Is it "out of the country" if we hadn't moved here yet?

[latteberry 1]

I'm sure this has been answered elsewhere, but I couldn't find it.

On the n-400 it asks how many days my husband was out of the country in the last 5 years. Well, we didn't move here until August 2008. So, he meets the 3-year residency requirement but there is a big chunk of the "5 years" that he wasn't in the country because we were still living abroad. Once he got here, however, he never left.

How do we answer that question? Do we actually count the days from exactly 5 years ago until the date of immigration or do we say Zero?

Thanks.

[NotBonJovi 6]

If you husband is applying for naturalization based on marriage, then you need to mention only past 3 years. The 5-year rule does not apply to him.

[SerenityNOW 11]

Right - when applying for the N-400 based on the three-year marriage+residency requirement, just replace "3 years" everywhere that you see "5 years" on the application.

We had the same situation - living abroad until my husband used his CR-1 visa in October 2008. So yeah, we would have had something like 600+ days "out of the country" if we included pre- October 2008....

So - now that I said to replace 5 years with 3 years everywhere, I realized that we DIDN'T do that for Section 6 - addresses & employment. We included 5 years (and actually more like 40 years since my husband only lived in one place since birth until he moved to the U.S.!) Don't know if that is going to prove to be any kind of problem for his application - he isn't approved YET (always something to worry about!) You might consider being more consistent than we were and only including 3 years' worth of addresses and employment info...or who knows, hopefully it's not a big deal that we included extra.

Edited February 13, 2012 by SerenityNOW

[latteberry 1]

Thanks a bunch!