JackGats

I dud my last extension with a hotel letter in lieu of rental agreement. It was LK Empress on Beach Road. Note that I was renewing through an agent.

Good to know. Only reason to wait would be if you can't trust the airline not to change their schedule. Now of course I'll wait a few days given this piece of bad news.

So you did the TP well in advance. I thought no more than two weeks in advance were recommended.

I see, so you uploaded J&J for 1st dose and Moderna for 2nd.

I'll be flying on January 13th. I had the J&J jab in July and a Pfizer booster jab early this week on December 14th. I have 2 EU digital certificates, one that says "J&J 1/1", then another one that says "Pfizer 2/2". I could upload J&J as first dose, and Pfizer as second dose but wouldn't that baffle the system? The TP instructions specify the 2nd dose should be administered on a "recommended timeframe" of 3-4 weeks. Now my booster shot was 5 months after the first, way outside the time-frame. I have a good mind not to mention my booster shot and upload the J&J only. On the other hand the FAQ has the following, which suggests I could also upload the Pfizer 2/2 only. Note how the two sentences in the answer below are on a head-on contradiction course.

Without.

I converted mine. You need an official translation. I went to an address in Pattaya where the translation of my DE driving licence was returned with the stamp and certification of "Amtsgericht Saarbrücken", lol. No need for me to travel to Bangkok. P.S. I think the IDL has no value by itself. I is meant to accompany the original national licence. Not much use as I see it.

Two months ago when I booked ThaiAirways (Brussels-BKK) I was apprehensive ThaiAirways could go bust again or stop operating but I now think it was safer than other airlines for which Thailand is just one other destination they can do without. It's a good idea beforehand to check the reliability of a particular flight on Flightstats.

Peru's retirement visa is fairly easy. Low financial requirement, the only downside being the need to stay 6 months per year in the country per year (or alternatively, not to stay out of the country for more than 6 months in a row). Local agents can help you get a utility bill on the basis of some AirnB, and with that you can open an account with only your passport. Then the ball gets rolling.

Not if it's just cash deposits as the OP seems to mention. I hope it doesn't apply to overseas transfers. SWIFT transfers are only ok if you can transfer high amounts. Even so, 50k is a ridiculously low amount.

Turkey is if anything a paradise for gay men, not a paradise for straight mongers for sure. So if women are not your thing that should not be a downside. P.S. Countries in SA that to my knowledge do not tax foreign pensions (given the right visa) are: Chile Ecuador Peru Costa Rica Panama Uruguay Argentina Most will tax other type of revenue though. Uruguay only taxes what is earnt within Uruguay.

How could such lists be any good? They do not even do their homework on the tax and visa/residency issues.

Except the Moderna booster is supposed to be a half dose.

Same for me. Happy with either 2nd Road or Central Festival. Kind and efficient face-to-face service (compare that to EU banks where everything has to be done online and any mishap can lock you out of your account for weeks). I wish I could date those Bangkok Bank employees! 20 years ago such girls were in go-gos, not in banks.

Africans in the dog house again because of variants that for all we know were present in other countries before they got sequenced in Africa. "Travel ban on African countries" has become the standard sheeple apeasement measure at the slightest covid scare.

Quite a few countries apparently: https://www.iban.com/structure

If you can conduct your affairs in German, the Deutsche Kreditbank (DKB) is kind of specialised in expats. If you do not reside in Germany or the EU, you only pay tax whenever there's a withholding tax, like on dividends. https://www.nomadenberlin.com/blog2/deutsche-kreditbank For English-speaking people N26 bank may be better. I'm with DKB and I can vouch for it, dunno about N26. P.S. Seems N26 is not available for UK residents. Note that if you open an offshore account in any bank, you'd better do it before you settle in Thailand. Good luck with opening an account in Euroland when the only address you have is in Thailand.

Alas, many banks are phasing out the (good old) credit cards to replace them with debit cards. Debit card are more likely to get rejected whenever pre-authorisations are needed (car rentals), plus they enable a fraudster to empty your whole bank account (instead of just stealing your allowed monthly "credit"). Now that negative interest rates and the money-laundering craze have destroyed banks' business model, banking services are in a downward spiral. I see this as the biggest threat to my expat life-style in the not too distant future. Banks in Europe are now getting rid of their most solvent clients (because they have too much negative interest bearing cash and they cannot be gouged with overdraft penalties). How more perverse can it get?

They use the term "prepaid credit card" in Europe but you're right it's a misnomer. You transfer so much on the prepaid "credit" card, then you can only spend so much. If you want to spend more, you need to replenish. These cards became popular in Europe I think because in Europe it's more difficult than in the States to get your money back in case of fraud.

Bank account numbers like IBANs are between 22 and 34-digit long, against the puny 10 digits of my Thai number. This implies the Thai account number has few if any built-in redundancies and checksums to prevent mistyping. Is this any ground to worry when making substantial transfers? I mean one digit wrong and I might never see the money again.

Transfers from abroad and from my broker's account. I did one update (not at the Bangkok Bank office where I have my account) and it just "updated" all at one go, without showing intermediate stages.

My savings book showed 550k eight months back, then 1.3 million on the day I applied. It didn't show I'd had well over 800k on the account for more than 3 months.

Beware you have the paperwork showing the 800k have been on your account for all that time. I found myself having to shell out extra money to the agency facilitating my extension because I had not been in Thailand in the few months before my extension renewal. Consequently, my savings book didn't show any updates during the run-up months. My mistake for not paying the bank to issue me with a statement of account covering the last 3 months, instead of just a letter stating the account balance on the day I applied for renewal. This was all the more annoying since my account had not dropped under 1.3 million for over 8 months.

If I understand right what we need from the hotel is a certification on the same page that the whole package (transport + PCR + one-night say) is booked and paid for. We need the certification on ONE AND ONLY ONE PAGE because the TP system doesn't provide for the uploading of more than one jpeg image. Am I right?

In may layman's experience MRI was more for imaging harder parts, like bones and cartilage.