Questions about the process

Hello,

Me and my wife have been living in the US for more than a year now, and we’re about to apply for a GC. My wife’s a post-doc with lots of credentials and a pretty good background in her field of work, so we’re quite confident that it will work out. We’re thinking about applying for both the EB2NIW and the EB1A, as we read that this is possible. However, we have two questions about the process (I’m sorry but we couldn’t find the exact answers, just some fragments here and there):

– Our current visas (J1 and J2) expires by the end of October. We read that the NIW processing time should take about 3 months. Since we are almost in August, that would mean that our visas would have expired before we got an answer about the I-140. Should we leave the country back to our own country and wait for the answer there or if we file the I-485 concurrently that would mean that we can stay in the US while we wait for the answer? We think that this could work, but we’re afraid that we would end up staying here unlawfully by mistake, just because we couldn’t find an exact answer. Just filling the I-485 means that we can stay while we’re waiting?

– Since my wife is the postdoc, she’s the only one who should file for the I-140, right? As her husband, I should only file the I-485, is that correct? If so, should I wait for the answer for her I-140 or can I file my I-485 along with hers in the same packet? That would mean that we would post her I-140, her I-485, and mine I-485 (as well as other files like forms I-131 and I-765 for each of us), is that correct?

I’m sorry if it seems that those are silly questions, is just that we could find a lot of reference and mostly everything on how to fill the forms, but couldn’t find those very specific situations, and we just want to make everything right.

Thanks in advance.