mrmagyar

Thanks for the useful replies here. I do wonder how foreigners get their money out after selling such like as a villa on the islands. If the foreigner built the villa themselves, or even if they bought a company ownership structure, it seems unlikely that they'd be able to refer to that when trying to get clearance to convert their THB to foreign currencies.

Fair one Mike. Where the income can be attributed to personal services it can up options to route it through offshore structures and avoid UK income tax in the first place (though recent profit fragmentation rules have started to close the net on this). For any property related income that wouldn't be an option.

If you're resident in Thailand then you need not be resident in the UK (see statutory residence test).

I doubt it, as I assume that it arrives to you with relevant US taxes paid. But i'm no expert on that subject

Something that is always overlooked by people claiming that 'nobody with that amount of money would ever want to live in Thailand' is that Thailand does not tax foreign sourced income that isn't remitted in the year that it's earned. That's a very unique and incredibly attractive proposition. If you're faced with paying 40-50% tax in any western nation, or effectively 0 in Thailand, you very quickly get paid back for your investment costs. $500k put into Thai property might not yield a huge return. It might not appreciate much or at all. But it's very unlikely to go to zero either. So that bit of depreciation that you might suffer is relatively small change for having a place to live in a country that you enjoy whilst saving yourself fully half of all of your foreign sourced income.

Yeh, I was doing some rough maths on this and found the same. The 'friction' costs of the transfers are not fun.

Nice one Nigel, exactly what I was after. Thanks

Would anyone have links/details of the definitive rules on transferring large sums out of Thailand? I understand that there are quite stringent currency controls in force here. But if a foreigner was to bring in say 20m Baht for the purpose of buying a condo but only spending 10m, could then easily repatriate the remaining balance of 10m? And what about when coming to sell said condo 5 years down the road, would that money also be easy enough to get back out of the country?

Could anyone advise on how a foreigner can buy/sell Thai government bonds in the secondary market here? (Not new issue subscriptions). It reads as though the major banks are the only route but it'd be great for anyone with first hand experience to comment. I'm also not after financial advice on what a poor investment that would be.

Did you make any headway with this Chris? Perhaps by getting a response from them? It seems that this is going to be the overwhelming hurdle for the 'Work from Thailand' option. Most countries don't have publicly available financials for private companies so the validation of the accounts seems like a very grey area.

It's very unlikely. They would have to do another background check on your immigration history, but why would they bother to do that after you've already been a member? Alas. Nobody here is going to have come across this before, so nobody will know. The only way you can find out for sure is to ask the Elite staff themselves.

Congrats Ryan. Well done. I see you also posted in the Volunteer/Elite thread earlier but couldn't work out if you had one of 'the' volunteer visa's previously. If you'd be able to confirm/deny either here or by PM it'd be much appreciated to aid those looking for alternatives to the Elite after being barred from its application.

I was one of these too. But this doesn't bode well for getting any future visa's. If the only reason we got on is because the new passport meant they 'didn't bother' check past history that's really not a good sign.

Yeh, very good point. Although I don't suspect that it is a deliberate scam and I have to highly doubt that they would actually refuse to refund the fee in the event of denial at the last stage, it doesn't read well does it.

Ok well that's 3 of us in the same position here. I wonder how many more there are.

I'm in exactly the same position here. Not be a moaning farang about it, but it does seem particularly harsh. The sole reason for buying the volunteer visa was to avoid overstaying and potentially harming my record for future visits. I was trying to get the elite approval at the time but it didn't arrive fast enough before the end of September deadline. Those that were willing to overstay were then rewarded with an extension that was announced two days after the deadline. Much as I understand that some think we deserve all we get for the 'shady visa', it was a particularly complex and nuanced time and the options were few for those that didn't want to go back to a covid ravaged home country. It felt for all the world that we were being pushed into these shady visas at the time.

In addition to the above, would anyone be able to recommend a lawyer that might have direct access to immigration to discuss the above?

Dbszin, did they explicitly tell you that this was the reason? Were you able to find anything helpful as regards a next step? It seems extremely unfortunate that the (stay of last resort) volunteer has given people a permanent black mark. But that does seem to be the case.

Could you update us if you made the application here? It seems that the situation with Elite visa after volunteer visa has evolved from 'maybe a problem' to 'must get a new passport' and is now at 'blocked for life'