seekingthetruth

Glanced back over this and I don't think I answered your question directly. Your U.S. citizen kids can get SS on your account as soon as you start SS, as long as they are still under 18. Regardless of residency. Your wife needs 5 years residency to get any type of SS on your account, unless she can qualify for the caregiver status. Are you close to getting SS or are you a young whippersnapper?

Thanks for putting that together! That will be on the back burner, but you never know!

Yes, I know she can't get married. My thinking is along the the same lines as yours. They are young. My questions are more about creating a truthful carrot to dangle in front of her if she gets cold feet on moving. And her boyfriend might be excited about that possibility for his future too. If they can survive a LDR for a while, that could build a stronger relationship.

Asking this hypothetical question for my step daughter, a Filipina. I think we are going to push through this year with completing the IR1 / IR2 for my wife and step daughter, who is 18 and still unmarried. A possible challenge is that my step daughter might not want to leave the first and only "love or her life" behind. 🙂 After she enters the U.S. and gets her green card, does she have any options for him to come join her, anytime soon, on a fiancé visa, or, get married after she gets the greed card, and do a CR-1? I would probably end up as the financial support if there is an option. Or, does she have to wait until she has citizenship? I really have no idea about this. I actually like him a lot and she could do much worse. 20 years old, hard worker, smart, and going to aeronautical school, and doing an internship for aircraft mechanic.. I think in a few years he could land a good job in the U.S. @Chancy @Adventine@payxibka

This probably deserves it's own topic, but I did not see an appropriate forum, and this is my topic, so here we go! 😊 Anything I say here is based on research, my actual experience, and my memory of both, but you should always double check possible idiots posting on the internet! 🙃 Wife (I will say wife here but it could the other way around with husband collecting on wife's benefit) while husband is still living A foreign born wife can collect SS benefits on her husband's SS account when he starts receiving SS at age 62 or beyond, but she must reside in the U.S. for 5 years and will start at her age 62 or greater. She can get up to 50% of her husband's benefit at her full retirement age, but they knock a lot for retiring early. You can use this calculator to estimate the benefit: https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/quickcalc/spouse.html For my wife, it goes from 32% of my benefit at age 62 to 50% at her full retirement age at 67. If she works and gets 10 years of contributions, she will get the higher of the two benefits. After getting the 5 years residency, the wife can move to most countries and still get the benefit. Exception: Your wife can get a caregiver benefit for caring for your children under 16. She can get that at any age and the 5 year residency does not apply. (Read below in Family on why I don't do that) In fact, the benefit can go to any qualified caregiver if your wife is gone. For instance, your wife disappears with the mailman, and your mom is taking care of the kids. I think your mom can get a benefit. Of course, lot's of details on that. If you quality for SSDI (disability) the rules re different and your wife may be able to collect earlier than 62. Children 5 year residency also effects foreign born children who are U.S. citizens. They must have 5 years residency in order to pass their U.S. citizenship on to their children. That has no impact on their ability to get a SS benefit on their parent's account. My two kids get SS on my account. That made starting SS at 62 a no brainer for us. They each get about 50% of my benefit, so the extra benefit to our family is 100% of my benefit. They can get it until age 18 or 19 if they are a full time student. Family Maximum When you start collecting, you can have several kids and your wife collecting on your account, but they will split the "family maximum" pie equally. For instance, suppose my two kids get $1000 each and the family maximum is $2100. Add a third kid and they get 2100 / 3 = 700 each. This is why we don't add my wife as a caregiver and as the third. My kids don't pay taxes. Without the 3rd, 2000 is not taxable. If my wife was the third, that 700 she gets would be part of our joint return "possible" taxable income. I need to revisit that after the recent large increase in SS and the possibility we will be in a lower tax bracket this year. Formula is here but I think it is also shown in your SS online account. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/familymax.html Hope that helps a bit. Lots of details to look into.

We are still in a holding pattern but I think that we are going to start moving forward again. We were very discouraged because of all the negative things going on in the U.S., but I think we are going to push through. I need to get my wife 5 years residency so she can benefit from my Social Security after I am gone.

You might find something in my old posts from 2019/2020. If I recall correctly, the only thing you can do at the interview stage, if you don't like the date or can't make it, is to miss it and reschedule. At the time, Manila Embassy was a mess and that would be risky. Paris might be different now. We are still postponing at NVC.

https://babylonbee.com/news/kamala-harris-meets-brittney-griner-at-the-airport-to-lock-her-up-on-marijuana-charges

That Forbes writer does not seem to be a fan of Elon.

