11 hours ago, Pib said:

Having BoI Certified Agents (CA) to assist applicants who want to use such a service (for a fee) should very significantly increase the number LTR visas that get approved

I do not think that the introduction of agents will cause a step change in the number of LTR visas.  The fundamental problem of the LTR visa is NOT that the application process is technically too difficult, but that the criteria are set such that very very few people fit.  So at the margin, there might be a few more applications and visas issued with agents, but the huge embarrassing shortfall compared with the target of 1 million in five years will not disappear thereby.

10 hours ago, aublumberg said:

When the LTR program was launched in one of the webcasts back in Aug / Sep 2022, that question came up and BOI explicitly said that dividend payments or similar recurring investment returns do qualify for the Wealthy Pensioner assessment.

I would assume some key issues for the situation described include 1) if the dividend is not really a disguised salary payment and income from work does not count for the WP qualification, 2) how sustainable that is and 3) to what extent related party transactions are acceptable

7 hours ago, Karma80 said:

I did trawl a bit through this thread, but couldn't find if anyone had used regular dividend payments as proof of income, rather than pension.

 

In particular, if I own an overseas company and pay myself dividends that exceed the $80k per annum for 2 years, will that be meet the requirement for the Wealthy Pensioner plan?

 

As I approach 50, I am looking for to arrange my tax strategy and the LTR's advantages for both tax, convenience and certainly make it worth lining my ducks up for. TIA.

Based on some data points the BOI currently does not seem to be set up to process much which is not standardised and does not fit their standard pattern.  So basically they seem to want to tick certain boxes they are familiar with and if you are slightly different, even if a deeper analysis would show that this is absolutely no problem, then this tends to cause great problems.  So it is certainly worthwhile trying, but do not get your hopes up too high and maybe better apply in 6-12 months than right now.  By analogy just read what some people higher up wrote about health care insurance which does not have an expiry date which should actually be better, not worse than one with a time-limitation, but has repeatedly been rejected for various people.  Re the taxation please note that you can get nearly the same tax benefits as under the LTR-WP with any other visa as long as you do not submit overseas earnings to Thailand in the year they were earned so that tax benefit on a relative basis is really more smart marketing than reality.

1 hour ago, Pib said:

 To me BoI was indirectly saying my military Tricare coverage did not meet the requirements probably because it did not have an "end-date" as most civilian policies have both a specific start date for the current annual coverage and also a specific end date 12 months down the road.  I had also seen posts in other forums talking LTR applications where applicants with "open-ended, group" type policies which typically do not have an end date reflected on the policy also not being accepted by BoI.   Opened ended, group type policies many times do "not" have a policy end date as long as you are still kicking and paying the premiums (if any premiums are needed). Typically these are government-provided/sponsored policies. Although these open-ended, group type medical coverage policies provide outstanding worldwide coverage (like Tricare), unfortunately, the lack of the policy showing an end-date at least 10 months down the road is probably why it failed to satisfy BoI. 

@PibTwo questions I would like to ask you if I may:

1) Did you try to explain this to the BOI supporting your statements about the open-endedness of the policy with appropriate documentation and this was futile or you did not really bother to further go down this route since you had the bank deposit alternative?

2) I think you called the BOI several times.  So I take it you never actually managed to talk to the person doing your case, but just generic people who really do not know much more than what is shown on their process status screen?

1 hour ago, Saraburi121 said:

Applied November 21 for the Wealthy Pensioner and was approved December 23rd.

Record short time, but amazing how uneven processing times are.  There are people who do not hear anything for several months and there are others where everything gets done in record time.  So the "pensioner visa get processed very slowly, Work-from-Thailand professionals have it better" theory also does not seem to be valid any longer.  Just seems to be pretty unpredictable.

10 minutes ago, Pib said:

I wonder if the genesis of this disclaimer is caused by visa agents, lawyers, scammers, etc., beginning to advertise they can hand-walk a person thru the LTR application for a fee? 

I am sure that is the reason.  Also maybe not only "hand-walk", but also more "advanced" services...  And since the target group is more wealthy it can be charged more so this probably can be quite a profitable business for whoever is doing it.

 

8 minutes ago, Zuman said:

I applied for the WP LTR for Mrs Zuman (dependent) and myself on October 4. I received final approval on December 16

Congratulations!

2.5 months.  Did you have some intermediate communications with the BOI or they only got back to you in the middle December for the first time when they told you about your approval?

1 hour ago, Pib said:

So I self insured instead.   

Congratulations on your approval!  Re the self-insurance:  Did they accept brokerage accounts (like in some other cases above) or did you use a bank deposit?

23 minutes ago, topt said:

So tell me what they would be then please.

My UK financial institutions still seem to use OTP's for access and a version of it for transactions in some cases.

I don't disagree that it has issues but appears to still be used.

