FredLee

Some people have had required to show more proof in addition to the letter.  Here is a link.   

Sorry for the mistake, I used the wrong terminology.  I meant the Thai ID Card. 

When I changed from marriage to retirement extension four years ago in Chiang Mai, in addition to all the documents required for the retirement extension the following was required:  Wife had to be present, copy of her CPR, copy of her bluebook, copy of our marriage certificate and a copy of our marriage registration. Don't know if they still requires those, but better to be safe than sorry considering the distance you have to travel.

6 hours ago, NancyL said:

Was it the agent that said that or an Immigration agent?  Seems that some agents just want to make sure that their clients are over-prepared.

The agent told me it was now required. When I went to get my extension, the immigration agent looked at each statement very closely. He then laid them out side by side with the certification letter to make sure the amounts matched up. It appears they are getting serious about it. I always have my income documentation with me when I go to immigration just to be on the safe side, but this is the first time I had to show it.

1 hour ago, davehowden said:

Are you from the USA ?

Yes. I had the income certification letter from the consulate, but the agent said that immigration is now requiring additional documentation.

TIme for the annual pilgrimage for my extension of stay, so took all my documents to the visa agent upstairs at the Prom. They did ask for documentation to back up the income verification letter. Said the "new" boss requires it. Provided them copies of of each of my retirement income statements. I also had copies of three months of bank statements showing the deposits into my account, but they said the other documents were enough.

I have used Toshiba exclusively for quite a few years with no failures. Ranging in size from 250 GB to 1 TB. No external power source required. I am not a heavy user, using them only once or twice a week for backup or file storage.

I purchased a Dell Inspiron 5567 from Lazada several months ago. It was supposed to come with Ubuntu installed, but actually had windows 10 installed. I installed Linux Mint on it myself, having received good advice from some members here. (see my post in the Linux forum).  All the function buttons, trackpad, and mouse work with no problems using Linux Mint.

I use Android File Transfer. It is free. Just download to your iMac and install.

Just be prepared for additional information. I changed from marriage to retirement extension about three years ago in Chiang Mai, and they required me to bring my wife and a copy of my marriage documents.

It appears that High Sierra has many problems. Waiting for them to clean it up before I upgrade.

Been using Firefox for years, but it seems that every time they update they break something. Getting tired of wasting my time trying to get it back working properly. Switched to Chrome three days ago.

18 hours ago, muratremix said:

Probably because it is not public 3BB wifi?

Perhaps somebody is making fun, or thinking it is fun to rename their wifi name to 3BB?

I recently stopped by the local 3bb office to upgrade my service, which included a new router. They set it up for me, and when I got home I found they had changed the name of my network from "my name" to "3bb-my name". Maybe they are trying to get free advertisement by adding 3bb to the users network name.

Thanks guys.  I did do a dual boot. I decided to keep windows just in case my install didn't work. I don't think I will ever use it. I erased the D: and E: partitions in windows, and then did the linux install. I made the partitions as swap: 1 GB, root: 30 GB and home: the remaining free space. Everything seems to be working fine. It is set up to boot into linux first so I am happy with that. I am a little bit familiar with linux, I played around with Fedora a little bit about 10 years ago so I hope I can learn fast. I really appreciate you both taking the time to help me, thanks once again.

Ordered a new laptop with Ubuntu already installed. Figured that was the easiest way, since shouldn't have any hardware issues. Laptop arrived today, and it had Windows 10 instead of Ubuntu. Not familiar with Windows since I have been using OSX for quite a few years. Don't really want Windows, but I suppose it could be useful. So I downloaded Linux Mint Cinnamon and imaged it to a USB. Booted up from the USB and it appears to be working ok. Checked the ethernet connection, wifi, and sound and they all work properly. I am trying to decide whether to make a dual boot system or just replace Windows with Linux. If I decide to do a dual boot, I am not sure of partitoning the 1TB hard drive. It is currently configured as Local DIsk (C:)  101 GB free of 149 GB,     Data (D:)  390 GB free of 390 GB,   Backup (E:) 390 GB free of 390 GB.  Looks like I should be able to install Linux in the D: or E: partition, but I'm not sure. Appreciate any advice.  

I just did this last week. I also was a True customer. I ordered a Roku Premier+ set top box from Amazon. It was delivered to me in seven days. Followed the very simple instructions to connect it and log on. Did a search from my computer to USTvNow, and signed up for their free trial. Followed their instructions on how to set it up on my Roku, again very simple. I also signed up for the Netflix Thailand free trial. Roku already has them on the on their playlist, so didn't have to set it up manually. Both services I signed up for have various packages available. If I choose the top level for each, the combined price will be almost identical to what I was paying for True's gold package.  

Thanks for the reply. My Roku will be delivered this week, and I am looking forward to seeing what all is available with it.

I would like to be able to stream tv shows from the US. I just ordered a Roku Premier+ box to be able to stream the ustvnow shows to my television, but in viewing them on my 21.5 inch computer screen. I am not sure the quality is going to good enough when streamed to a 50 inch tv screen. I have not had any problems with buffering.

My fallback position would to be to try to use something like Sling TV. I already have a vpn that is paid up for a year. It can only be installed on a router flashed with Tomato by Shibby, so I am thinking about ordering an ASUS router and flashing it with the firmware/software from Tomato. I verified on the Tomato website of which download to use for the router I will be using. From what I can find on the web, I would connect the router to the modem/router provided by my ISP.

I would appreciate any feedback as to anything I am overlooking. I have never flashed a router before, so I am a little nervous about that. I am also not sure whether I should upgrade my internet package with my ISP, my average download speed is between 13 Mbps and 15Mbps.