Sounds like BS to me. According to a report by Bangor Daily News, several social media groups are now refusing to post snowy owl photos in an attempt to discourage the "paparazzi-like behavior" of some photographers. .............. "There have been several instances where at least a dozen people were too close to the owls so they would fly off to get a shot of them flying," Dyer said. "[Owls] need to save their energy to hunt and if they expend a lot of energy flying off they could possibly die from exhaustion/hunger." Full article https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/snowy-owl-photos-banned-by-facebook-groups-to-deter-animal-paparazzi-shots/ar-AA14JFzh

It is sad to see them go. Might as well get it over with because they are just a shell of the company they used to be. My dad was an avid woodworker when I was a boy, and Craftsman were THE tools to have in the 60's and 70's. The brand was sold a few years ago. Kenmore made great appliances too, but I suspect they were actually made by another brand.

A lot of that is not true or twisted a bit. https://www.ssa.gov/history/InternetMyths.html

Actually I have. He ignores me.

I get confused because another forum I am on insists you post the ENTIRE article and discourages including a link. I suspect the moderator there had no idea about the legality of that.

Here is a good article that I learned from, despite the complexity. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-goes-zero-213727225.html How crypto goes to zero Wed, November 23, 2022 at 1:37 PM If everyone stopped using it. That, in five words, is how crypto would go to zero. Still, the journey is more interesting than the destination. The death of ftx, an exchange declared bankrupt on November 11th after a spectacular blow-up, will encourage some people to turn their attention elsewhere. What would have to happen for everyone to give up? An answer requires a sense of how the industry works. At crypto’s base are blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which record transactions verified by computers, a process incentivised by the issuance of new tokens. The Ethereum blockchain validates lines of code, which has made it possible for people to issue their own tokens or build applications. These include stablecoins, which are pegged to real-world currencies, and tokens like Uniswap, which manage decentralised-finance (DeFi) protocols. Major chains and a handful of Ethereum-based tokens, like stablecoins, account for 90% of cryptocurrency value. Big businesses have been built on top of this world, including exchanges, investment funds and lending platforms. To take out crypto entirely would require killing the underlying blockchain layers. They could either give way first, kicking the stool out from underneath everything else. Or the industry could unravel from the top down, layer by layer like a knitted scarf. Knocking the stool out is extraordinarily hard, and the current high value of bitcoin and ether makes it even harder. To attack a blockchain and shut it down requires gaining 51% control of the computational power or value of tokens staked to verify transactions. The more valuable the tokens, the more energy it takes to attack a proof-of-work chain, like Bitcoin, and the more money to attack a proof-of-stake chain, like Ethereum. The security of these chains—as measured by the amount someone would have to spend to attack them—is now in the region of $5bn to $10bn. It would require either a government or an extraordinarily rich individual to mount such an attack. And even if Elon Musk was so inclined, he seems a little busy at present. Unravelling is therefore the more conceivable path. The events of this year have revealed just how prone to this sort of thing crypto is. The implosion that seems to have set the chaos in motion is that of Terra-Luna, a decentralised stablecoin system, worth around $40bn at its peak. It collapsed in May, wiping $200bn off the market capitalisation of crypto. That led a few weeks later to the bankruptcy of several lending platforms and a hedge fund, events which wiped another $200bn off the market cap. The margin calls these platforms faced seem to have imperilled Alameda, the trading firm owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, and led to the decision to use ftx customer funds to plug the gap. When ftx failed, it wiped another $200bn off crypto’s market cap. Now other exchanges and lending platforms looks to be in trouble. Beady-eyed readers will note that most of this stuff, apart from Terra-Luna, is in the “on top of” category and not actually on-chain tech. DeFi exchanges and lending protocols have continued to whir even as the enterprises more akin to normal businesses have imploded one by one. But the collapse of these enterprises could imperil the underlying tech by taking out chunks of its value, making the chains more exposed to would-be attackers and pushing miners or stakers to switch off their machines. The value of on-chain activity and tokens is self-reinforcing. The more people that use DeFi, the more valuable Ethereum becomes. The higher the price of ether, the higher the hurdle to attack the blockchain and the more confidence people will have that blockchains will endure. This also works in reverse. The more people shy away from crypto out of fear, the less secure it becomes. The total market cap of cryptocurrencies is currently $820bn. That is 70% below the peak a year ago, but still high compared with most of crypto’s history. It is higher than at the start of last year, for instance, and any point before then, including the peak of the bull market in 2017. Many more layers—such as a major stablecoin, big businesses or perhaps other on-chain protocols—would have to unravel to take crypto’s value back to the levels at which it traded just three or four years ago. Crypto’s reputation has been undermined before. It has collapsed in value repeatedly throughout its lifetime. Although fewer people will use crypto as a result of the ftx collapse, it is very hard to imagine the number will be small enough to take its value to zero. © 2022 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/11/23/how-crypto-goes-to-zero

