nigelforbes

They haven't: https://www.thaiwebsites.com/tourists-nationalities-Thailand.asp

The evidence is that over 75% of international visitors to Thailand are from ASEAN and East Asia, wealthy Chinese live in many places in the region.

What year was that again? "Yong trained in pediatrics at the Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Medicine and completed board certification by the Medical Council of Thailand in 1978. He was subsequently accepted as a faculty member, and received a research fellowship grant at the hepatology department at King's College Hospital Medical School during 1983–84.[3] He has since worked continuously at Chulalongkorn, mostly focusing on teaching and research, and obtained professorship in 1990. He has served as the head of the faculty's Viral Hepatitis Research Unit and Molecular Biology Research Unit since 1992 and 1996, respectively". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yong_Poovorawan

Foreign Exchange Transaction

How's about we compare your qualifications to his on this subject and see who is the better person to listen to!

It's not clear from the OP what he means when he says, "just collect your baggage and go". Collect from where? The only place he collects his baggage is from the baggage carrousel, thereafter he has to go through Customs where his bag may of may not be x-rayed. But after that? No, nothing, except maybe one or two lurking uniformed types who might try and ask some after the fact questions like, "how many cigarettes' you have".

Maybe the too strong Baht is keeping tourists away, there should be more than this, surely!

Pattaya's air borne pollution problem is Cambodia: https://www.windy.com/?14.448,104.026,6 https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:2023-02-20..2023-02-21,2023-02-20;@102.5,13.3,8z

Typo - the above should say South, not Phuket!

So more tourists, spending more money but coming from a very very low base. Plus heavily discounted prices during covid have now returned to normal and if anything have increased as a result of inflation. What's the net of all that I wonder, I sure can't tell. EDIT or maybe I can! BOT's report on tourist arrivals shows Phuket receiving 71 mill in 2019, 21 mill in 2020, 8 mill in 2021 and 41 mill in 2022. https://www.bot.or.th/App/BTWS_STAT/statistics/ReportPage.aspx?reportID=875&language=eng

In a 2018 study, BOT said “Overall exports value appears to have no correlations with exchange rate movements.” In other words, it doesn't matter how high or low the exchange rate is, overall export values are not affected. Another poster challenged this but offered no proof that this wasn't true so I decided to dig into the subject. The first point to appreciate is that there is a huge difference between value and volume. A volume of 10 boxes with a value of $20 each is not the same as a volume of 20 boxes with a value of $10 each! Overall value is important to GDP and the Baht, overall volume is important to jobs. What I found is that there CAN or MAY be an impact on the value of exports, depending on which country is being exported to and how they eventually pay. I cannot find evidence that there is a strong correlation between OVERALL VALUE or volume, based on exchange rate movements. The value of trade with the US for example does appear to correlates with the strength or weakness of USD/THB, when the dollar is weak (or the Baht is strong), the Thai trade balance with the US is in surplus, when USD is strong (or the Baht is weak), the trade balance is in deficit. I suspect this is only because the US pays the final bill in USD. The same problem doesn't exist with the other countries Thailand exports to, unless their currency is pegged to USD. In most cases it seems those other currencies move in a similar fashion to THB, in relationship to the Dollar. (Note: it doesn't matter that trade bills are settled in USD, that's just an interim currency, used to settle trade bills, it's the end currency that counts when we're talking about exports value/volume. And anyway, this is about export volumes and value, not Baht strength or weakness). See below, the balance of trade between Thailand and the US since 1990, the trade deficit/surplus between the two countries (only) correlates mostly to Dollar strength weakness and the state of the US economy.

Some do, some do not, it's random plus based on suspicion or intel.

Any bank remittance advice will suffice, it doesn't need to be an official FET. In over 10 years I've never seen an offical FET but have used advice forms for various offical purposes.

They just asked me when I was in branch one day, I'd had my account with them for six years or more and always had balances North of 4mill. The credit limit is 300k and you collect points but the charge is 4k per year - I barely use it any more and will cancel this year, it doesn't do anything a debit card can't.

Exactly, that's what we did also, for the same reasons.

@Isaan sailor If you're looking into ways that change the value of the Baht, you might want to research BOT and Forward Contracts. BOT uses forward contracts to hedge their USD obligations when they don't have enough USD on hand and/or at times when USD is too strong or the Baht is too weak (as in 2022). A forward contract lets BOT agree to buy a specific amount of foreign currency, on a specific date, at a specific exchange rate and they pay a fee for this. If they don't make the exchange on the agreed date, they can agree to extend the period (for a fee) or walk away from the contract and lose their fee, failing that they fullfill the contract. The amount involved are in the billions of USD which requires BOT to sell THB to buy the agreed currency. All of this is done through partner banks and private lenders but ultimately the effects of it are felt in the exchange rate.

One other aspect to explore perhaps is a superficies, which can be willed and I think but am not 100% certain, cannot be cancelled on divorce.

I'm not sure that the cancellation of the usufruct can be contested, that appears to be a right regardless of the asset split at divorce.

But if the house is willed to you, you will have one year to sell it so technically you would own it, albeit for one year. And We all hope we are in solid marriages except the usufruct and Thai divorce law comes into play if we aren't, the problem is that none of us have crystal balls that work.

