- I'll be married next month in the Philippines,
do you know how long the PSA is taking
for the official marriage certificate?
I will need this before applying for the CR1.
Yeah, you know we have a great deal
of information, a long article on getting married
in the Philippines just because we do the Philippines
so much and I think most of it in fact
was written by Rick here because
he got married there.
You are gonna need a few weeks,
two weeks would even be tight because
you've gotta apply, there's a waiting period
before you can get married where they post it
I guess assumedly just in case there's
any objections they post your application and so on.
So it's not like the United States
or it's not like Vegas where you can do
a drive through wedding and which is,
you can actually do here, I'm not jokin'.
It's a process there they have a lot of
public holidays and you know you,
there are some jurisdictions,
believe it or not, I think off the top of my head,
I think Quezon city might be one of them,
where they won't even perform marriages
for foreigners to a Filipino so
you've got some hoops to jump through.
I would research that first before
you start taking off work.
Because just thinking you'll go there
and two weeks you'll come back and be married,
it may not happen.
It might take you three, it might take you four,
the bureaucracy there is notoriously maddening
and you know you're just gonna have to allow
for a lot of time.
That's why from the Philippines,
the K1 Visa is much more common and popular.
However, I don't want to discourage
you from it, I'm just sayin' do your homework.
Get stuff lined up before you go
if you have a limited time.
Now if you're retired or can take,
self-employed, or whatever,
you're in a situation where you
can stay as long as you need to
to get this done, then yeah absolutely.
You can absolutely get it done
and in the long term, a CSR, a CR1,
getting married there will save you money
because you won't have to do the adjustment status.
So I'm not trying to discourage you from it,
I'm just saying you gotta have some time,
don't book a return flight unless you
can book it like a month later.
If you try to go and you got two weeks
off and you're booked a return flight,
two weeks is tough.
I'm not sayin' it can't be done.
I'm sure there are people who have got it done,
but you're gonna have to look at
the Philippine holidays, 'cause there's 14 of them,
and then occasionally they just come up
with a special holiday like when the Pope came,
they just declared it randomly a holiday.
So hey you know, they have strikes, they have
transportation strikes, all kind of things happen there.
The gears are not greased very well
in the Philippines unless you've
got some money you can grease 'em with
which I don't recommend.
So yeah, you can absolutely do it,
but you say how long does it take?
You know again, to get that marriage certificate
in your hand is not just a matter of
the PSA issuing it, it's a matter of you going
through all the steps necessary to get there
which includes that,
how long do you have to post it?
Is it a week?
10 days? - So it's 10 business days.
And I actually showed up and 12 days,
not business days and found out.
It turned out to be two weeks because
you add in the weekends.
- So it's basically a two week waiting period
where they have to post it,
publicly post it.
If you need a ceremony for the family,
which is a common, what many people have done,
is do some kind of ceremony even to all attendees,
it could appear to be a wedding,
but you just don't actually get married
and don't talk about being married
and don't go showing pictures of
a marriage license because if the
embassy thinks you got married even,
they'll deny a K1 so you have to be clear
to everybody that this is a,
we're having a ceremony and call it an
engagement ceremony or whatever you want.
So that's one way people have got around it,
they've done the dress, the whole big ceremony,
but they didn't actually get a license,
get married, register it, do any of that.
Just have a ceremony so that the local family
can attend, that's one way people
have kind of solved this dilemma.
- Yeah just to add on to that,
there's two different types of licenses
and certificates in the Philippines.
The first marriage license actually
comes from the Civil Registrar's office.
You can get that at, kind of like the
County Court House, or the Elope Office there.
My wife and I actually obtained our
marriage license from the city and county building
in Manila, in metro Manila, and then once we
received that marriage license we were married
by a judge and a magistrate.
And so once you get that marriage license
or certificate signed it's not an official
marriage certificate at that point.
Then you have to have the Civil Registrar's office
transfer the certificate over to the PSA.
The PSA is the Philippine Statistics Authority.
They keep all the records, civil records,
in the Philippines.
They are one of the few countries
that I'm aware of that actually has
a marriage registry.
So then they register that at the PSA
and right now it's my understanding,
it's taking approximately two months
to obtain the marriage certificate from the PSA
and that's a little different from getting
the marriage license which Ben covered very well.
It takes a couple of weeks just to get that.
So in your question Michael, you stated that
you're going out to get married
so we kind of assume that you're looking
for the steps and procedures for
being able to get married so Ben
covered that very well, but if you're actually
looking to get the marriage certificate
from the PSA, you can add another
two additional months on top of getting married.
So this is a very long process.
This is not for the faint of heart
and you've gotta have some time to do it.
But now, the good news is,
you do not have to be in the Philippines
during this period.
You, but you do need to show up
to sign the paperwork, to get the marriage certificate,
you need to be there for the marriage of course,
then you can travel back to the US
and it's just gonna take some time
to get the actual marriage certificate from the PSA.
Your spouse can do that, you can actually
order it online once it's available.
I know my wife went down there
several times and escalated to a manager
because it was just taking so long
and we wanted to get moving with the process.
But I hope I, we covered both areas there for you.
If not, give us a call.
We can clear this up.
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