Only dozen? I think I will need two dozen just to cover my family!

🤣 https://twitter.com/mazemoore/status/1595305491156111361?s=20&t=ZiPgzy8C1X4Hq27uh84r9A

Nah, Twitter was not biased to the left. They probably just found those shirts on sale and ordered a few. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1595250835096621057?s=20&t=ZiPgzy8C1X4Hq27uh84r9A

If he would have been honest on the applications he would have disclosed the first marriage, and would have had to provide proof at that time. Apparently he tried to skate around that little detail. You don't just forget a marriage.

I just joined Twitter a few weeks ago and I am enjoying it. Following Biden and reading the comments is entertaining! I follow a few conservative celebs too, like Rob Schneider.

Long read, but if you have crypto investments or are interested, take the time. https://www.revolver.news/2022/11/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-on-steroids-is-cryptocurrency-tether-joe-biden-crypto-bcci/

This has been discussed many times but I never saw an official answer to it. I contacted NVC, told them our situation (I-130 approved, but need to delay for a year or two due to shipping costs, housing costs, etc.) and asked what is the proper way to postpone our case at NVC. This is their answer. Passing it along. Dear Sir/Madam: Thank you for contacting the National Visa Center (NVC). To keep your case active, do not let more than one year go by without contacting the NVC. The easiest way to keep your case active is to access the Consular Electronic Center (CEAC) at https://ceac.state.gov/iv. Every time you go into your CEAC account, it will update the last contact date. Regards, Romeo | Inquiry Management Department of State CA/VO/DO/NVC LDRM | Lockwood Hills | Contractor DOS - National Visa Center So, it appears: - No need to call - No need to upload a document Just login. Reminder: The DS 260 does need to be submitted within 1 year Update below ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I finally had some time and wrote up a clear (hopefully) summary, perhaps for a pinned post. If you want to ask the admins and they agree to pin it, I will make a new topic with it. Just my way of giving a bit back to VJ, with the help of Family! Proposal for pinned post Topic: Need to delay your case at NVC? Here is the BEST way! After my wife and stepdaughter were approved by USCIS, we received the welcome letters from NVC. We later realized that we are going to have to postpone getting the visas and moving to the U.S. The delay might be one year, two years, or longer. We don’t want to lose the fees we paid and start all over, so we are delaying. I asked here on VJ about how to delay and got good advice from several members. I also asked NVC via the AskNVC web portal. The advice can be slightly confusing, so I am sharing what I have learned. Please note: This only applies to cases that are at NVC. After your case goes to the embassy, this no longer applies. Facts: NVC will keep your case open indefinitely if you contact them once a year. NVC has been known to mistakenly close cases even though there was contact within the required window. It is up to you to prove that you contacted them by providing contact evidence. Regardless of delaying, your DS 260 must be submitted to NVC within one year of your NVC welcome letter. There are three options to contact NVC and keep your delayed case open.By phone. Downsides: Long waits, might be expensive, and you have no paper trail of your contact. Log into your CEAC account. Downsides: This does not work for cases that were submitted by mail, and you have no paper trail of your contact. Use the AskNVC web portal. Only a simple message is required, such as “I need more time for our case. This is my record of annual NVC contact.” Upside: You will receive an immediate automated e-mail record of your contact with NVC including all the communication detail. In the e-mail, it states: “Please retain this email as a record of your contact with NVC”. AskNVC is the BEST option. Just logging into your CEAC account does not provide the safety of having a paper trail of your contact. Logging in does not work for non-electronic cases filed by mail. Keep your NVC automated responses and perhaps keep a tickler file to remind you when to send another annual contact at AskNVC. AskNVC: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-information-resources/ask-nvc.html I hope this information will help others who need to safely delay their cases at NVC.