How to correctly compose a sponsorship letter for a Schengen visa - you won’t go far without it?

Anyone who has ever applied for a Schengen visa has directly or indirectly encountered the term “letter of sponsorship”. What is it, why is the document needed and how to write it correctly so as not to be refused? If there is no official income (or it is too low), the balance in the bank account is close to zero, and you want to go on vacation or visit loved ones, you must provide a sponsorship letter to obtain a visa.

Before answering the question posed, it is worth understanding the essence of the document itself.

A sponsorship letter is an official document, drawn up in free form, confirming that a third party will bear all the costs of your trip to one of the Schengen countries.

This 3rd party may be one or more adult blood and/or legal relatives.

Some states also allow the execution of such a document by an employer or legal entity - for example, a company organizing an event (for example, an exhibition or symposium).

Even if there is insufficient funds for travel, the EU Visa Code cannot be violated - one of the clauses of this document states that in order to obtain a Schengen visa, you must have funds in an amount sufficient to cover: transportation costs, housing and related expenses for the entire duration of the trip. Accordingly, if the visa applicant does not have the required amount (or cannot document this), he should get it somewhere. Some take out the missing amount on credit, others borrow from friends, but these methods are not always reliable and safe enough. The most correct solution in this situation is a sponsorship letter.

It is believed that for each day of his stay in one of the Schengen countries, a traveler must have at least 50 euros, which at the current exchange rate is just under three and a half thousand rubles.

You need to add the cost of 2 flights (or the cost of another type of transport) to your daily expenses, and you can calculate the amount without which a tourist’s route to the EU countries is closed.

To obtain a visa without sponsorship, you must have official sources of income in the amount of at least 15-20 thousand rubles monthly, or have the amount to cover travel expenses in your bank account.

Three groups of visa applicants who need a sponsorship letter a priori:

• children under 18 years of age, because the child is in any case fully or partially financially dependent on adults, without their help he will not be able to travel independently to the Schengen states;
• unemployed citizens or people with unofficial wages;
• pensioners whose pension does not exceed 15–20 thousand rubles per month and do not have significant savings.

Sample letter 2019

Having studied in detail the official sample of a sponsorship letter approved by each of the Consulates, you can easily and in a matter of minutes understand everything: the structure and message.

The sponsorship letter for obtaining a Schengen visa is written in Russian.

It is possible to write “the old-fashioned way” - with a black pen on a sheet of paper by hand, or to print the text on a PC and then print it out on a printer. In any case, the sponsor will have to personally sign.

For the text you need:

• passport details of the sponsor, traveler;
• country visited;
• contacts (phone and/or email);
• travel time in the format “from DD.MM.YYYY to DD.MM.YYYY”;
• confirmation of the assumption of responsibility for covering expenses (“I, full name, undertake...”);
• At the end of the document, put the date, signature and its transcript.

It is worth sticking to short, clear, clear formulations without flowery phrases.

You can use this template (form) as a basis, in which all you have to do is fill in the blanks:

To the consular section

embassy ________________ (name of state)

Sponsorship letter

I, Last Name First Name Patronymic, DD.MM.YYYY of birth, passport ________ (series, number), live at the address: ___, st.___d. ___, sq. ___, I hereby confirm that the expenses Last Name First Name Patronymic, DD.MM.YYYY of birth, passport ________ (series, number), living at the address ___, st. ___, building ___, apt. ___, during a trip to __________ in the period from DD.MM.YYYY to DD.MM.YYYY I take over.

I am attaching an extract from the official place(s) of work or bank account.

Contact number - _________________

E-mail address - _________________

DD.MM.YY, “signature” / “decryption”

Filling out this template instead of writing everything from scratch will save a lot of time.

Additional documents

In addition to the letter itself, the Consulate of the Schengen states (in particular Latvia, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Italy, Estonia, Spain, Greece, Lithuania, Portugal, Poland, France, Hungary, etc.) as well as the UK They also require a number of documents and their copies.

Without at least one of them, you will not be able to obtain a visa.

1. A copy of the sponsor's passport. You will need a civilian one in any case, but it won’t hurt to have a foreign one with you (if you have one).
2. A certificate of the sponsor's salary from the official place of work, issued on a special company letterhead indicating the position, contact information of the organization, signature of the accountant or general director, and seal. If the sponsor operates as an individual entrepreneur, copies of certificates of registration of an individual entrepreneur and registration with the tax office will be required.
3. Bank account statement. It is worth considering that you should take the document no earlier than a month before submitting the application; you need to indicate not only the balance but also the movement of money for the last 3 months (all receipts, withdrawals, transfers to other currencies and other transactions).
4. If the sponsorship letter is issued for a child under 14 years of age, then his birth certificate (copy) will also be needed.

Examples of errors

Typical mistakes that annually deprive thousands of people of traveling to the Schengen area due to the absence or incorrect preparation of a sponsorship letter:

• Probably the most common shortcoming is an indecently large and unnecessary amount of text. You need to write briefly and to the point, which is why any well-written sponsorship letter never contains more than two hundred words.
• Dividing into paragraphs is also an important point. It is necessary that even a small text be well structured.
• It is worth writing in a language that everyone can understand, and not overusing professional vocabulary or expressions that are incomprehensible to people in other fields of activity. It also doesn’t hurt to avoid dialectisms and jargon (profanity).

Don’t make mistakes and the sponsorship letter will turn out to be really worthwhile, it will be pleasant to read, which means it will form that very important “emotional plus” in the head of the Consulate employee who decides whether to issue a visa or not.