K2938

8 hours ago, oldcpu said:

I have not yet decided if I will buy the bonds/mutual-fund and apply for an LTR Visa, but I am giving it some thought.

The application rejection rate for LTR visas appears to be very high.  So if you really wanted to go down this route, it would make a lot of sense ONLY to buy anything if you have confirmation from the BOI that your application is fully approved in all aspects, subject to you buying whatever you want to buy.  Otherwise you run the huge risk of having bought something with all the expenses entailed and still getting rejected.

1 hour ago, OldAjahn said:

Thanks, OldCPU, for the reports of your conversations with BOI. Now we need clarification of their rules. Because if a 5+ year bond is required, how could a mutual fund, so readily saleable, be allowed? If I'm following correctly, an applicant could sell the bond just after receiving the visa, and buy a new one just before the five year review, which doesn't make sense from BOI's point of view.

 

If 5 year + maturity and held past the review date is the true regulation, then check www.thaibma.or.th/EN/Market/YieldCurve/Government.aspx for a list of government bonds of all maturities and spreads. The over-the-counter market is not that liquid for off-the-run issues, I was told, and spreads are wide. So you need to look for recent (on-the-run) issues. To buy five year bonds, there would be an overlap at your 5-year review when you would be holding $500,000 worth of Thai paper, not a safe situation. In the US, the 30-year bond is the usual investor's choice: least volatile, most liquid. You'll see one recent 20 year and a 30-year on the ThaiBMA list. I'm thinking of going that route to the LTR myself, but there's a real question whether that fits with prudent long-term investment goals.

 

Following the old 60/40 rule, you would allocate 250k to bonds and 375k to equities if your total portfolio of investable assets (not including your primary residence) was 625k. But according to the home-currency rule, at least 60% should be in the home currency. So if my home is dollars, Thai bonds could be allocated 40% of 40% = 16%. Then I would expect a total port. of 1.57 million. Sorry, out of my league. If all your assets and all your expenses are in baht, and you expect to live in Thailand till the end, then your home currency is baht. But if even one of those criteria doesn't hold, then it's dollars or pounds or whatever. If you have a well-diversified international portfolio, and want a high yield on your investments, chances are your currency should be dollars.

 

Also, there's a recession coming, and the Thai bond yield curve is not yet showing the extreme inversion (recession-pricing) that the US curve shows, which suggests that Thai bonds bought now will loose money in the short-medium term. If you want to buy a 20 or 30 year bond, make sure your portfolio is set up to handle the inflation and FX risk.

For many people who would need to invest 250k USD in Thai government bonds to get the LTR, it would probably make more sense from a financial point of view to look at other visas, the Non-O if over 50 or married to a Thai and Thai Elite if not.  The sweet spot for the LTR is people who have sufficient income so that no investment is required or those who have sufficient real estate investments in Thailand anyway

10 minutes ago, NCC1701 said:

Question: What payment methods do they accept? I can find nothing on their website and calling them, they don't seem sure.

If you go through this thread, you will find that cash is now accepted, credit cards not, at least as of the time the respective posts were made.  And QR code is also accepted

• LTR application rate slowed down further.  Since Sept 1 about 1,600 applications have now been submitted

• Americans made the most applications so far, followed by Chinese, British, and Germans

https://thethaiger.com/hot-news/visa/thailands-10-year-ltr-visa-most-popular-among-americans-and-chinese

23 minutes ago, Boomer6969 said:

Which documents need translations & notarisation? None of those needed for the pensioner visa as far as I am concerned.

Not everybody has the privilege of coming from English speaking countries.  Documents not in Thai or English need to be officially translated and various documents also need to be notarized in certain situations.

23 hours ago, Boomer6969 said:

So blaming them for being picky and/or rigid would be evidently unfair. My only fear is that the whole thing fails due to lack of suitable candidates and that the limited number of survivors be handed back, for subsequent processing, to Immigration who would then harass us unashamedly.

7 hours ago, JJJJJJJJ said:

Based on my observation, BOI is quite picky and very reluctant to let you pass, which can be testified by the passing rate. Even if you qualify for the conditions, they still take a very conservative position.

1)  As tends to be the case with anecdotal evidence, one can always find positive and negative stories. But as JJJJJJJJ correctly points out, the huge rejection rate which consolidates all these different data points seems to indicate the possibility of quite fundamental flaws in this visa approval process.  I would have expected a rejection rate of maybe 10-20% for a program like this.  A rejection rate in the 70-85% range depending on the LTR category is just so many times higher than this figure that this is really rather worrying. 

Once the huge rejection rate becomes widely known this will probably also lead to a further decline in applications for the LTR program because some people who would in principle have been interested and who would probably meet the criteria will decide just not to bother applying because the huge rejection rate does not justify for them disclosing their confidential financial data, spending money on translation and notarization of documents and wasting their time applying for most likely being rejected.   So this is actually a rather important issue.

