I'm French, my husband is American, and I assumed I'd handle his file myself. The French half I knew well enough. It was the American half that got us. What France Navigator gave us first was the list of things we didn't know we were supposed to know. We had the wrong idea about which route applied to us, and we'd been making decisions about our summers without realising they counted. That changed how we planned the following two years. After that it was mostly about not repeating mistakes. We'd already had a file come back once. Going through everything properly, in the order it's actually needed, meant the next one went through. There were also whole subjects we'd never have thought to look into. Things that come with being married across two countries, and things left over from his life before he moved here, that nobody mentions and that would have caught up with us years later. And then the part I couldn't help with at all. He'd been turned down more than once with no explanation, and it took France Navigator to tell us why and where to go instead. The money side stopped being something we found out about too late. He prepared for the exam on it over a couple of months and went in confident. He passed. We'd have got there eventually on our own, I think, just a lot later and with more doors closed along the way
Maud CassiereSeptember 2026
