We got our South African Permanent Residency (Almost!)

After 18 months of waiting, one email changed everything. It told us that our South African permanent residency application had reached an outcome, but there were 3 problems. Number one, the email from the Department of Home Affairs ended up in my junk folder. Number 2, therefore we just had 9 days to pay R120,000. And number 3, even after paying it, we still didn't know whether the decision applied to both James and I. What followed involved unanswered emails, a brown envelope, 2 missed phone calls, and a trip to London that finally They gave us part of the answer, but only part of it. So in this video, I'm going to take you through exactly what happened, what the decision means, what we still don't know about James, and what comes next, because after all the waiting, the outcome wasn't quite as simple as we expected. Now, if you've been following this channel for a while, you may remember that we started our South African residency process back in November 2024. We'd already bought a home in South Africa, and our longer-term plan is to spend more time there during the British winter. Now James is still working at the moment, so we weren't planning to move immediately. That meant we had a choice. We could either apply for a more straightforward resident visa, which would have been faster and would last for about 4 or 5 years, or we could skip that and go straight to permanent residency. Now permanent residency is definitely the harder route. It required more evidence, more money, and a much longer wait, but once approved, we would not have to keep renewing our retirement visa every few years, and we weren't in a rush, so we decided to deal with the harder process first. At least that was the plan. But before I take you through the timeline, do consider subscribing if you're interested in what it really takes to build a life in South Africa. We will be sharing a follow-up to this video to share further twists and turns in this convoluted process. But let's first go back to the beginning. We began this process in June of 2024. We applied under the financial independence category. That meant proving that we had assets worth at least R12 million. Now those assets could be both inside and outside of South Africa, so think property, pensions, savings, cars, and so on. We also needed medical certificates, police checks, notarized birth certificates, certified copies of other documents, and because at the time James and I were not married, we had to provide 5 years of evidence showing that we were genuinely in a relationship, and that is much more difficult than it sounds. You don't realize how much evidence you need until somebody asks you to prove that you have a shared life together for the previous 5 years. So we had to find old bills, shared addresses, financial records, travel evidence, and other paperwork that showed that we were genuinely a couple. Now luckily James is way more organized than I am, so he was able to dig out this information. The final application became a very large pack, and it was something that I worked on every Friday, chipping away at the info required each week. Now we were applying from the UK, so we had to submit everything through the VSF Global Office in London. We eventually made that submission in November of 2024, and I should say here that we used a consultancy called Intergate to help us. Now, this isn't a sponsored video, we absolutely paid 100% for their services, but I honestly don't think that we'd have got the application right without them. They told us what documents we needed, they checked everything each week, They pointed out any gaps, and then they put the final submission pack together for us. And there were so many documents, dates, certifications, and small details that it would have been really easy to make a mistake. And with an application this expensive and this slow, the last thing you want is to be rejected because just one piece of paper is missing or prepared incorrectly. So in November 2024, we headed off to London and we submitted everything, and then the waiting One of the frustrating things about this process is that you cannot properly track your application online at all. You hand over a huge amount of personal and financial information, and then it just disappears into the system. There's no useful tracking page showing who has it, where it is, or how far it's progressed. So for months we heard absolutely nothing. Now I just imagine that our application is sitting in some huge dusty warehouse in Pretoria, with hundreds of or thousands of other applications, and eventually someone blows off the dust and gets to it. Then in February 2025, I received an email from the South African High Commission in London, and for a few seconds I was really excited. I thought we had a genuine update and we were making progress, but the message simply said that our application had now left London and being forwarded to Pretoria for processing and finalisation. That was all. And it appears that applications are collected together in London and then sent to South Africa in batches, so although we applied in November, it was actually several months before the application reached Pretoria. All rather frustrating. And then everything went really quiet again, and if we fast forward over a year to March 2026, I received an email from the Department of Home Affairs asking for updated financial and contact information. And this was exciting because it meant somebody was finally processing the application, but it also created a lot— another large amount of work because a lot of things had changed since we first applied. We'd moved house, I'd moved my pension, some of our financial information had also changed, so we had to update the evidence and make sure everything still met all the requirements and all the banks confirmed that what we were saying was true. Then once again there was silence. Up to this point, the process had been slow and frustrating, but the next email changed the pace completely. After waiting for 18 months, we suddenly had days to send a