Further Leave To Remain - Joint Income Taken Into Consideration

[Moving Forward]

Hello

My wife was granted a UK Partner Entry Visa in May 2013. She has been with me for over 7 months now, and has quickly settled in here.

I feel it's now time to try and preempt any issues for her Further Leave to Remain visa application which will be applied for January 2016.

For her UK Partner Entry Visa, the financial requirement was met by myself, taken as income from self employment.

However, income from self employment has since dropped.

Whilst I am working on building up a business, there is a chance that self employment income will not on it's own meet the requirement for her FLR application in 2016 (from what I understand the financial year, 2014/15 will be the last full financial year to be considered for her 2016 FLR application).

My wife is currently working as a carer for two companies. It is very likely that the combined income from my self employment for 2014/2015 and her salary from these two jobs will meet the financial requirement for her 2016 FLR application.

My questions are:
1. Income from both partners will be considered?

2. Income from both of my partners jobs will be considered? - One of these jobs will be on a permanent contract, the other on a temporary zero hours contract. She has wage slips for both jobs, so presumably we would just add together the total she makes for each month, for the 6 months leading up to her application, and the total for the lowest month will be taken as her base salary?

This will then be added to my self employment income for 2014/15.

[Moving Forward]

Sorry should have done some research first... was looking for confirmation but it's all in section FM -7.

1. Yes, both partners income will be considered even if one partners income is from self employment and the other is from employment.

2. Yes, income from both my partners jobs will be considered. However, her jobs are not salaried as she is paid per hour and so her earning vary depending on how many shifts she completes each month. Now from what I understand her earnings will be classed as B: Non Salaried Employment.

Here is where things may need to be preempted... like most Filipinos she would like us to have a child and so would I.

However, the timing of this next visa application may complicate matters as if she has a child after Dec. 2014, but before the further leave application deadline (Jan 16) she will be taking time off work (most probably unpaid maternity leave). 'I think' any time off work will affect the annual income calculated from the 12 months up to when she applies for FLR.

I will continue reading but my understanding so far is that for B:non salaried employment they also look at the 12 months prior to application, not just the 6 months beforehand, for which she presumably won't be working for some of those months, bringing down her total annual income.

My wife is currently 33. I am conscious that her biological clock is ticking and I am not comfortable delaying pregnancy when she is 35+ (which coincides roughly when her further leave to remain is application is applied for).

The worst case scenario I can see is we don't make the financial requirement again (quite unlikely) but we are able to show we can support ourselves but the time taken to settlement will be extended from 5 years to 10 years.

I really don't want this to happen as I want my wife to become a British Citizen as I have plans to travel a lot when my circumstances have changed within the next few years. For example, I don't want to wait 10 years until we both travel to the US.

Anyway I am probably overthinking things and will just do the deed now ;)

[Moving Forward]

I will continue reading but my understanding so far is that for B:non salaried employment they also look at the 12 months prior to application, not just the 6 months beforehand, for which she presumably won't be working for some of those months, bringing down her total annual income.

)
wrong!

Ok, good, they only look at the previous 6 months for B: non salaried employment:

"Where the person is in non-salaried employment – the level of gross annual employment income relied upon in the application will be the annual equivalent of the person’s average gross monthly income from non-salaried employment in the 6 months prior to the date of application (where that employment was held throughout that period)."

This means that providing my wife is back to work for a full 6 months prior to the FLR application, the average of pay of these 6 months will be used to calculate her gross annual pay and the time before then spent off work after having a baby won't affect things.

So plan is to continue building up my own business (self employed), get my wife pregnant and back to work by July 2015!

Could anyone assist me and confirm I am reading this correctly?