When the applicant has an informed assessment of the route and understands the material unresolved issues, with current instructions and a clear professional scope.
Do not confuse interest with readiness
Ask counsel to assess eligibility, admissibility and availability while the household or sponsor reviews funding and participation. This guide does not set a legal readiness test. It offers a decision record so the next commitment follows understood facts rather than pressure from a sales timetable.
Readiness has an order, and skipping a step usually means repeating it. First comes the individual assessment: who is applying, what their history contains, and whether anything in it would need addressing under any route at all. Second comes funding authority: whose money, held where, and who must approve its release.
Third comes the current programme reference, checked at the time rather than recalled, because terms described in an earlier conversation may not be the terms that apply. Only after those three does a filing plan make sense. Hypothetical example: A farm-machinery dealership owner books a filing-preparation package before anyone has established whether the intended contributor may lawfully make a payment of that size and character, and the package is redrafted twice while that question is resolved.
The gift runs from the individual applicant or a corporate sponsor, as applicable, to the Department of Commerce, deposited in a separate Treasury fund, and the processing fee is nonrefundable, so the decision to pay belongs at the end of this sequence rather than the beginning.