Hey, guys, welcome back
to the Girl Gone London channel, if you're new here, my name is Kalyn.
I'm an American who's lived in the UK for almost 10 years.
And today I am telling you whether or not my indefinite leave to remain application
came back and some possible complications that I had with it.
OK, so I'm going to jump right into things because spoiler alert,
I was going to try and like, make you wait for the answer,
but I'm not I'm pretty excited to share the story, but it is a story.
So basically, if you follow the channel,
if you watched back in January, you'll have seen that I took the life
in the UK test and this was to apply for my indefinite leave to remain.
I will explain indefinite leave to remain in a minute because it's not indefinite.
So I had to do that. Back in January.
I put in my application for my indefinite leave to remain in February of twenty
twenty one, February 12th, to be exact, which was my birthday.
Now at the time, they didn't have the priority service available.
It's like an extortionate amount of money
extra I think 800 pounds ish, which is a lot.
But when you compare it to the fact
that the application itself cost over 2000 pounds,
I was probably going to do it just because
I felt like I've been waiting so long for it.
But they didn't have that available at the time.
So I had to go the normal route, which was basically up to six months waiting time.
So I knew that from February 12th it should come back before August 12th,
but was not guaranteed to come back before then.
So I have basically just been
biding my time, getting vaccinated, feeling pretty trapped, to be honest.
I'll get to that in a minute and waiting for it to come back.
Now, for most people,
they're pretty certain that their indefinite leave application will come
back and they meet all the requirements and everything is hunky dory.
But they say that in the UK, hunky dory comment below.
Let me know. Do you say hunky dory in the UK?
I'd love to know.
I've never heard anyone say it, so I'm guessing.
No, but there you are.
So I knew that I had to wait until August 12 possibly.
And I ran into a little bit of a situation
where I almost didn't qualify, which I will also get to in a minute.
So let me back up a little bit and explain what indefinite leave to remain is,
because, as I said, it's not indefinite, which is it seems indefinite.
And you think it's indefinite, but it's not indefinite.
So what it is, is it's basically a settlement visa.
So you can be on all kinds of visas in the UK.
I've been on basically all of them
throughout my time here, a student visa, a work visa, a partner visa.
They've got more short term visas.
If you're just doing kind of
like an internship, like investor visas, all kinds of visas.
But they don't all lead to a settlement.
So the indefinite leave to remain visa or
I don't think it's called the I don't know if it's technically considered a visa
anymore because it means you don't need a visa, but it's a residence permit.
And this requires you to have spent five
years in the UK on a visa that leads to settlement.
It needs to be continuous as well.
So examples of things that don't lead to settlement would be a student visa.
So the whole point is that you come
to the UK and you're meant to leave, maybe not necessarily right after your program.
Sometimes they will give you time after
there's new graduate visa that gives you like a couple of years after.
But the idea is on a student visa, you're meant to go home eventually.
So the so I've lived here for almost ten
years now, but I did not qualify for indefinite leave
to remain until after I had spent five years on a visa that led to settlement.
So the main options for this are going to be a work visa or a partner visa.
So when my husband and I he was not my husband at the time, five years ago,
we qualified for what they call an unmarried partner visa.
We had been living in the UK together
for two years at that point, and this was while I was on a student visa.
So my time living with him previously didn't count towards my indefinite leave.
But we did end up qualifying
for the Unmarried Partners Visa because we were able to use that time that we had
lived together to show that we were unmarried partners.
And the reason why they have the two year
requirement is that you can just like apply with your roommate anyway.
So that started in March of twenty.
Sixteen is when I got my first partner,
Visa, which was an unmarried partner visa at the time.
Now you are on that one for two and a half
years and then at two and a half years you have to renew.
At this point we had gotten married,
so I basically renewed and was on a married partner visa.
But it doesn't really make that much of a difference.
It was just that what we had to show was our marriage certificate,
as opposed to lots of evidence of like our relationship and living together.
