Spouse visa – docs to show shared financial responsibilities

[Melhan]

I am a UK national living in England and my boyfriend is a Turkish national living in Turkey (non-EU). We have maintained a long distance relationship for more than 3.5 years now. We are planning to marry this year in Turkey and then apply for a spouse visa which would allow us to be together finally and also give my boyfriend the right to work in the UK. We believe that we have good evidence of all the spouse visa requirements - we have met each other’s families three times each, we have so many photos of holidays together over the past 3.5 years and receipts and booking confirmations for all our travels and hotels we have stayed in. We have a 3.5 year history of emails, Skype conversations, Facebook and phone records. We meet the financial requirement and my boyfriend meets the English requirement. He has applied for 6 visitor visas since we have been together and all of them have been successfully granted. However, we are concerned that we don’t have any evidence to prove that we have shared financial responsibilities. The official UKBA website suggests we need to show evidence that we

• share financial responsibilities with your partner, such as a joint mortgage or tenancy agreement, a joint bank account or joint savings, and utility bills in both your names;

Since we are living in different countries at the moment, we obviously do not have a joint mortgage, tenancy agreement or utility bills in both our names. When my boyfriend was in the UK with me for the Christmas/New Year holiday we made an appointment at the HSBC bank to open a joint bank account/savings account just so that we could prove that our relationship was genuine for the spouse visa application (we didn’t say this reason to the bank manager). A telephone call to the HSBC helpline told us that there would be no problem with our application to open a joint bank account even if we lived in different countries (Flexible Saver Account). However, we were refused on the grounds that my boyfriend was currently in the UK on a visitor visa. Even after meeting the manager the decision was not overturned. Then we tried to add each other as additional card holders on each other’s credit card accounts but this was not possible since we were not living at the same address or country in each case. We also tried to open a joint PayPal account but this is not possible.

So our question is this:
What type of documents can we show to prove that we have shared financial responsibilities? The only pieces of evidence that we have now are the following. Will these suffice?

• On occasions I have paid for my boyfriend’s flight tickets to the UK for visiting me using my credit card
• My boyfriend has paid for some of the hotels that we have stayed in together using his credit card
• I transferred some money from my bank to my boyfriend’s bank account on one occasion

If this evidence is not enough, please can anyone advise us what we can do to prove that we share financial responsibilities?

Thank you for your help

[Casa]

There's no requirement for you to share joint finances when applying for a spouse visa.

[SAMISPOUSAL]

melhan

are u sure you are looking at spousal sponsoring info in your quote?

if you have 3.5 years of relationship that is very strong indeed....
and u even have proof of some financial support for each other.. so u seem ok..

they just want to see that there is a genuine commitment to the relationship..that is maintained.. ..

[Melhan]

Thank you Casa for your confirmation. We understood that the list of suggested evidence to prove our relationship was just a list of suggested points to address but we thought that proving shared financial responsibilities was important. It’s reassuring to know that it is not a requirement and we will certainly include the small pieces of shared financial activities that we do have evidence for.

Since writing this post, my boyfriend found a link to a document written by the UKBA to advise case workers on how to assess genuine and subsisting relationships
http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitec ... iew=Binary

We hadn’t seen it before and believe that it gives a little more information on how the relationship is assessed compared to the UKBA website. I added the link here in case it is useful for other forum users.

Samispousal; thank you for your support and good luck with your application too.