evidence, but being there helped a lot.
Plus as my last weeks post states, I was told on making my appointment that 95% of postal applications were taking 6 months.
Hope our experience helps. Good luck.
