Advice and Guidelines

Starting your application submission is a long and tedious task. It's important to start with the right habits as these will make the process a lot easier and manageable. Below are some tips and tricks to help you navigate your application and set you up for success

• Organise your work into folders. This step will help you enormously throughout the whole process and will make it easier for both you and your partner collect and collate information for your submission. I would suggest using a cloud provider to store your folders such as Google Drive or Dropbox. I would also recommend labelling your folders as per the application sections.

  So for instance:
  1. Financial Aspects
  2. Nature of Household
  3. Social Aspects

  4. Commitment
  5. Development of the Relationship
  6. Other

Use the 'Other' folder to put any additional evidence you want to include and are unsure which section they go into. You will have a chance to submit 'Other' documents in your application on ImmiAccount later on.

• Start your application as early as possible. Your application starts from the date you pay your application fee. You will have time to submit your evidence after you pay the fee and fill out the details. If you wait until you have gathered all your evidence before paying the fee then you will be wasting valuable time for your application to be reviewed. So get started early you'll minimise your application processing time.

• Include evidence guides with every section. We included evidence guides to make it easier for those reviewing our application to follow what we had submitted. This isn't essential but we felt it was helpful to expedite the review of our documents. It also highlighted which aspects of evidence we submitted to call attention to the checklist criteria. You can see examples of these evidence guides in the Shop tab.

• Upload guide documents when submitting any new pieces of information. Your application reviewers might ask for additional information to support your submission. These could be police checks, medical exams or more information for a specific section. When submitting these, we would recommend also submitting a guiding document to again highlight what new evidence you are making available. Your reviewers will get notified when each new piece of information is uploaded so this will help show them you have responded to their requests.

• More is better. As you will find in our submission examples, it is better to submit more evidence than less. The more evidence you provide, the more it looks like your relationship is genuine and true. Check out the submission examples to give you more ideas of what you can include to boost your success chances.

• Condense your files. You are limited to 100 files at 5MB per upload. You will find when combining your documents they exceed the 5MB limit per file. This is annoying and also unavoidable. I would recommend using a PDF condensing tool to help compress your files under the 5MB limit. You can do this via Adobe Acrobat or other similar programs. There are also free tools online that can help with this. Be advised that be careful not to compress your files so much that they distort the quality of your pages. Some programs blur your documents when compressed so be aware that your documents are readable after this process.

• Save money on the international transfer fee. You can save up to $150+ dollars when paying the $9050 application fee by paying via bank transfer instead of using your credit or debit card. The processing fees, surcharges and exchange fees can quickly rack up when using a card but you can avoid these by using B-PAY via OFX. Provided that you or your sponsor has an Australian bank account you can use OFX to eliminate the extra fees. Get started with this link to help facilitate your surcharge free payment and save yourself $150+ dollars. Hey, you can now use those savings to purchase the submission example on this site and you'll be guided through the whole process!

• Ask for help. Check out all the government websites, forums and examples you can find. If you're stuck, there are many migration lawyers that can help you but beware, using this help comes at a significant cost.