I did mine yesterday. No lawyer, they are a waste of money from what I can tell. The form itself is not hard but it is a lot of information. I think the difficult part is the civil documents and to make sure you have everything. State departments website is great help https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrate/the-immigrant-visa-process/step-5-collect-financial-evidence-and-other-supporting-documents.html

@Agnes 🇬🇧 Thanks for your insight! Can you please give me some tips? did you had all documents are ready in hand before your started the process? how long did it take you to complete? what did you do for any questions that you were unsure about it?

@F R I studied the state departments website in advance and had all my ducks in a row (or so I think, will see what they say). You will need a birth certificate in English and a police certificate from any country where you lived more than 6 months since the age of 16. Not to mention all your addresses since you were 16. I travel around in Europe a lot for work so this was not as easy for me as for most people. Social media profiles, parents details etc. Bit excessive but not hard. We did both the AOS and the DS-260 with my husband yesterday. DS-260 form took me about 4 hours including a whole bunch of website crashes and looking up my previous addresses and US visits. The AOS form was around 6 hours by the time we got through it and gathered all our financial evidence. My husband is in the UK with me though so we had a harder than usual case of showing our assets since our UK income doesn’t count even if it blows out the allowance from the park, ha! In terms of questions we were not sure of we added commentary to the form or to the submission notes. The form declaration says that we fill out the form in good faith to the best of our knowledge. We did that. That’s all anyone can do. Let’s see what they say in a few weeks time.

@F R in terms of prep work my birth certificate is European non English. English translation and police certificates took me about 2 months to gather. I started it in early February around the 15 month mark hoping that approval would not be far then. generally Uk police certificates are valid for a year so it’s worth getting them ready when you think approval may be close. I believe I found the 1 year validity on the state department’s website somewhere. Also, the evidence submission part of the nvc website doesn’t show everything you need so write a checklist from the state department’s website I linked earlier and make sure to add the documents.

Thank you so much for the detailed insight, @Agnes 🇬🇧 I really appreciate it, and this is very helpful. I’m hoping I can do this on my own now, although I am not aware if I need to do the AOS form, too. I know I need to do the DS-260 form since my wife is abroad. Thanks again!

@F R no problem! To be clear your wife needs to do the ds-260 application as it will be her green card. You as the sponsor will need to fill out the AOS form. Please take a look at the website I linked for the full process. All police certificates, etc are for your wife. Some documents are for the both of you like your birth certificates, but you should already have this from the I-130.

I hired a lawyer because according to my knowledge lawyer is the best option for legal work

@Agnes 🇬🇧 Thanks!

@Ahsan ali Akhtar Did you do all your process from I-130 to NVC through a lawyer, or just did the NVC phase through lawyer?

all case through lawyer