very large amount of money. So in May 2026, I received an email from the Department of Home Affairs, and attached to it was a letter confirming that the application had been approved. After all this time, we finally had the answer that we'd been waiting for, but There is a condition with it, and that is that we had 14 days from receipt of this letter to pay R120,000 to the Department of Home Affairs. Now, this payment we expected, and it's linked to the financial independence application. And this is where the story becomes slightly alarming, because the email ended up in my junk folder and I didn't see it for 5 days. So now, instead of having 14 days to arrange payment, I only had 9 days left. And we had to transfer 120,000 rand from the UK to South Africa to reach their bank account within the 14 days. And if you know anything about transfers, international payments can take several days. There can be delays with banks, with money laundering checks, currency transfers, and other security checks. So after waiting more than a year, everything suddenly felt really, really urgent. We had 9 days to make a large payment to South Africa. And yes, absolutely, it did cross my mind that this could be a scam, especially since it ended up in junk. But the message looked really genuine, the letter looked genuine, and the timing made sense. But when you're about to send R120,000 overseas, you want to be absolutely certain that the account belongs to the Department of Home Affairs. So I did my due diligence and some research. I checked all the details, and I was able to confirm that yes, the bank account was Genuine. So I made the payment, then I tried to get a receipt or confirmation that the payment had been received, and that became yet another challenge. I could absolutely confirm that the money had left the UK, but I couldn't confirm it had been received by the Department of Home Affairs. And at the same time, I was trying to find out whether the approval for the residency applied to both of us. I was the main applicant, and James had applied as part of the family application, so I I think understandably, I assumed that the approval meant that both applications had been approved because I assumed that they were processed at the same time, but the replies I received were never clear. One message said that I was the main applicant and that my spouse's application would be dealt with as part of a family application. I mean, what does that mean? Slightly cryptic, and to be honest, it didn't answer the question: has James's application been approved or not? I kept on asking, and I kept getting vague replies or just no responses. And because we had applied together, I would assume that we would receive our outcomes together. That's a fair enough assumption, isn't it? But that assumption turned out to be wrong. At the end of June of 2026, I received another email from the South African High Commission in London. It said that the application had been finalized and that VFS Global would contact me about collection. What they don't tell you is whether the result is positive or negative. They simply tell you that the outcome has been reached. Now, in my case, I already knew that the result was positive because I'd been asked to pay the R120,000, and they wouldn't ask for that if it had been rejected. But I still didn't know whether James's residency was included, so I continued to email every single address that I could find. Eventually, the South African High Commission confirmed that they'd received a positive outcome But they had not received an outcome for Jane, so it was only for me. And that was the moment we realized that actually the applications are being treated separately with 2 separate application numbers. So we submitted them together, but they were not completed together. So after waiting for the decision to be made, you also wait for the physical paperwork to make its way from South Africa to London. And in July, I received confirmation that my outcome was being sent to VSF Global in London, and about 2 weeks later, VFS tried to call me and I missed the call. Now, we don't live close to London, so collecting it may— meant another trip. So I traveled down the following week. So I am walking on my way to the VFS office to pick up my residency. So we'll see how straightforward that is. You can't actually book an appointment, you just have to turn up. between 4 o'clock and 5:30 Monday to Friday. They've called me twice, I've missed both calls, so hopefully this will be straightforward. I'll let you know. And here we are at the VSF application centre. There's no queue, so that's a good sign. So let's see what happens. I arrived, I got a number, and based on our original experience, I expected to wait ages, but in fact I only waited about 15 minutes. And then I was handed a brown envelope, and by this point I knew my application had been successful, but I'd never received one simple message saying exactly what I would be collecting. So I opened the envelope, and inside was a covering letter and my residence permit. So after waiting 18 months, it came down to an A4 sheet of paper inside a brown envelope. I'd imagine something slightly more substantial or perhaps smaller like a card that would fit neatly inside my passport, but no, it's this A4 sheet of paper. It's like a larger certificate that I now need to keep safe and carry when I enter and exit the country. Now on the train on the way home I became completely paranoid that I was going to leave this flipping envelope behind, so I kept it in front of me at hand. I'd waited 18 months for this piece of paper, and I was convinced I was going to lose it somewhere between London and Eastbourne, but thankfully, as you can see, it made it home safely. So what does this actually mean? Well, it means I can stay in South Africa permanently. I don't need to leave after 3 months simply because my visitor period has ended, and it gives me the right to live in South Africa as a permanent resident, and that's a major step for us because it makes longer-term plans much easier. But we still have the unresolved issue of James. So