Plan around the point at which a family member actually holds status or authorization, not around a filing date. Between petition, visa availability, and either an immigrant visa interview or eligible adjustment, several steps depend on government action with no fixed decision date. Treat every earlier date as provisional and keep commitments cancellable until then.
Set decision points, not a move date
Give the household three checkpoints: funds documented and petition filed; visa number available for the applicable category and chargeability; and authorization actually issued. Attach one reversible action to each — for instance, giving notice only after the third. Beyond that lies conditional residence and, ordinarily in the 90 days before its second anniversary, the petition to remove conditions.
Reviewing the checkpoints quarterly is more useful than repeatedly asking how long the whole case will take. One further discipline keeps the plan honest over a long process. Write the checkpoints as conditions rather than months, then review them on a fixed date each quarter and record what has changed.
Cases of this length are usually derailed not by a single delay but by a plan that stopped being updated, so that decisions made in year one were still being relied on in year three. Conditional residence and the petition to remove conditions sit at the far end of that sequence, and the evidence for that petition is accumulated during the two years rather than gathered at the end of them.