So that would get me my total of five years.
So February of twenty twenty one, actually, Mark.
Of twenty twenty one was my five years
that I was eight that I needed towards my indefinite leave to remain.
There are other stipulations that you need to have in place,
which I'll get into in a minute, because that's where we almost fell short.
So you had to have been actually like living in the UK.
You can't just have gotten the visa five years ago, moved away and then come back
in and be like, I'm ready for my indefinite leave.
You have to show that you've been living in the UK, you've been resident in the UK,
and there's a financial element as well.
So for for one person, if you don't have kids or dependents,
you have to basically show that you and your partner together have eighteen
thousand six hundred pounds of a salary job per year.
There are other options, but once you get into things like
freelancing, I can be pretty difficult to meet
the requirements based on how they count backwards.
And if you made more of this month
and less this month, it's just a lot easier to have a salaried
job in order to kind of pass these visa checks.
So before I tell you what problems we ran into, I will explain.
What I mean by indefinite leave is not indefinite.
And basically you get indefinite leave to remain.
But if you live outside the UK for over two years,
you completely start from scratch.
You completely start from zero.
And I know this sounds like a long time.
So people are like, well, of course,
if you're going to live in the UK, like, why would you be gone for two years?
But if you think about it, you know, there's a big world out there.
What happens if, you know, one of us got a job in America and wanted to take it?
What happens if, God forbid, something happened to someone in my family
and I felt like I needed to be there and, you know, help?
There's all kinds of things that can happen in life.
And so, yes, two years is a long amount of time to spend away from the UK.
But I'm like, I'm I've got lots of plans coming up.
And like I said, there is lots of opportunity out there in the world.
So I didn't want to be I don't want to be in a situation where
they take away my indefinite leave because I've been living for over two years out
of the country, which is why I've also now applied for citizenship.
But that is a whole different video.
So that's what I mean when I say it's
called indefinite leave to remain, but it's not technically indefinite.
They can take it away.
So moving on to the problems that I potentially run into with my visa,
like I said, for most people, it's a pretty simple process.
You've already been here for five years
on these visas leading up, you know what's required.
So my story starts with a salaried job.
So since I have been in the UK
on a partner visa in March of 2016, I had been working a salary job and it was
perfectly fine in order to satisfy the requirements.
So everything was going to be good as the years went on.
And I sort of realized that I should
probably branch out, maybe try and move up, maybe try and go to another company.
I never did out of fear that something
would happen and I wouldn't have a job or I'd apply for a job and they'd accept me.
And then something would happen
with that job and then I wouldn't qualify for indefinite leave.
My husband works freelance, which is why I'm saying my salary job was
a little bit easier for us to satisfy the financial requirement.
Not that we definitely couldn't have, but it's just it's like you don't want
to be caught in a position where something happens and because of,
like the freelance nature of something, you don't qualify.
So I stayed in this job and I stayed in this job.
And as much as I enjoyed the people that I
worked with at this job, in case any of them ever watch this,
the job itself, I just felt like I was definitely had outgrown.
But again, I was so scared and I was like,
just make it to February of 2021 to get the visa to make sure that's all secure.
You've put so much time into your life in the UK and, you know, it's fine.
So even when it was pretty terrible,
I hated my commute and I really wasn't happy.
I just stuck with it in order to get this indefinite leave to remain.
And then what happened was twenty twenty.
And I no longer had a job as of October of twenty twenty.
Now this all has worked out one hundred
percent for the best, which I'll talk about in another video
where I share how I actually make money these days and what my job is.
But at the time I was like six months away from qualifying for indefinite leave
to remain and I lost my job that I always stuck with.
Even though I didn't like it in the end because I was so afraid of not qualifying
for indefinite leave to remain so, this is a great example of why you should
never stick with a job or stick with anything in your life
with the idea that you're definitely going to get something out of it or that it's
definitely secure or anything like that, because at the end of the day,
if something happens globally and a company can no longer hire you
and no longer has the money for your position or doesn't exist,
they don't care about your indefinite leave to remain visa harsh, but true.
