Matt, I hope it all goes well for your move back to the UK. I am guessing it will be harder to come back to the UK, given you now have a family to move with you. Make sure you get your kids their British passports, this will mean they won't be counted in the minimum salary requirements for UK settlement (you'd just need to confirm £18,600 per year to support your wife without the extras).
It is a sad state of affairs when people are forced, by circumstances, to have to return to blighty and fight officialdom and bureocracy just to have their nearest and dearest with them. I reckon if a a couple have been married for a few years, lived together abroad, and in the meantime have been blessed with children, then there should be no need for the foreign spouse to obtain an entry visa. The only requirements would be for the British subject would be to have suitable accomodation and valid employment. All the best.
Matt, haven't we been here before? I believe it's called "the end of the year blues" and I know from our conversations that both 2011 and 2012 were difficult years for you. But I really did think that this year you had cracked it by acquiring more property and the starting and building-up of your call centre business. Yes Yolanda has been an eye-opener in exposing the dark underbelly of Philippine society and the lengths that some will go to in the name of greed. But there's nothing you or I can do about that except write about it and expose the ugly truth to as wide an international audience as we can. When we spoke earlier in the week, you thought you'd be off to Saudi for one of your lucrative asset management consultancy spells with the oil industry; is that now not happening?
