Welcome to PolishCitizens.com, our website dedicated to helping people just like you (and us) acquire Polish citizenship through descent. In other words, we help people claim Polish citizenship through their parents, grandparents, or another distant relative.
In this article, we wanted to share the reasons why we started PolishCitizens.com. It’s a relevant story that will give you insight into our own journey of claiming Polish citizenship, which will hopefully help you avoid mistakes and get your citizenship confirmed quickly.
You see, we didn’t set out to start a company, far from it. We just wanted to go through a nice and easy process, pay someone to do most of the work, and then wait for the final documents to come through.
But that’s not what happened. We ended up speaking with every service provider we could find. We talked to lawyers, advisors, freelancers, and everyone in between. But what we found was a complete lack of transparency in terms of pricing or services and zero customer service.
And it didn’t stop there. Even after reluctantly settling on a service provider to manage our case, we faced numerous “extra” charges that were unforeseen related to our case. This was incredibly frustrating and costly. In the end, these extra charges added another 50% to our total bill.
But what’s worse is that half way through the process, we learned a few important facts. These helped to shape our outlook on the “citizenship industry” in Poland and helped us figure out how we could help other people facing the same challenges.
The Top 5 Things We Learned While Confirming Polish Citizenship
1. You do not need a service provider or lawyer to represent you to get citizenship confirmed in Poland
This is a common misconception and one we wish we learned from the beginning. Unfortunately, by the time we figured this out it was too late. So we stayed with our service provider since they were already corresponding directly with the Government agencies and we didn’t want to disrupt the process. But this taught us that it was possible to manage the process on our own, which we have since done for others and taught others to do for themselves.
2. Most of the documents that you need to prepare can be done by yourself (with a bit of guidance)
The process for claiming Polish citizenship does require documentation, plenty of it. But that doesn’t mean you need to pay a “professional” to do it for you. In fact, most of the documents require simple content where you are required to fill in the blanks.
Of course, there are other documents that require more technical or historical consideration. In these instances, if you are not confident in your own abilities to complete such documents you might want to hire someone to help with the process.
3. The only in country requirement is to have a local address for sending and receiving correspondence
While all of the documentation that you submit does need to be in Polish, none of the process needs to be completed in Poland. You can complete all of the documents in your home country and send them to Poland for submission.
That said, you do need to have a local address to receive correspondence from the government after submitting your information. But like most countries, Poland has service providers that offer this for a small fee per month. This is significantly cheaper than working with any of the local service providers to manage the entire process for you.
4. Most service providers charge 10-15 times the actual cost of confirming citizenship
When we got more insight into the process of receiving Polish citizenship, we were shocked to find out how inexpensive the entire process really is to complete. In fact, most service providers charge anywhere from 10 to 15 times the base cost.
With this in mind, you can see the savings that are possible when going through the process yourself. Or at the very least, outsourcing some of the required tasks such as translation, mail service, and completing some of the more technical documents.
5. Polish translators can be found all over the world and will gladly help you for a small fee
Yes, your documents need to be in Polish. But there are Polish translators in most countries. And while you can get your documents translated by an official translator, you can also simply have the documents certified by a consulate in your home country.
In any case, you will need to go through one of those two processes in order to get your documents into Polish before submitting. But this can usually be done at a fraction of the cost that service providers will charge you.
What Happened Next
At the end of the day, our experience was very disappointing. Thankfully, we did confirm our citizenship, receive our documents, and collect our passports.
But after seeing “behind the curtain” we decided that the next time we would do it ourselves. And that’s exactly what we did.
Like many Polish immigrant families, our immediate family is pretty large. And while only two of us went through the process of confirming our citizenship on the first round, we were determined to get Polish citizenship for the rest of our family as well.
The next time we went through the process, we completed citizenship for 18 people. Fortunately, we had already completed most of the documentation that would be needed since everyone was an uncle, aunt, or cousin.
But the biggest difference is that this time, we did it ourselves without any help from a service provider. And it went great!
We ended up completing the process in less time than the original process and it only cost us about 25% of what we paid to the original service provider per applicant. If you ask us, that’s a pretty significant savings.
And that brings us to the present day…
What We Currently Offer
We’re not looking to be service providers. On the contrary, we don’t see the need for them in the Polish citizenship process. Instead, we’re committed to helping people claim their Polish citizenship in the most cost effective and transparent way possible, which is on their own.
To this end, we have created a number of resources (and we have more coming) that will help you go through the entire process of claiming Polish citizenship. This includes our Polish Citizenship Applicant Checklist and our Ultimate Guide to Obtaining Polish Citizenship. Both of these are geared towards people looking to claim citizenship through descent.
The Polish Citizenship Applicant Checklist breaks down all of the documents that you are going to need to prepare in order to start the process. And we think this is the most important place for anyone considering claiming Polish citizenship to start. The reason for this is simple, collecting the documents can be daunting and if you’re not up to the task, you might want to stop there.
On the other hand, there are ways to collect documents even if you don’t have them. And you can even collect documents from Poland (and former Polish territories) if that’s necessary. This is detailed in the Ultimate Guide.
In fact, the Ultimate Guide to Obtaining Polish Citizenship details the entire process to claiming Polish citizenship, from start to finish. It will give you everything you need to know to go through the process yourself and it will help you get started before you need to consider hiring anyone for anything.
With both of these downloadable reports, our goal was simple, we wanted to give you a way to make a small investment to understand what you need to actually do before you pay someone that will blatantly ignore your interests. It’s a way for you to educate yourself, for a small nominal fee, before speaking to anyone about the next steps.
Next Steps
Hopefully you found this useful, if you have any questions you can use the contact form to send us a message.
If you’re ready to get started, we recommend taking a look at the Polish Citizenship Applicant Checklist as the first step to claiming your citizenship!
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE POLISH CITIZENSHIP APPLICANT CHECKLIST