So we ended up using savings for the indefinite leave to remain visa.
So the other other option, if you don't have salary or unsalaried
employment, there are a couple of other ways.
But the other main way is through your savings.
So thank God we had kind of seen this coming and been able to hoard a bunch
of savings, get it all together in the right bank accounts.
And I was very lucky to be gifted some money from my grandparents
who unfortunately passed away in the past couple of years,
which was exactly the amount of money needed extra to bring our savings up
to the indefinite leave to remain savings requirement.
So I'm not exactly sure where I stand
on things like that in terms of what it means, if it means anything.
But it was a really, really nice feeling to feel like someone
somewhere knew the situation that I was in and was looking out for me anyway.
So we ended up qualifying basically
by the skin of our teeth on the SAT on the savings requirement for my visa.
So it didn't matter at that point that I had lost my job because we only had
to submit bank statements with savings because of the whole situation globally.
They did have some things in place where you could have gone ahead and used like
your old works salary if you were furloughed or no longer had employment.
However, that was only being extended like weeks out of time.
So I had to apply in February and until like the end of January,
it said that that was expiring at the end of January.
So you have your whole life in the balance of this visa.
And it was very difficult to know,
like exactly what would happen if we didn't have the savings.
So we didn't end up qualifying via the savings route.
But again, the whole six months that I've been
waiting, I'm like, did I count the right amount?
Have I misread something in the paperwork?
It's a little bit of a different
qualifying scenario than I was used to planning on with my salaried employment.
So kind of nerve racking.
And I will finally get to the point and say that my visa came back on July 19,
20 or 21 in case anyone else out there needs a time line.
It is about five months and a couple of weeks.
So fireworks, fireworks, fireworks.
I am so excited to finally have indefinite
but not indefinite leave to remain in the UK.
Like I said, I've been here for ten years.
I've been on the settlement route for five
and it's just such a relief for so many reasons.
No.
One, I can actually travel now, considering I've missed like almost two
years in my family and some of my friends lives where I haven't seen them.
So that's really exciting.
But also my whole past well,
my whole time here really has been all about
worry about which visa comes next when our visas expiring, like I said,
living my entire life based on my indefinite leave to remain,
not making decisions that would jeopardize that in my mind, feeling like I was just
basically constantly beholden to these visa rules.
And I don't have a problem with it.
I know that I'm moving to another country and this is just part of it.
But I can not have a logical problem with it, but have an emotional problem
with it where people don't realize how difficult it can be for your entire life
to be dictated by basically somebody else's rules.
So to have that freedom is such a weight lifted, I feel like I can actually live
my own life and I can actually make decisions and we can make decisions
together based on what is like exciting and fun and the right
decisions for us and not the right decision based on a visa.
If anybody has any questions about your
own indefinite leave to remain processed, I can definitely share more
in the comments about my application or about the process.
It's a lot different than when I started applying five years ago because it's gone
from basically paperwork that you had to physically mail in like a stack of.
Paperwork, now it's all online.
Go figure in five years time,
it changed from sending my passport in the mail, like in this giant
box signed for tracked everything like so stressful to all being online.
And you just click click a button, basically, and you're almost done.
So a lot has changed and gotten easier with the application process.
But I'm so glad to be done.
I'm so glad that you made it to the end of this video.
I always like doing an Easter egg
at the end of videos like this to see if people have been actually watching.
I know some of you do watch the end of every video, which surprises me every
time, because funnily enough, though I upload YouTube videos,
I don't consider myself really worth listening to.
I'm still surprised that people subscribe.
So today's Easter Egg is comment.
Hmmm.
OK, comment your favorite color in the comments and that will tell me
that you have made it all the way to the end and other people will be like,
why are these people sharing their favorite colors but will know together.
So anyway, thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time.