Since the new investor rules came in, the question we're asked most is how much money is needed. But once a file is with Immigration New Zealand, what they come back on is never the amount — it's the source of funds.
The hard part of an investor visa was never the amount. It's whether you can account for where the money came from.
Not the threshold — the evidence
They aren't looking at what you hold today but at how it came to be yours, and whether each step is recorded. What they want is an unbroken chain: when it was earned, how, whether it was declared, which account it moved through to which, and whether there is any break that can't be explained.
For applicants from Taiwan the difficulty is rarely that anything is wrong with the money. It's that ordinary business and family habits there don't leave the kind of paper record INZ expects. That is a documentation problem, not an integrity one — but left unaddressed, the outcome is the same.
Source of funds: the five gaps we see most
From the cases we've handled, these are the gaps that come up most often:
- Older cash transactions.No invoice, no transfer record — only the person's memory. The further back it goes, the harder to rebuild.
- Money moving within the family.Given by parents, lent between siblings, with nothing written down at the time.
- Business income not fully declared.The most sensitive of them. How to present it requires professional judgement, and it may involve tax matters back home.
- A break in a property disposal.Proceeds from a sale passed through several accounts, and one leg has no matching record.
- Investment gains without statements.Historical trades in shares, funds or digital assets weren't kept — only the closing balance survives.
All five can be dealt with, and all five take time. Some need historical records retrieved from a bank, some an accountant's statement, and some simply a different order of presentation.
Why six months ahead
Retrieving ten-year-old bank records is not a matter of days; an accountant's statement takes rounds of correspondence; translation and certification each have their own timelines. These tasks run in sequence, not in parallel.
Once you've decided on this route we usually suggest a source-of-funds health check, even if the filing date is undecided. It's comparatively light work, and it tells you where the largest gap is and how long that gap will take to close.
Three things you can start now
Before engaging anyone, you can already begin these:
- Lay your main sources of income over the last ten years onto a timeline, marking which stretches are fully documented and which aren't.
- Request historical statements from your banks. Most have a limit on how far back they'll go, so the earlier the better.
- Find and file the acquisition and disposal documents for property, shareholdings, policies and other large assets.
Doing just these three makes an enormous difference to how far a first consultation gets.
When to bring in an adviser
If, while building that timeline, you find a stretch you can't account for, that is the moment to talk to someone. The earlier a break is found, the more ways there are to close it. Once the file is in and the question comes back, all that's left is explaining.
Further reading
Active Investor Plus: requirements and process
Source of funds for AIP: the four documents most often missing
Growth or Balanced? The logic behind three family situations