You may have heard the following statement online or heard it from a student visa agent, but is it true?
Your funds must be in a bank account for at least six months to be accepted by Immigration New Zealand. If your funds are less than six months old, then your application will be declined.
This article will explain why this statement is wrong, or at least is a huge oversimplification of how student visa funds actually work.
We hope that after reading this article, you will understand the following concepts:
- The period of time your funds have been held is important. However, Immigration New Zealand (INZ) has never required a specific duration to accept funds (eg, funds must be held for exactly six months before they can be accepted)
- The source of your funds (where the money came from) may be more important than the period of time you’ve held your funds
- For a source of funds to be acceptable, the source must be ‘genuine’ – the meaning of ‘genuine’ depends on your individual circumstances, and is difficult to define simply.
How long funds should be held – what does the policy say?
The rules or policies around any visa are called immigration instructions.
An immigration instruction is a statement of government intent made at the highest levels by the government cabinet. It is the only text in student visa processing that could be called a ‘policy’.
Other texts exist that can be helpful (such as the Student Visa Information Sheet, which will be discussed below). But these are NOT what is used by immigration officers to assess a student visa. Immigration officers are obligated to follow the immigration instructions, and are not permitted to ignore them.
The immigration instruction about how long funds should be held is seen at instruction U3.20.20.b.:
U3.20.20 Funds held by or on behalf of the student
(a) Where funds are held by or on behalf of the student, immigration officers must be satisfied that the funds are from a genuine source and are genuinely available for the purposes of the applicant’s maintenance requirements.
(b) When determining whether a student has sufficient funds to maintain themselves throughout their stay in New Zealand, immigration officers may consider the period of time for which funds have been held by the student and the student’s ability to access funds while in New Zealand.
What can we see in the highlighted part of the instruction above?
- The period of time funds have been held can make a difference, but
- The instructions do not say what is an appropriate ‘period of time’ and leave it up to the immigration officer to decide what that might be; and
- Nowhere does it say that your funds must be 6 months old!
So, why do so many people say that funds have to be six months old to be accepted?
As explained above, everybody agrees that the history of student visa funds CAN have an impact on the visa assessment. INZ has also publicly referred to ‘six months’ as a kind of meaningful period in its public communication, so the period of six months may have some (limited) significance.
However, INZ have never specifically said ‘Your funds must be six months old to meet requirements’!
So, what did INZ actually say about the so-called ‘six-month rule’? To find out, we can look at the Student Visa Information Sheet, which is publicly available on the INZ website.
The Information Sheet is a helpful guide, written in a way the average reader can understand. However, it is still just a kind of ‘pamphlet’ for the general reader. The very first line in the Information Sheet says exactly for whom the text is intended:
This information sheet is for people who have not had an international student visa approved in the past.
Very clearly, the Information Sheet is NOT intended to be a technical manual for immigration officers to use when assessing an application. It is NOT government policy, the way immigration instructions are policies. Rather, it is a list of helpful suggestions for beginners (ie, ‘first-time international students’, a term in the full title of the document).
In the context of giving very general advice for beginners, the Information Sheet does mention three to six months as a kind of ‘threshold period’:
Evidence of having money available
The money to support your first year of study (or first programme) must be readily available. For example, cash in bank accounts that you can use to support yourself while in New Zealand. We recommend at least three months of transaction history for bank accounts. You may want to provide longer history (such as six months) to strengthen your financial evidence.
But does this mean “If your funds do not remain in a bank statement for at least 6 months before you apply, then your application will be declined”?
Firstly, three months or six months history is ‘recommend[ed]’. It is not required. Secondly, INZ says that you should try to show three to six months of ‘transaction history’, which can mean showing that money came from another bank account, or that your savings increased through regular salary payments.
This does NOT mean that your funds must sit untouched in a bank account for six months, and only THEN can you submit your application! Such a rule would make very little sense: nothing special happens to your money after it has ‘matured’ for six months. It is not cheese or wine that gets better with age; it is exactly the same money today as it will be in six months!