Correction/typo: the above post should read, 9 years above that level, not 19 years, sorry!

@KhaoYai

You should read the entire thread, it's explained further on.

A post in another thread made me think back to the earlier part of this century when expats in Thailand used to have debates about the value of the Baht and the falling exchange rate against the Pound. By 2006, expats had grown used to 75 baht per Pound or higher, they'd had 19 years above that level. As the Baht began to strengthen and the Pound began to weaken, grumblings could be heard that the Baht was getting above it's station but that it couldn't last. By 2012, 50 was the norm and the grumblings were deafeningly unanimous, "the Baht is going to crash bring back 75", they all said as one. By 2016 it had reached 45 and the prospect of sub 40 was very real, I believed less than 5 years away, it actually got there in 3 years. I famously said at that time, "you''ll never see 45 again". I was wrong, we saw 46 during covid. The question is, why did so many expats feel so strongly that Baht strength wouldn't last and wasn't deserved? The answer is, for the same reasons that many think the same thing today: dual pricing, rip offs, corruption, pollution, uneven sidewalks and low hanging electric lines and bizarrely, high costs for some. What I got out of those discussions is that the people who complain the most are the ones who are being squeezed the most and probably the ones who have been here the longest. The other take away was that less than 10% of expats understood how the Baht exchange rate was constructed and the importance of USD to the Thai economy and the Baht. If in 2006 or 2012 you'd tried to suggest that the real problem with Baht strength or weakness was USD, you'd be ridiculed as a fantasist, fortunately today there is better awareness but sadly not as much as is needed. The other problem was boiling frog syndrome, most expats couldn't see the economic progress that the country was making because they were right in the middle of it, the country was changing daily but few expats realised that because nobody paid attention to the numbers or put them in perspective. In a separate post today I wrote: "In 1997, at the time of the crash, there were 5 mill. tourists per year, in 2019 there was 40 mill. In 1997, GDP was USD 113 bill., in 2019 it was USD 540 bill. In 1997, over 40% of the population was below the poverty level, today it's about 7%. In 1997, exports were USD 5 bill. month, during a couple of months last year they reached USD 26 bill. I was here from 1995 and there's no contrast between then and now". There's a lot of similarities between the events I've described above.....and today! https://www.poundsterlinglive.com/bank-of-england-spot/historical-spot-exchange-rates/gbp/GBP-to-THB

Spoken like a true, slightly jaded expat who has lost perspective, somebody who 20+ years ago, even 10 or 15 years ago, couldn't possibly believe that Thailand was going to continue to be successful, it was all a flash in the pan and the Baht was going to collapse, after all, 55 or 60 was way too strong and simply wasn't justified.....I remember those days well! You have to hand it to them, love them or loathe them, the country has done an excellent job of marketing itself and recovering from the Asian crash of 1997. In 1997, at the time of the crash, there were 5 mill. tourists per year, in 2019 there was 40 mill. In 1997, GDP was USD 113 bill., in 2019 it was USD 540 bill. In 1997, over 40% of the population was below the poverty level, today it's about 7%. In 1997, exports were USD 5 bill. month, during a couple of months last year they reached USD 26 bill. I was here from 1995 and there's no contrast between then and now. From a Thai perspective, that promise has been delivered upon and then some, it's not bitcoin, it's gold ingots. What can be said of the tourists perspective? The country is be much cheaper than their home country, that's a big win, it's also much hotter, that's a seriously big win, especially in the winter. Everything is very different from back home so there's novelty value, the food can be very good, there's two more wins. The scenery can be wonderful, the people are easy going and always smile, the infrastructure is decent so it's easy to get around and there's plenty of contrasts, mountains to beaches....win, win, win win. Plus, the guys can get laid for peanuts, by a beautiful woman or man too no less, and it's easy! The downsides? the beaches/sea could be cleaner but pollution's a problem everywhere these days, even back in Cornwall, Deven and Cumbria; they may pay more than the locals for some things but it's still pretty cheap compared to back home, as far they are concerned, it's very affordable (have you seen the prices in Venice and Singapore lately); electric cables are strung along the sides of the road and the pavements are uneven, that's part of the charm and novelty value. At least there aren't homeless drug addicts living on downtown streets and it's safe to walk around any time of day or night without getting knifed or mugged. Is all of that overhyped and sold to the ignorant? Not from a tourist perspective it's not, only from the perspective of a jaded expat is that true. And you know, there are times when I feel the same way, but then I look at things a little more objectively and the events of the past 25 years. It isn't perfect by a long shot but it's pretty damned good. https://tradingeconomics.com/thailand/poverty-headcount-ratio-at-national-poverty-line-percent-of-population-wb-data.html https://tradingeconomics.com/thailand/gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/thailand/exports

And of course if the opposition was in power, those things wouldn't happen, right? There is the standard every day level of skimming and enrichment that is part of the fabric of Thai culture, and then there' s the extraordinary level that gets uncovered from time to time. Nothing much can be done about the former, that's business as usual, it's the latter that I don't think will happen.