D.Ba

"You can request for a name change on the day of your interview and that can delay the oath ceremony up to 1-2 months, depending on your city/county judicial ceremonies calendar. The name change can be as simple as hyphenating surnames or changing one single letter." Nice one, but having gone through a painful name change in Germany once, I have no desire to do that again.

The bad advice is "File at the end of March. You'll pay the smaller fees. It's just the filing, so until you have an interview and an oath, it's just that - an application. Chances are it will take a month or 2 before your case would be eligible for an interview, so hopefully the law will have passed. Even if you've passed your interview, you still have to have your naturalization ceremony to actually become a US citizen and that oath ceremony could potentially be rescheduled/delayed. As long as German parliament pushes the actual changes into effect in mid-April as anticipate, you should be good to go." Which is exactly what I did, and we know now when the law will go into effect (which is not on the date it was passed) and I for one know that the average processing times mean nothing (website 7 months, actual 13 days). And likewise there is no guarantee on the oath scheduling ceremony. Obviously, it is up to the individual (and I did not apply because someone suggested that on the internet), but to encourage people to do this is just not very helpful. So, I'd advise to follow the German embassy's advice.