Short answer: Roughly 3 months.
4 months minus 5 weeks (to resubmit FBI BG) for our friends Lisbon office experience.
Doug,
The refreshed FBI BG check you submitted 5 weeks after biometrics appointment is the original or scanned-emailed copy certified by your lawyer?
What is the evidence because I will be entering through a third country. Do they need boarding pass / train ticket or hotel invoices.
Thanks
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We received the newly apostiled BG check, scanned it, sent it to our lawyer and DHLāed the original. What happened on the other end we donāt know but we have complete trust in our lawyer. They most likely submitted the scan but I canāt say.
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The appointment situation may get worse. This morning, SEF took the Azores branch off the list from the ari portal. So no more catching last minute cancellations at Ponta Delgada.
Is everyone else seeing āHTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.ā for the SEF page that you used to get appointments on? Maybe part of the transition to the national guard and police was just shut the appointment calendar down? Just making sure Iām not the only one seeing it.
yes, https://ari.sef.pt/ not working for me last couple of days.
EDIT: Just checked, its working now.
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Hi everyone. We submitted our biometrics on August 24th in Lisbon. They accepted everything and asked for nothing more at the time of the appointment.
October 15th we got a request to provide some additional documents: updated declarations from the fund, the bank, a statement from social security that we didnāt have any debts on ss andā¦something else.
No news since then, waiting patiently.
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Hi everyone, my application has finally been acceptedā¦it took 3 and a half months. So I understand the next step is to get a biometrics appointment with SEF. My lawyer tells me that āthere is no knowledge of when SEF will reopen their calendar for meetings. They are not answering the phone.ā
Is it true that SEF is not offering any biometrics meetings anywhere in Portugal at the moment?
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Yes, that is correct. Many have been waiting for over a year to get the biometric appointment.
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They are basically booked up and you have to wait for the next opening or keep an eye out for cancellations last minute, both are tough.
They are processing appointments, but getting an appointment requires determination and ingenuity. A couple nomadgate threads have discussed this intensively for the last year. The only recent change is that two of ten SEF offices stopped offering GV biometrics appointments: the Azores and another obscure place.
It is definitely true. They only release batches of appointments. They also donāt give you much notice that they will release them. Last couple of times it happened, they released about a thousand appointments for October and November at the end of September. Then last Wednesday, they released 1400 appointments that covers December and January. Both times, they announced it the morning of!
I donāt blame folks too much for being overwhelmed here - lots of info in rambling threads that are VERY hard to search and very unfriendly to someone trying to read everything quickly. Whatever forum software this is is not great
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perhaps re: softwareā but think about it this way: most people who posted here from / since earlier days had no such info a year to a year and a half ago. For example, ARI account access is a brand new luxury thing only the newer folks now know request, because the āolderā folks found out the hard way.
So IMHO newcomers have no clue how much more informed they are today based on those contributing before them.
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When I joined the site, I read the interesting threads from beginning to end, clutter and all. Then I asked questions that werenāt already answered or followed up on issues that werenāt clearly resolved. The community collaborated to expand the knowledge base for mutual benefit.
I encourage folks to remember that weāre all members of a voluntary community, not paying customers. Folks who want everything neatly packaged might want to look into a full-service outfit like Henley or Arton.
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This is getting kind of tangential to this thread so moderators might want to break it out.
What about it makes it difficult to read quickly? The font size? The way itās formatted? I do think the way it scrolls is weird and just a little bit too fancy, like too many things about most web interfaces now - style over function. The search is like most searches - itās free-form text, there might be some query language but if you donāt know what youāre looking for in the first place a free-form text search is just giving you a pitchfork to dig through a haystack. And if all it does is point you at a 1000-post topicā¦ youāre doomed.
All of thisā¦ itās a complicated topic. I would say that there are only really maybe 4 threads total that matter - the main fund comparison thread, the apostille thread, the tax/PFIC thread, and this one on the SEF status. If one read those four and treated it as a book/manual and spent the day itād take, I think one would end up being quite well informed. There are a few more that add specific-topic info - I think thereās one on BPI/IMGA, a couple of threads with some good stuff from tommi on the DIY SEF approach, and the mercan thread. The rest are tangential or clutter. The trick is knowing to find those 5 threads, and being willing to take the time to read them. If youāre going to commit 350-500k, the day spent reading the threads would seem worth it - God knows I wish Iād have been able to do it that way instead of spending the two or three man-weeks I spent figuring it all out with the other folks here.
Problem is of course that at this point, most anything added to those main 4 threads is mostly just making them longer without adding a ton of new information. Of course there is simply less information to BE added, and on top of that most of us who built out that information have moved on, and have little reason to do any more digging - not much in it for us any more.
It would be nice if someone condensed it all into a FAQ or something, but itād be a ton of effort, and clearly no one has enough free time or motivation to do it. I donāt think any of us would care if @tkrunning had one of his folks do it but that seems the only likely way itās going to happen.
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Oh absolutely, well said all around Jeff
You canāt actually ctrl F is the big problem, and the actual search doesnāt work well.
They overrode the native ctrl F in your browser because it doesnāt actually load the whole thread at once for some stupid reason. Just a few comments at a time that are on your screen.