One of the last tasks a person needs to do before sending in their non-lucrative visa application is to pay for the process and the resulting residency. If you look at the Toronto embassy’s website, they have this really informative paragraph:
You must pay a fee. Look for it in this page: [
link] Please, ONLY money order or certified cheque payable to the Consulate General of Spain in Toronto will be accepted.
So, they ask that you go to another page, and then figure out the fees there. But which out of all those options are the ones you need to pay?
Using some of the other embassies websites to cross check the information, it looks like the two fees that need to be paid are the Canadian citizens 22 years old or over, which is $762 CAD currently, and the Initial authorization for temporary residency, which is $16.10 CAD.
A ‘money order’ in Canada is sort of like a certified cheque, but you buy it from the post office. I originally went down to my local post office and tried to buy two for the amounts listed above. Unfortunately I was quickly informed that ‘Consulate General of Spain in Toronto’ won’t work since it’s too large for the computer field that is available. I thought about shrinking it to something like ‘Consulate General of Spain’, which may have worked, but I really didn’t want to risk it.
I decided to go to my bank and try the certified cheque approach. I’m not a big fan of certified cheques, since banks charge you to issue them, and they are almost like sending cash (unless you have the original cheque, they are hard to cancel). And unlike a cheque, you can’t put a stop payment on it, which means it can be cashed later even if for some reason you need to cancel it. Seeing as I didn’t really have any other choice, I asked my bank for two certified cheques in the above listed amounts.
Tomorrow I have an appointment to pick up my new passport, which will hopefully be valid for 10 years. Once I have that, I am going to quickly update my application to reflect my new passport number, and then send it off. With luck I’m only about 36 hours away from sending off my completely application.
