I’m at my wit’s end. I and my husband have a joint bank account, joint brokerage account, joint health insurance, one joint tax return, we live together and have a lease under both of our names, and I am an authorized user of all of his credit cards. We literally don’t actively use any separate/individual financial accounts, we do everything together. We have life insurance with each other as beneficiaries. And yet, we got an RFE for bona fide marriage after submitting all of this evidence.
What can I even do now? If they’re not satisfied with the fact that we get paid on the same joint checking account, have all of our savings in the same brokerage account, and live together with a lease, what can I even send to prove that our relationship is real?
It’s not as if our marriage is very new either. We waited more than one year after marrying to submit the AOS package. And, of course, in addition to the hard evidence, we have pictures of us together going back 3 years, with all of our family members.
The RFE letter doesn’t even say what’s wrong with our package. It just says we need to send evidence that we “intended to establish a life together when you married,” and then lists all of the things you see in the USCIS website, like children, evidence that we have lived together, evidence that we have combined financial resources, evidence that we’ve made “estate, health and financial planning arrangements” with each other, and affidavits. So basically things we already submitted, except that we don’t have children and haven’t submitted affidavits.
Regarding things they may consider red flags, we’re both young (24 now, 22 when we got married, 20 when we started dating), and I (the immigrant) make much more money than him (250k vs 90k), which is not expected for a woman. But we dated for 2 years before I started making any money (because I was in college). He made only 30k/year (working part-time) while I was in college, so they may see that as suspicious. We both have computer science degrees, his is from a #1 CS school, so he could definitely get a higher-paying job if necessary, but he does what he loves.
I don’t know what we could possibly do. Here are a few potential issues that I want to address before responding to the RFE:
Our utilities are mostly only on his name, because it was easier to set it up that way. Yesterday, I called our electricity company to put my name on the bill too.
I spend money almost only from his credit cards, not from my authorized user credit cards (because again, it’s easier that way). So yesterday I started using one of my authorized user credit cards, so we can show that I use it in the future.
I don’t have a state ID, because I can’t drive. So today I applied for a REAL ID to get extra proof of my address.
His driver’s license has his parents’ house as his address. So I asked him to change it to our current address.
We didn’t send any family affidavits, since I thought it wouldn’t be necessary given all the evidence we submitted. But we can submit several of those this time.
We didn’t send any chat logs, but I guess we could do that.
We can try to do our 2023 taxes early and submit our tax return by the RFE deadline. This would show him working on his 90k/year job for a full year, which wasn’t present in our previous tax return.
What else could I possibly do? Do I need to make more drastic changes, such as buying a car (even though we don’t have a parking spot and we live in a dense city) because they maybe don’t understand that our shared brokerage account is “shared property,” and a car would be simpler? What else could possibly be done? And what can I do if I’m denied?
Yes, our credit reports have matching current addresses and 3 additional matching past addresses (we've moved around a lot). So I'll submit them as evidence too.