I am not aware of any big bank in Thailand offering "proper" non-OTP 2FA.  Which is why my personal conclusion in these imperfect circumstances was that using the app is better than going via the internet as I wrote above.  But if there is any bank with "proper" non-OTP 2FA, this would of course be the best

16 minutes ago, topt said:

Please define "proper" - if I try and set up a new payee online with SCB I have to authenticate via OTP for which I need my phone?

OTP is a very very weak level of protection which is very easy to get around and has therefore generally been discarded because of this in many Western countries as mentioned above.  So "proper" in this means an actually well-working method of 2FA, not OTP

10 minutes ago, topt said:

I am not pro app. Most of my banking is done online with a pc.

Given that there is no proper 2FA in Thailand, app seems safer than "online with a pc" because for the latter anybody can enter passwords in the internet from anywhere while to do the same with your app they would need to have your phone which is much more difficult.  Also, it is generally much easier now for somebody to hack into a PC than remotely access an up-to-date phone

Nearly everything cheaper at local market.  The odd exception for some strange reason seem to be tomatoes where Makro sometimes has cheaper prices

33 minutes ago, aublumberg said:

It also clarifies that the other government agencies come after 'approved' and are not part of that, hence 'qualification approved' only.

As far as I know other government agencies are involved in Step 3, like checking if you are an internationally wanted terrorist, have grossly violated immigration rules in Thailand in the past, are otherwise 'undesirable' etc.

1 hour ago, khunjeff said:

I just received this today

So I take it you got approved.  Congratulations!  May I ask when you originally applied?  Asking because apart from some positive exceptions the delays seem to be getting longer and longer

36 minutes ago, lextsy said:

Now  i dont know what to do. They obviously have an issue with the "Single Trip" and stated that if i left thailand, it would not be active which is their issues....

Are you already approved for LTR now in principle?  Otherwise best just to wait with health insurance to avoid potentially wasting your money because who knows if you will actually get approved.

1 hour ago, Pib said:

Based on the govt's target of 1 million approved applications over 5 years (which is 200K applications per year or 16.7K per month)  in comparison to the actual number of applications being received (apparently less than 2K in approx 3 months with maybe only 25% being approved) even the "hugely underwhelming" description does not seem to accurately describe how not-popular this new visa has been so far.   Even "....attracted a rather measly amount of applications..." from a very recent news article (at bottom) seems to fall short.

... and just imagine what would have happened to the processing speed of applications which already now is very far below the promised 20 business days if the expected application rate had materialised

16 hours ago, khunjeff said:

Almost immediately, they sent back the exact same request, but with the additional sentence "Please note investment account could not considered instead of health insurance document."

Earlier on in this thread there was also at least one other person where they accepted investment accounts.  So seems to depend on the mood of the screener. 

But if your screener did not like the investment account, then you could just sell 100k USD of your investments, show them you have 100k USD in cash and done.  So easy to circumvent.  Or you could even take a margin loan for a day which would spare you from having to temporarily sell part of your investments.

21 hours ago, at92uk said:

- For this type of Visa, do I need to meet ALL the criteria or just one?

Not sure I understand.  You need to meet all the criteria for your LTR type

21 hours ago, at92uk said:

- One of the required documents is the "Annual personal income tax return". As far as I know, in the UK we'd only do this if you're self employed? I'm employed by a company (not mine) what would I need to provide here?

Explain the situation and provide the next best thing instead

3 hours ago, Pib said:

For those who recently submitted your application (like say over the last week or so) it would be helpful to know what your application status now shows after the BoI software update today/Sat/10 Dec where people who had a status of "Pending" Friday night/9 Dec woke-up to a new status of "Consideration by Govt Agencies" on Saturday morning/10 Dec.   If your status also now suddenly shows "Consideration by Govt Agencies" with your application only having been submitted recently (say the last week or two) then "Consideration by Govt Agencies" is probably just the new "Pending."   But hey, maybe some of you are still showing "Pending"....please give us some crossfeed if your application still shows Pending as of 10 Dec/Saturday.

Slightly broadening the question by Pib re the new "Consideration by Govt Agencies" status: 

Is there anybody at all with a pending application - regardless of application time - where the status has NOT now changed from "Pending" to "Consideration by Govt Agencies"?

If there is nobody without the change, then "Consideration by Govt Agencies" would indeed appear to be only a renaming of "Pending" and not an indication of progress.
 

19 minutes ago, oldcpu said:

I scrolled up (back) one month, and could not find those statistics.

 

The best I could find was a link to a fulcum.sg article you linked to on 20-Nov, but it did not contain those statistics for a Wealthy Pensioner application.

As far as I remember that article contained a 14% success rate for Work-from-Thailand professionals which is extremely low.  And a few days later there was somebody who was told that he got the xth LTR visa from which one can work out an estimate of the overall success rate.  From other published data it is also known what the breakdown is between the different LTR categories, so with all this you can come up with a pretty good guess of the Wealthy Pensioner LTR visa.  As none of these figures come directly from the BOI, they could theoretically of course all be wrong, but prudence would dictate to be very careful with your investment decisions