2)  For those already approved there would appear to be little reason to be concerned about this process being moved from the BOI to immigration and to fear "harassment" from the latter.  A program like this just needs to be centrally managed and the Smart visa program, which is also far from a stellar success, continues to be managed by the BOI as well.

5 hours ago, aublumberg said:

a certain segment of applicants "just give it a go and see". This is also evident from a number of online forums.

This “gambling” approach to the LTR application is primarily among the digital nomad group which apply as Working-from-Thailand professionals.  This is also why the rejection rate for Working-from-Thailand professionals is 86% versus the overall rejection rate of “only” approximately 75%. 

However according to the statistics published at the end of October Working-from-Thailand professionals only account for about a third of all applications, so the other two thirds – with Wealthy Pensioners being the biggest sub-group thereof and largest of all application categories - still need to have an average rejection rate of approximately 70% so that the overall rejection average comes out at 75%.

Now we of course do not know the details, but the fact that thus about 70% of Wealthy Pensioner applications appear to get rejected seems extremely high as I would not expect to be so many “gamblers” in this group.  Also, while the application does not cost any money, most people – and especially among this group – will be reluctant to disclose their financial details in the application process unless they really believe they will get approved.   So the very high rejection rate even in this group would rather appear to be an indicator of the possibility of excessive pickiness on the side of the BOI, but we of course do not know the details.

6 hours ago, bradiston said:

They say each questionnaire had to have a minimum of 50 respondents. Who knows? They might have all been Embassy workers, corporate employees, contractors, for instance. The poll results don't give a breakdown of the poll responders details - anonymous, obviously.

I would assume that Internations does the poll among their members because that is the easiest people to contact for them.  And Internations members are typically young, university educated professionals in managerial office jobs, so already age-wise a million miles away from the typical member of this forum

On 11/24/2022 at 7:32 AM, aublumberg said:

Would love to know what the rate is for the other three LTR categories.

Somebody receiving his LTR on Nov 23 was told his LTR was the 376th issued, so the overall success rate is higher than the 14% of the working-from-Thailand category, but not vastly so.  Given the application numbers published earlier, success rate overall is probably only around 25%.

We of course do not know the reasons for this very low success rate, but since it is probably unlikely that the vast majority of people applying for the LTR visa were just crazy, missing the criteria by miles and really should never have applied if they would have had any sense, this would appear to indicate excessive pickiness and rigidity on the side of the BOI

2 hours ago, keemapoot said:

I suppose you could implement a yearly income check of some sort for those, but I agree with Karma above, this would open the floodgates on all the remote digital nomads

Most digital nomads do not stay in a place for five or ten years, but travel around.  To stay a year somewhere is already long for them.  Really what Thailand would also need is a digital nomad visa as many countries have recently introduced, but that is different from the LONG-TERM residents the LTR visa is after. 

Regarding the LTR visa itself to start with the BOI should just be more flexible in the interpretation of the criteria which currently exist which would also be the most face-saving solution.  So for example be more flexible in what types of income are taken into account, be more flexible in what funds are counted towards the 100k USD health self-insurance option, do not require audited financial statements to prove the revenue of a company etc.
 

37 minutes ago, anrcaccount said:

The intent of this program was to attract new residents, not recategorise visas of existing ones. 

 

Currently it appears the program is falling well short of doing this. 

And since there are only a limited number of visa holders of existing visas which can be re-categorised, this means that once this re-categorisation wave is over, the applicant rate will even further slow down.  Really kind of by half given that currently 56% of applications are in this re-categorisation category. 

And any advertising campaign is hardly likely to be able to rectify this in any meaningful way as advertising does not address the fundamental problem of too restrictive conditions of the program for many. 

So without any changes much more likely that over five years there will be 10 000 visas issued instead of the aimed for 1 million which would only be about 1% of the target

"[T]he [LTR] programme has had a faltering start. According to unpublished data from the BOI, by 10 October 2022, only 1,003 foreigners had applied for the LTR visa, of which 56 per cent were filed by domestic applicants – meaning foreigners who already resided in Thailand in some other visa status, while just 44 per cent came from new overseas applicants."

"All things considered, the LTR could turn out to be unremarkable like the 2003-2021 Thailand Elite project, which attracted only about 15,000 visa holders in its 18-year run. This suggests deeper issues are at work and may not have been completely thought through: Thailand’s BOI might want to consider what makes other regional or global long-term visa programmes succeed and improve the LTR scheme, while there is still time to aim high and fix things. "

( https://fulcrum.sg/thailands-long-term-resident-visa-for-global-talent-and-wealthy-residents-aiming-too-high/ )