Completed my first online report yesterday. I could never get it to work before, but I just recently traveled outside of the country so I decided to try it again. I actually had to try about 12 times to get it to accept my application. I tried all the various IE browsers on Safari, and then was able to successfully complete the report using IE 7 emulator on Firefox (also on my Mac). There were a myriad of problems: Major annoyance was typing a character and then having to wait 2 or 3 seconds to type the next one. This was common to all IE versions. The drop down menus would not work on some IE versions. Most of the times, once I was able to get everything filled out, the submit button on the first page could not be activated. Twice when I was able to submit the first page I was directed to the dreaded report to immigration page. Finally I was able to submit the first page successfully, and the second page went off without a hitch. I received my confirmation email this morning, and printed out my receipt of notification.

I am using a Macbook Pro. I tried every IE browser version and also the chrome browser using Safari without success. I also tried IE 8 and IE 9 emulators on the Firefox browser without success. It only worked using IE 7 on Firefox.

After reading stuurman's post, I think I will download Chrome and use the IE-on-Chrome extension for my next report.

As far as #2: I changed from extension based on marriage to extension based on retirement last year. My retirement extension started on the date I changed it, not the expiration date of the previous marriage extension. So if you changed your extension on 1 August, it would be valid through 31 July. My experience was at the Chiang Mai immigration office.

Bangkok Furniture, just west of the Promenda entrance/exit on road 3029. I bought a leather covered one there last July, and they had seven or eight fabric covered ones on display.

I posted mine on 26 December by EMS. I received it by post yesterday, 20 January. I live outside the city, and it previously has taken 8 to 10 days to receive it.

Thought I add my experience going for my retirement extension on 2 december. I arrived at 5 am, when there were 7 seats occupied, the first 3 by agents (or at least their bags) and the remainder with people representing themselves. Had a nice chat with some of the other people who came early, complaining about the need to get up this early as us foreigners are wont to do. The queue started to fill up seriously around 7 am and by 8:30 when the female immigration stepped out to start checking paperwork and handing out queue cards I counted 33 people in the queue. This would indicate that it should be safe to come around 6:30-7:00 and still get served, except during weeks with a lot of holidays (like next week).

I was expecting to receive queue number 9 when the lady told me that I needed to bring my Thai wife to sign a letter an also bring a recent copy of my marriage certificate. Apparently the first time you change from Non-O visa to a retirement visa that is a requirement. It takes a lot of time to get a new copy of my marriage registration and a bit expensive as it has to come from Europe (I cannot get it on-line), then it needs to be certified to be a true copy by the embassy in Bangkok and get translated into Thai. I was told last year that I would have to submit a new certificate every year to extend my marriage visa and that was the main reason for me to switch over to a retirement visa (that and the fact you can get the retirement extension the same day). It was the first time I heard about this requirement, so either I am a lousy reader of various threads on the subject (very likely) or switching visa is not often done and this isn't frequently mentioned.

Anyway, I was turned away but decided to return home, pick up my wife and copies of last years' marriage certificate. On my return after some discussion with the girls outside and pointing out that I couldn't possibly get a new copy of the marriage certificate before my visa expires in 9 days time they told me to have a talk with the retirement officer inside. After my wife's charm offensive she relented and told us to come back at 15:30 to get processed without a queue number.

While waiting from 14:30 onwards I noticed that 2 staff were processing retirement extensions taking 15-20 minutes for each application, they didn't seem to be over-stretched walking around, going out for a while, basically waiting for when they told the next 2 applicants to be present. I got to talk with the last 2 people in the queue that morning who had received number 30. So that day including me at least 32 people were served, probably more as I counted 33 including me. There even was another guy that just walked in around 15:00 and got processed without a queue card number. It seemed a quiet day, except for the tourist visa extensions that also had an incredible long queue in the morning. If one has all the paperwork in order it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to process everything, meaning that with 2 staff they could easily do double than 30 a day if necessary, or process everyone by 12:00...

Individual staff are normally very nice and polite, except for the guy that was manning the re-entry desk that day. Management and planning obviously is a mess, not to speak about the silly 90-day reporting or the unavailability of longer extension periods, foreign retirees clearly are not a priority for Thai politics. In the end I got my retirement extension, still a bit surprised by that, though I have to provide them with an updated marriage certificate for which I have mobilized my elderly sister back in Europe. No need for GT4, didn't even notice if their 'office' was open.

I wasn't going to post any more as no one had any relevant information on how many were getting the extensions in a day.

Thank you very much for the information and experience you had. You are the first person in over 700 shares to give an idea of how many people were getting their extensions in a day. We know they will give out a lot of queue numbers but how many they serve has been a mystery. Thank you once again I now have a ball park answer. I know it will change day to day. But I have an idea.

if you are getting a retirement extension of stay why is your wife involved

When your current extension is based on you supporting your wife and/or children and you want to change that to a retirement extension she needs to sign a declaration (saying something along the lines that she is aware of this and agrees that you will officially no longer support her, at least for extension of stay purposes) and you have to submit proof that you are actually still married. I don't fully understand why this is necessary, but my brother had to do the same several years ago and according to my wife they told her last year at immigration that I would have to do that for my first retirement extension. For my next extension in 2016 it will no longer be necessary and I can just submit the bank letter and copies of my bank book. I thought it worth mentioning because it is something I haven't seen mentioned before.

Yep, same thing happened to me when I changed extension type last year. Here is a link to some of the discussion. http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/770148-retirement-visa-required-paperwork/

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Hope this helps.

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Yeah, don't know what's going on. I am using 3bb, and the problem I have been getting for the last couple of weeks is a failure to connect with the error page that says "the connection has been reset." I usually just hit refresh a couple of times, and then it will connect. I am using the Firefox browser.