Australian Visa - Update 4 “The 45 Year Age Limit!”
Monday, January 12th, 2009
Up until now, we had been working on the premise of having to validate Andrew’s Independent Skilled Based Visa (to prevent expiry of Australian port of entry date requirement) before his 45th birthday (the current age limit for this particular type of visa in order to legally live and work there). So, we assumed that if we obtained visa this year, we would need to fly out prior to Andrew’s up and coming November birthday this year (yes, he will be 45!) in order to validate visa before we go off gadding about on our travels.
But, we have since found out the requirement is to simply have the visa application lodged before Andrew is 45. That is all we have to do. We do not have to have the visa application processed or make initial entry by the time Andrew is 45 as we originally thought. Therefore, if Andrew takes and passes the practical assessment as planned on 7 April it leaves 6 months to prepare and lodge the visa application which can be done and completed for lodgement within a 2 - 3 week period if necessary.
Woohooooo!
On this basis, the theory now is that if we maximise application lodgement process, we could in theory (subject to checking further) now possibly include visa validation (though may be a bit tight to do) as part of our route plan rather than performing via separate (and very expensive) flights beforehand (especially given that we are not sure that we will want to live and work in Australia, even if legal, when we get there). We would need to refine our route plan to do this however (which, we are still working on).
Another reality is that we simply don’t have the money to really support flying out to Australia beforehand - we reckon we’d need circa £5K to get there and back again (overland trip at risk of suffering, being cut too short or failing in some way to accommodate, so this sounds like good news for us!).
