Hi, I’m an Australia citizen and my partner is Serbian, currently in Australia on a student visa. We’ve been together for a year and 2 months now, however we were in a long distance relationship for about 9 months. We met whilst she was holidaying in Australia and we spent about 1.5 months together and she then had to go back to Serbia to arrange for her student visa, move to Australia, etc. Whilst she was in Serbia, I visited her and we went travelling around Europe (though there are no flights in her name as we went on a 3 week road trip, but we do have hotel reservations, lots of photographs from that trip and Facebook posts). She moved to Australia in early May 2018 and We’ve been living together since then. While she is not on my current lease agreement, We have a joint savings account and her phone bill, personal bank account, etc have our address. There are no transactions on the joint account as that’s purely a savings account (we opened that just in case we have to do another student visa and need to show the funds required for study, stay, etc) and we just use our own accounts for our daily expenses. We want to apply for a spouse visa for her (her student visa expires in November this year). Even though we’ve been together for over a year (we have photos, emails, messages, my trip to Europe, letters from friends etc to prove our relationship), however since we were in a long distance relationship for part of that year, are we still eligible to apply for a spouse visa? I’ve spoken to a couple of migration agents and they say we are eligible, I’m a bit nervous about the fact that we haven’t lived together for 12 months and just want to be absolutely certain as the agents’ fees are $4000+ and not to mention $7000+ for the application.
Thanks for all your help!
Thanks for all your help!