bonita

Just to encourage someone. When we came, on a student visa (almost 2 decades ago) the route to ILR, for so many, was 10 years. Getting any company to sponsor you if you weren't in the health sector (Dr,nurse,etc) was like looking for a needle in a haystack. When our student visa ran out,my husband jumped on the post-study work visa(he was the last set before they discontinued it for a while). The difference btw then and now is that the 10years route then wasn't straightforward. While you are just applying to renew on the same visa category you are already on, then we had to find what visa to jump onto once the one you were on was running out. So after the post-study work ran out, we had to jump on the entrepreneur visa. We did that for another three years and it ran out. After that we had to jump again into a student visa(payinginternationalschool fees for another two years). It was while on this visa that we qualified for ILR. You can imagine how much in fees we had to part with for our family. I don't even want to mention how much that entrepreneur visa cost us. But,in the end,we got there. And we are recovering. All the years we spent working for visa fees,we have our passport now and we are recovering. I know it look gloomy now but 10years will come and it'll go and you will achieve the goal that brought you,then you'll begin to recover. It's heartbreaking, I know, but as long as they don't change the rules again in the coming years,there's a silver lining. You'll all be fine.