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rasg

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Everything posted by rasg

  1. With the help of this forum and one other I was guided through the process for three visit visas, a settlement visa, two FLRs, an ILR and a citizenship application. No visa company was required. Most of the work that is done will be the gathering of info by your partner and all you have to do is collate it and present it The main hurdle is showing ties to Thailand. My now wife's only ties were her family and her job. Fortunately she had a great boss who provided a letter for her to use in the application. What were the reason(s) for rejection? You will have to address the reason(s) for refusal in any subsequent application. You take a chance with a visit visa application whether you use a visa company or not. As has been suggested Thai Visa Express is the only one worth considering unless you find another that is OISC registered. Whenever you apply for a visa it's really important that you ignore any of the suggestions from your wife's mates and her Facebook friends.
  2. For our trip to Iceland I just did screenshots of what I planned on booking for the Danish Embassy and they were quite happy. The bonus was that they created the Schengen visa while we waited. Only then did I book the tickets.
  3. None of my Thai wife's family have email addresses. Young or old. I had to set one up for my step son so he could join something a while back. I can’t remember what but he was 17 at the time.
  4. That option wasn;t available I recommend you do it yourself. It's not a complex process and the people on here will always help. The main hurdle is the reason to return to Thailand and if I remember from your previous posts your girlfriend has a steady job. The rest is pretty straightforward and your GF will be supplying you with most of the information. Back in 2015 I knew nothing about the process and with the info needed from my wife she was given three visit visas in less than seven months. The last visa we applied for was a two year visit visa before deciding to get married and went for a settlement visa. It's worth £80ish to go to Phuket rather than the schlep to Bangkok. The option wasn't available back in 2015. The only visa company I would trust is Thai Visa Express. Most of the others will give you inaccurate info. One of our Thai friends here in the UK was banned from applying for ten years for doing something dodgy and taking the wrong advice.
  5. My wife's English was not the best when we met but almost ten years later it's as good as it will ever be. She understands almost everything that is said to her and you have that perfect fall back using Google Translate if you need to explain something specific. 150,000 baht is less than £3500 so not the end of the world to a Brit. To a Thai it's a huge amount of money. I think I mentioned it before but my wife wife used her job as her only reason to return and she was successful in two 6 months visas and a two year visa. She had almost nothing to do with them apart from gathering the information. You need to find out if she has been making payments to the credit card company and if she is paying more than the minimum each month so that the debt is going down. I wish you luck. Meeting my wife back in 2015 was the best thing that ever happened to me. Ignore the naysayers. Too many on here who have been bitten before and want to tell the world about it and always assume the worst.
  6. I remember playing with time lapse and cartoons in my teens but it's so much easier now and I fancy having a play around myself. What sort of interval do you use between shots, out of interest or does it depend on your subject? I have a Sony RX10 MKIV that has a an optical 24-1200 zoom that could be interesting. It can be controlled by computer with the Sony app but the limitation is a minimum of ten seconds between each photo. Too long for clouds and stuff. I also have a full frame 5D MKII with the 70-200 mm should be on another level when it comes to image quality and a 3rd party intervalometer is £15 on eBay. I'm also on a mission to sell a load of my stuff that is hardly ever used although I do get an occasional income by renting out some of it through FatLama.
  7. Magic Lantern looks mighty interesting and I already have a couple of 60Ds and a 5D MII that I can’t bear to part with and I've wanted to play with timelapse for a long time. Thanks for posting this. To the op. What is your budget and what length zoom are you looking for?
  8. Surely if you leave it a week or two the date of the statement you are after will be a historical statement? I find it hard to believe a bank could charge you a months interest just so you can find out how much cash you have in your account. I bank with Santander, Nationwide and First Direct and I can download statements with all of my details at the top and the logo any time I want to. I have done for numerous visas. The statements are identical to those they used to post to me until I ticked the box to "save the planet".
  9. No. Nothing apart from how close she was to her family BUT she had spent the previous 20 years of her life working from home and sending money home each month. No assets.
  10. She sounds like a wise woman politically. My wife's English is streets ahead of what it was when she first came here in 2015. We occasionally discuss particle physics with the help of Google Translate.
  11. She does as her boss has said he will keep her job open for three months. It was my wife's only reason to return back in 2015.
  12. That's a relief for many people. Why they didn't clarify it sooner is beyond me.
  13. I don't think they did until we were allowed to upload all of the information digitally. They seem to allow far more than they did.
  14. My wife was lucky. Less than a two week wait for her citizenship ceremony. It was a big surprise that she was given her first passport so quickly as the surname in her Thai passport didn't match her citizenship certificate.
  15. Turn the TV off and go out and do something!
  16. Not that expensive. My local is charging £11.99 for 2 courses of Christmas dinner. Third course is £3.00. Their food is very good. I've eaten many steaks in their and the landlord is the chef.
  17. You are going to the wrong pub!
  18. The general rule in the UK is that the names must be the same but there are quite a few reasons why some from other countries can't. They treated my wife's case as an exception. It's all on here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/names-aligning-names-on-foreign-documents/names-aligning-names-on-foreign-documents-accessible#When_observations_cause I was worried my wife was going to have problems getting a UK passport at all without having to travel to Thailand to change her name. In my research the Thai Embassy came up trumps. It's possible to change the details on a tabian baan (sp) without going to Thailand. It took almost a week before they replied but you need to give a member of your family or friend, power of attorney and they can do it for you.
  19. Around £10 in West London. Her citizenship took 15 weeks and her UK passport took ten days.
  20. What recently surprised me was that my wife's only name change from almost years ago was actually printed on her UK citizenship certificate. When she divorced she changed her surname back to her family (maiden) name and changed her first name at the same time.
  21. I'm pretty certain it was Teresa May who came up with the matching names requirement when she was the Home Secretary and I'm not sure that it works both ways. ie. It's a UK requirement, not a Thai requirement.
  22. Same here. It took a grovelling letter to the Passport Office in London as my wife's Thai passport was in her maiden name but they simply added an observation page to her shiny new British passport. I was amazed to see it arrive in 10 days so I had a bit of pressure from the missus to book somewhere so she could use it for the first time. It is possible but I explained to the pp office that my wife would change her name the next time she or we go to Thailand. She did try in 2019 but found she needed our marriage certificate and a translation while she was in Thailand. The annoying thing for us was we submitted my wife's citizenship in her maiden name so her two passports would have matching surnames and part way through the process the HO called and offered to change her citizenship certificate to her married name. All done and dusted now thank goodness.
  23. I mistyped my name when I booking a flight to Portugal with BA just over a week ago. How I missed it, I don't know but I did. I called BA and they fixed it but it took 24 hours to show on the updated booking. The typo still hadn’t gone on the car hire and hotel booking though but there was no problem with either of them.
  24. Thank you. It's far less complicated than any other visa. The stumbling block on it is the two referees that are required.
  25. According to my wife's application you do. After you have completed the questions you will receive a checklist of the requirements you need to provide. The following is one of them that they requested from my wife that we submitted to UKVCAS for her citizenship today. "Proof of living in the UK for Mrs PK for 5 years if applying in your own right or 3 years if applying as the spouse of a British Citizen." We provided a couple of letters from my wife's bank and our joint account, council tax bills for three years and a whole bunch of Covid test results that we provided to the Office of National Statistics over three years. They allowed the latter for ILR too as we took the tests at home together over Covid and beyond. There was no need for any financial information.
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