K2938

Phuket should be fine

So "Screen 3" might mean some sort of progress. Just strange that this shows up over the weekend and after a three-day public holiday where nobody at the BOI was presumably working @ThailandRyan: Do you happen to remember if your status display actually went through all the individual screens until 7?

Being intentionally very brief to avoid clogging-up this highly useful and informative thread with investment discussions let me just say that many people with this amount of money would probably prefer to invest this for example in an S&P500 index fund which over longer periods has historically returned approximately 10%, implying an excess return of about 5% or 5k USD per year over the figures you mention and without even taking into account that there are usually also some tax advantages on top of this in many jurisdictions. So doing this over 10 years means an extra income of 10x 5k USD = 50k USD which is far more than the price of a 10 year Elite visa. But if you are happy with your investment and would have had this anyway, then all of course is fine for you!

1) The Visa and Mastercard exchange rates are generally indeed slightly worse than the Wise rates. The difference on various days I looked ranged from approximately 0.1% to 1.0%. 2) Visa / Mastercard have two fee earners, a) the vendor fees, b) the foreign exchange rate mark-up. So even if foregoing the foreign exchange rate mark-up due to the lack of a foreign exchange element with Wise, they still make money from the vendor fees.

If - if! - the BOI were to limit the 100k USD bank account self-insurance alternative to cash only, excluding brokerage accounts, this would tremendously decrease the attractiveness of the LTR visa for many. Because then the applicant would be forced to forego the earnings potential of not only 800,000 THB (i.e. approximately 22k USD) required to be invested in a senseless low-returning savings account as under the Non-O, but this would now require such an investment even for nearly five times this amount, namely 100k USD. Especially among the more wealthy and financially literate people this visa is targeting, it would appear rather unlikely that there would be many who would be happy to do this since this just would be an extremely poor investment (and even the Thailand Elite visa by comparison would actually be much cheaper taking into account the lost investment returns)

I checked myself over the last few days and the Wise rate - at least on the two days I checked - was indeed better than the Visa / Mastercard rate. The fact that with Wise the funds are already converted I would however not view as an additional advantage since the exchange rate can go up as much as it can go down over time, so that can go both ways.

Does this need to be full-time, i.e. basically the minimum cost from this is two Bali minimum wages which appears to be about 320 USD per month for two?

That is quite a long approval time given that the BOI says they would aim for 20 business days for approval. Did they ask for a lot of additional documents or were they just slow?

So for the initial 90 day Non-O visa Phuket requires a signed lease? And this lease needs to cover the 90 days or 1 year?

Do you know if the BOI accepts "IRA distributions" for the 80k USD income proof?

So Krungsri and Aeon basically have the same charge per baht received, 0,73% vs. 0,75%

But is the Wise rate also better than the Visa or Mastercard rate for THB/EUR if your foreign card does not add any commission on top which exists?

The BOI still seems to be working out what it requires and is learning on the go (which is good!). As there are countries without income tax and as in many countries with income tax with careful structuring at least some income can legally be received tax free, e.g. if it is offshore and the country has a territorial tax system, it would be silly for the BOI to insist on an income tax statement for everybody as a matter of course

Did you have to pay extra for the family member visa or was this all included in the 50 000 THB LTR fee for you (or respectively your marked up version of this if getting the visa outside Thailand which I think you did)?

I am again guessing, but there seems to be a correlation between the four digit number and the phone number extension of the person at the BOI actually looking at the thing. For three digits this does not work, so I assume - but do not know! - this is more like another holding pile, but I could be wrong. Please update us all when you know more.

Presumably a change from Pending to Processing is positive, implying that somebody might actually look at your stuff, especially if a "StaffBoi" with a four digit, not three digit number is shown under StaffName. But I am guessing

... or just put both documents in one pdf file

Did you get the impression the BOI had not looked at your application at all yet or just that they had not finished their work yet and now are accelerating that following your phone call?

No. As you will see in the application form you can tick "I will submit later" or something like this, with later meaning prior to the issue of the visa as this is a pre-condition for this.

Interesting in the quote that their key mental focus seems to be on people already having an immigration stamp, i.e. people already in Thailand. For this to benefit Thailand, the attraction of NEW people to Thailand should really be top of the list instead of people just switching from one visa to the other

You are asking very detailed, complex questions you are unlikely to get a sensible answer to from people here, with many guessing, though not necessarily saying so. Better to spend the money to talk to a professional tax consultant who actually knows what he is talking about.

How about from Malaysia (Penang) with AirAsia in case you know?

It would be very silly from the BOI if they did this and are after "rich" people. Most of the truly rich people are those who made their money either from founding and then selling a successful business or inherited their wealth. Neither of those are likely to receive a pension which is what salaried people get

Still see it as a positive. Given the very poor application numbers, the BOI will come under increasing pressure to be more lenient. First maybe where things are grey and could be interpreted as either white or black and then maybe also on more fundamental issues. So really the best advice for anybody who has not applied yet and is not in a desperate rush would probably be to just wait a few more months with the application until the full impact of the poor application numbers has set in on the BOI.

... which at the current application run rate even with the heroic assumption of a 100% approval rate would imply that it would only take a good 170 years to reach the 1 million visa issues the government is aiming for within five years ????