Hi, I'm new to this forum, but it seems to be the place to go for clarification on some of the ambiguities regarding UK visa applications. Apologies if any of this ground has been covered before, but I've searched this forum and others and can't find answers to all my questions, so hopefully people with first-hand experience will be able to help me out
My fiance and I met whilst teaching English in South Korea, and after a year of living together there we got engaged, and are now planning to start our married life in England. We're hoping to get married in the States in September, and then get her over to England asap after that. Between now and our marriage I plan to find a new job in the UK in order to provide us the requisite stability/place to live etc, while she stays on the other side of the atlantic and saves money.
However, I worry that we might be being a little naive about how easy the process will be, as we are both looking into entry-level media production jobs, which are notoriously underpaid and unstable. I'm confident in my ability to get a job job between now and our wedding, but she won't be able to find work until she has her visa, which means I'll apparently have to prove I can support her. How much would I need to be earning in order to prove that satisfactorily? (We're both more than prepared to share a cupboard of a flat and survive on beans on toast, as we've done it before, but I worry that they won't take this into account!) I'm also worried that if I do get TV work, most contracts in that industry are short-term, for 3-6 months at a time, and immigration folk might not like that. Does anyone have any experience going through the process as a self-employed freelancer?
Also, what are the real costs of the spouse visa? I saw that it should cost about $1200, which we can cover with our savings from Korea, but are there more costs which I'm not taking into account?
We plan to marry in the States so that more of her family and friends can attend the wedding, and so that we can go straight from there to a British embassy to get an interview and present our application together in person before I have to come back to England. Would this be the fastest, most painless way to do it? Is a US marriage certificate just as good to UK immigration as a British one? How long do the applications generally take?
I apologise for the vast amount of questions, I'm just desperate for some clarity to make sure our plans are as well thought-out as we hope they are. We just want to be able to live together without sacrificing our ambitions, which in spite of the alleged 'special relationship' between our two nations, looks to be much more difficult than we first thought! Anyway, any help or advice that people can give will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Dean