About Visa & Money Desk

What this site is

Visa & Money Desk publishes plain-English guides to published rules in four areas:

• US tax — filing from abroad, the forms, EIN and ITIN, FBAR and FATCA, non-resident taxation
• Mortgages and home loans — VA, FHA, conventional, credit scores, mortgage insurance
• US immigration — EB-2 NIW, spouse and fiancé(e) visas, attorney costs and verification
• UK sponsor licence — applying, Certificates of Sponsorship, the Skills Charge, compliance

How we work

We write from official sources, and we show them. IRS, VA, HUD, FHFA, CFPB, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, USCIS, the State Department, gov.uk and the Home Office. Every article ends with a linked source list so you can check it yourself.

We date everything. Every article carries the date its facts were checked. In these subjects a figure without a date is close to useless — tax thresholds, loan limits and visa fees all change, some of them annually.

We say when we could not verify something. Where a primary source was unavailable, unreadable or contradicted by another, we say so in the article and leave the gap rather than publishing a number we cannot stand behind.

There are several examples across this site. We declined to publish a list of brokers accepting non-resident clients because we could only confirm two. We flagged the widely quoted USDA credit score of 640 as absent from USDA's own documents. We noted that Freddie Mac's minimum scores could not be verified, and that a HUD threshold may have been re-indexed since we could last read it.

That is the part we would ask you to judge us on. It is easy to publish a confident number. In this subject area, a confident wrong number costs somebody real money.

We write plainly. No jargon where a normal word will do.

What we are not

We are not a law firm, a tax practice, a lender or an adviser of any kind. Nothing here is advice for your situation. See our Disclaimer.

We cannot process, expedite, check or influence any application. We have no relationship with the IRS, USCIS, the VA, HUD or the Home Office.

On the hardest subjects

Tax, mortgages and immigration are areas where bad information does measurable damage — a missed deadline, a wrongly filed form, a loan someone cannot afford.

So we take a deliberately conservative line. We explain published rules and point you to the official source. We tell you when a matter is one to take to a professional, and we try to be specific about when that is rather than adding a disclaimer to everything.

Where a rule is genuinely unsettled — the UK's Temporary Shortage List after December 2026, ACA subsidy eligibility for visa holders from 2027 — we say it is unsettled rather than picking the likeliest answer and presenting it as fact.

How this site is funded

Advertising. Advertisements are selected and served by third-party networks. We do not choose individual advertisements and we do not endorse them.

We do not take payment for coverage, we do not publish sponsored articles disguised as guides, and no advertiser has any influence over what we write.

Corrections

We will correct anything we get wrong and say what changed. Email [email protected] with the article and what is wrong.

More detail in our Editorial Policy.