Thank you very much, Garbonzo Bean. Much obliged.
I agree. Thatās what I did. I paid my lawyer and my lawyer paid the fee. But I imagine each lawyer might do it differently.
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In fact, literally anyone can pay on your behalf, your lawyer, partner, family, friend or pet 
as long as they have access to Multibanco payment system (via online banking with a PT bank for example).
What matters is the ācomprovativoā PDF that appears then in your SEF ARI portal, and will be required as part of your documents pack for the biometric appointment.
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My timeline:
- Main applicant submission: 02nd Mar, 2023
- Paid on 07 Mar, 2023
- Family application submission: 09 Mar, 2023
- Paid on 13 Mar, 2023
I will not pay much attention to any news/noise about the actual cut off date until the law is approved by the parliament. All we hear and read now are all speculations and people kind of saying what mostly beneficial to themselves. We should give ourselves peace.
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So 49 hours have passed since my ARI application was submitted and it is still refusing my payment. Can this be paid in person? I hope they arenāt actually blocking it now.
Did you get your lawyer to pay or did you pay yourself
I tried to pay myself. But after that failed, I sent an email asking my lawyer to try
I got my lawyer to pay early March and it went through.
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Yes I just talked to my attorney on the phone and she told me people were having issues paying it using their bank app. But they succeeded in person. So I just sent the fee directly to her so she could go pay at the bank
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I am about the same in timelineā¦ within a day. Made dependent payments on Friday .
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So my lawyer applied on 3/14 and paid on 3/21, but when I log onto ari.sef.pt, it still says awaiting fee payment registration. Did anyone recall how long it takes for the fee payment to show on the SEF site?
@globextrader my own payment status reflected as āSettledā within 48 hours, but my dependentsā took 6 days to show as āSettledā. Just a matter of time before the status updates. My payments were made earlier in March.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but for those applying after Feb 16, 2023 not only do you risk your application being voided, you are in for an extremely long wait. Even if your application is considered by SEF you should note that SEF still has not pre-approved people from December 2021. Which means, you would be lucky to have your applications reviewed two years from now. It could very well be a 9 year process from beginning to end.
Maybe it is still worth taking a chance on things improving. But my opinion is that this is a foolish gambit. I have regrets applying when I did and it was long before this mess.
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Yes. Sorry I lost track of the thread . Payments all accepted and process started/confirmed. Somehow the bank missed one payment and I had to redo it but it went through
Not much we can do about timeline ā¦. Oh well. Process started.
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I think youāre right to remind us of the slow processing times, but there is room for optimism (or really less pessimism).
From Sep 2022 we saw āwavesā of Dec 2021 applications processed (see SEF Pre-Approval : Sharing Status - #583 by chetiansunny)
It seems thereās still later Dec 2021 to be approved.
Of course I would assume the HUGE number of applications on Dec 2021 would have been bigger than application received during the first 9 months of 2021.
I think application from Q1 2023 will be the same as Q4 2021, we are all expecting to wait a year for pre-approval.
BUT we do have some benefits, only this year they allowed online renewals for most visas (
See: Portugal Moves Online Applications for Visa Renewals, Including Golden Visas - SchengenVisaInfo.com), which should reduce SEF workload by 70% according to one of the Funds [who is of course biased] (See: The end is near. How to proceed before the closure of the Golden Visa. - YouTube), including GV renewals, so that should allow SEF to focus on the new applications and backlog.
Yes, itāll still suck for new applicantās, but I wouldnāt be surprised if they pre-approve the rest of 2021, all of 2022 and the current 2023 applicants this year.
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