What INZ is actually communicating is this: If your funds have been held for six months or more, we might not expect to see further history than this. However, if your funds have been held for less than six months, we will expect more evidence, such as a transaction history. This interpretation certainly makes a lot more sense than an arbitrary ‘six month maturity’ rule, doesn’t it?
The importance of a Source of Funds
Source of funds simply means ‘the history or origin of your funds’. The nature of and evidence required for the source depends entirely on where the money came from.
When discussing the importance of a source of funds, we will now leave the Information Sheet to return to immigration instructions. Remember: unlike the Information Sheet, instructions are government policy and immigration officers will use them to assess your visa application!
Recall the instructions I shared above:
U3.20.20 Funds held by or on behalf of the student
(a) Where funds are held by or on behalf of the student, immigration officers must be satisfied that the funds are from a genuine source and are genuinely available for the purposes of the applicant’s maintenance requirements.
(b) When determining whether a student has sufficient funds to maintain themselves throughout their stay in New Zealand, immigration officers may consider the period of time for which funds have been held by the student and the student’s ability to access funds while in New Zealand.
Pay attention to the words ‘must’ and ‘may’ in the instructions above: immigration officers ‘must’ be satisfied that the funds comes from a genuine source, and they ‘must’ be confident the funds are genuinely available. On the other hand, immigration officers ‘may’ consider the period of time you’ve held your funds (or they may choose not to consider it, if the source of funds is strong enough to justify ignoring the period of time for which funds have been held).
In other words, the source of your money is, in fact, more important than the duration you have held your money! This is not my opinion, it is what the instructions clearly state!
This does not mean that evidence for the source of funds must always be provided. Sometimes, an application’s funds can be submitted without proving the source, such as where funds have been held for an extremely long time (eg. two or three years). However, showing a strong source of funds can make a significant difference in some situations, and this sometimes applies even when funds have been held six months or more.
If your funds are much more recent than this (eg. obtained one month ago after selling an asset), then the funds may be accepted despite being very ‘new’. However, this will only work if you provide very clear evidence of a source of funds.
Not sure if your funds meet the genuine source requirements? Book a consultation with one of our Licensed Immigration Advisers today:
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Okay, I get it: funds must come from a ‘genuine source’ and be ‘genuinely available’…but what does ‘genuine’ mean here?
Unfortunately, neither we nor INZ can give you a universal rule on what makes a source of funds ‘genuine’. This would be like giving a definition of ‘good person’ that everybody agrees with and which can cover every possible situation in life. It is impossible, because everybody’s circumstances are unique.
However, this does not mean that ‘genuineness’ is determined totally according to the immigration officer’s own individual preferences and personal opinions. If that was the case, then there would be no consistency in the immigration system at all.
Instead, INZ maintains detailed standard operating procedures that immigration officers will refer to when assessing genuineness. Unfortunately, many of these are kept highly secret to avoid dishonest applicants finding loopholes to cheat the system or avoid their fraud being detected.
However, an experienced immigration professional who regularly works with New Zealand student visas will develop an intuitive understanding of what INZ accepts, and what it does not.
This makes your choice of working with the right representative very important!
If work with a licensed immigration adviser at Choose New Zealand, how would it work?
First, we would assess your individual circumstances and get a good understanding of whether you may meet the immigration instructions, based on your individual circumstances. We would determine what type of funds you have, whether evidence a source of funds is required, and if so what the source is and how we might establish it later on. As you can see, this involves more than simply asking you ‘Are your funds six months old?’ and then counting the number of months on your bank statement until we get to 6!
Then, we would work together with you to prepare a strong funds portfolio that would meet INZ’s expectations, submit the visa application, and keep in touch with you right up to a decision being reached.
If you check Choose New Zealand’s Google review page, you will see that our reviews are high and we have had many satisfied clients – a visa application is important, and you owe it to yourself to get the best advice you possibly can. If you work with us, we believe you will get exactly that.
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This article is written by Choose New Zealand Licensed Immigration Adviser, Alain Koetsier (License No. 201900930)
DISCLAIMER: This article is for general information purposes only and is not a guide on how to apply for a visa. The article does not replace actual immigration advice tailored to your individual circumstances: if you trust your immigration adviser, you should follow their recommendations regardless of what this article describes.
