 Hi everyone, welcome back to our YouTube channel. My name is Jolie Greenbaum. I'm married QX Executive Assistant and I help earn filing unique and complex immigration applications. For today's video we're going to be talking about reference letters in spousal sponsorship applications. So it's important to note that according to the IRCC document checklist that reference letters are actually not mandatory if we meet four criteria. These four criteria are that you, this is your first marriage, that you've been married for more than two years, you have children, and that you are living together. If you meet all four of these criteria, reference letters are not mandatory. However, regardless of this, we submit reference letters with each and every single one of our applications because we feel that it really adds to the application and we have a very rigorous procedure that we follow. So regardless of the criteria we usually submit between five to seven reference letters in each and every single one of our applications. With regards to the content of the reference letters, in addition to making it mandatory for each of our applications, we provide our clients with a detailed list of instructions on regards to the content of the reference letters and our clients have found this really helpful to provide their friends and family. So they sort of have a guide of what to write, what to include, and what a reference letter should look like. To help you with this a bit, the content of a reference letter, it should really focus on how the couple works well together. It should focus on the person who's writing at their relationship to either spouse or to the couple as a whole. We usually advise that the people that write these reference letters know both spouses so that way they can better attest to both individuals and how they come to know each other as a couple. There isn't really a specific length that we follow with reference letters. Of course, we usually see a range between a half page to two pages, but it's really, really important that we emphasize that the quality is far more important than the quantity of the reference letter. We've had really short reference letters, but they have been fantastic and attest to the genuineness of the relationship and they tell wonderful stories, and those are always much more poignant than two pages of something that is less strong. So it's also really important that the quality of the reference letters remains high because we always double check the reference letters that we receive for every application. We need to ensure that one, the quality of the reference letters matches that of the legal submission letter that we're writing. We need to make sure that the information actually matches up. We don't leave room for discrepancies in our applications between the forms, to the documents, to the reference letters, to what's written in the legal submission letter. We need to make sure that everything is cohesive. So with that being said, we always verify that the reference letters are of top quality, the ones that we receive and the ones that we include in the application. What we also often do is that we actually include excerpts from the reference letters in our legal submission letters because we find that these really help to humanize the application, and this is really helpful for an officer reading and reviewing the application to see that this couple, they're in real, genuine, bona fide relationship, and that's not just based on their own joint documents, but to the friends and family around them, that they can see that these people are in a real relationship. Writing the reference letter, it's important for them to first introduce themselves, sort of off by saying how they know either individual or the couple as a whole, both spouses, and then they can sort of go into how they know them as a couple, how they work well together, maybe start by saying a personal anecdote. We usually find that any extra little pieces of information that can really humanize the couple to the officer is very beneficial. So if anybody has any questions about reference letters or the spousal sponsorship application process, please feel free to contact our office and we'll be more than happy to help you. Thank you for watching. Have a great day.