after sending more emails, I was told in mid-July that James's application was in the adjudication process. So that's good news. That meant it was now being considered. And then a few weeks later, I followed up again, and at this point I was told that his application had reached an outcome and had been dispatched to London at the end of July. But we still don't know whether the outcome is positive or negative. They're just not going to tell you on an email. Now, there's no obvious reason why it should be negative. We submitted our evidence together, we met the same relationship and financial requirements, but you know what, until James receives the official result, we can't say that his residency has been approved. And because we live some distance from London, you know, James is going to have to make the journey to VFS to open hopefully a big envelope like this and discover whether the answer is yes or no. Why they can't just tell you via email, I have no idea. It would remove a lot of stress and uncertainty for us all, and it would actually lower their admin because they would receive less chasing emails and calls. Anyway, hopefully by the time you're watching this, we may know more, and when we receive an update, we'll record a follow-up video once we know the full result. Getting the permanent residence permit is not the end of the process. It starts a whole other round of administration that you are time-bound to get done. So the next major step is to apply for a South African Smart ID card when we are next in South Africa, and the Smart ID replaces the old green identity book and will give us an official South African ID number, and the ID number is important for everyday life. It's used when you're dealing with banks, tax, insurance, vehicle registration, mobile phone contracts, and other services that require official identification. The residency certificate proves my status, but the ID should make it easier to function as a resident. Converting my non-resident bank account to a resident's bank account will make banking so much easier. So for example, I won't have to justify every time Rand goes into the account where it came from, from a money laundering perspective. Now after that, we also need to convert our British driving licenses into South African driving licenses because as a permanent resident I have a limited period where I can make this conversion. I need the South African identity document first before I can complete that process, so the Smart ID needs to come first when we're next in South Africa, and we don't want to leave the driving license conversion until the deadline of 5 years because then we'll have to go through the normal South African licensing process, and that would mean applying for a learner's license and taking the driving test. And we watched our friends go through this process earlier this year, and to be honest the South African driving test is much tougher than you probably expect, although I do often wonder whether— how many drivers in South Africa have actually passed their test. I'd prefer to avoid that altogether, so if I can simply convert my existing license then we will absolutely make sure we do that within 5 years. So although the residency has been approved there's still a fair amount of paperwork ahead. Now, what have we learned from this process? Well, the first lesson is to be persistent. Don't assume that somebody will automatically contact you every time the application moves forward. You need to follow up, find several email addresses, keep records of those that reply, and keep records of the replies. Save every reference number, copies of every document, keep copies of every payment, and check your junk folder. That one is very, very important, and James is now checking his spam folder every day. The most significant email in the whole of this process sat in my junk folder for 5 days. Crazy, right? Now, had I found it later, I could have missed the payment deadline completely and null and voided this whole process. Can you imagine how frustrating that would have been? I would also suggest finding contacts of people who actually respond. We collected a bunch of different emails and in some cases even WhatsApp contact details. Sometimes we had to send 2 or 3 messages before receiving a reply. Now I can't prove that the emails moved the application forward, but I do believe that being persistent helped us understand where it was in the process and stopped us missing important updates. The other surprise is the timescale. Our application has actually taken just over 18 months from submission to receiving the permit. Now whilst that felt like a long time. Friends of ours waited 4 years for theirs, so when we applied, our expectation was that our application would take a similar amount of time. So although the process was confusing and stressful, it was actually completed much faster than expected, and DHA says that they're getting through the backlog, and hopefully that is true, which may be why ours was finalized quicker than we thought. So that's where things stand. I have my permanent residence permit, James's application has reached an outcome, but we still don't know whether that outcome is positive or negative. We're hoping that his brown envelope will contain the same answer as mine, and of course, as soon as we know, we will record a follow-up. So make sure that you are subscribed if you want to see how this story ends. I'd really like to hear from you in the comments. Have you applied for South African residency or some other kind of long-term visa? How long did your application take? Did you struggle to get clear updates like we did? Did anything end up in your junk folders? Your experience may help others who are going through the same process, and that's why I've recorded this video. Now, if you want to see the original video where we explain the application process and all the documents needed in more detail, I will link that on screen now. But otherwise, thank you so much for watching. Hopefully next time we talk about this, we'll be able to say that both the have been approved.