K2938

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?

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

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

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

Indeed! The application process is really a big disappointment and the number of people who are saying that if they had known up front how all this would really work out in practice, they would not have bothered to apply appears to be growing. Adding this to the fact that the number of applicants is already hugely below the official goal, does not really bode too well for the future. And with the virtually endless and unpredictable delays it is just very easy as an applicant to reach a mental state where one does not really care much about the outcome any longer and rather starts work on a plan B. It seems that a lot of goodwill which such a program could generate is wasted. From a recent reddit post I read. People appear to get increasingly frustrated:

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.

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

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.

... 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

The number of people who invested 100k or more in cash at least a year ago when the corresponding interest rates in many Western countries where most applicants come from were negative or zero must be extremely limited. There seems to be a certain lack of understanding of market realities by whoever defined these criteria. So one can only hope that in view of the hugely underwhelming demand for this visa, the BOI changes this. Maybe the people who were approved based on investments also benefited from this.

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.

The social media are full of people complaining they were rejected for not meeting this. So this very much does not appear to be optional. The only exception from this as per the published terms would be if your employer is publicly listed. And the triangle next to the audited financials item is not defined as optional, but as "if applicable" which perfectly fits with "unless your employer is publicly listed". The LTR Work-from-Thailand visa is not for the typical digital nomad, but only for people working for large established organisations unfortunately.

Not sure I understand. You need to meet all the criteria for your LTR type Explain the situation and provide the next best thing instead

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.

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

If you scroll up in the thread, you will find the sources of the statistics. If I remember correctly, about a week or two ago.

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.

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

1) If it is really true that mutual fund investments are an allowed alternative, then the great benefit of this would be that you can sell the mutual fund whenever you want. 10 years is a very long time and it is just very difficult to plan ahead for 10 years even though you right now might have no doubt at all that you still will be in Thailand in 10 years. You might not and you might then want to be able to exit with as little sunk costs as possible. 2) Assuming it is true that mutual fund investments are an allowed alternative, it would be very useful to know if there are any restrictions on the type of mutual fund (e.g. debt, equity etc.). 3) As Misty is pointing out, there are some potential tax problems for U.S. citizens from foreign mutual funds. However, the higher earnings from an equity mutual fund (if allowed) might well more than compensate for the higher taxes. 4) If true that the BOI now allows mutual funds, this would really be a great sign that things are not cast in stone, but that changes are possible in view of the so far extremely low level of interest in this visa. Equally, it appears that Indonesia has now also decided to make foreign income tax free for its LTR equivalent (https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2453557/indonesia-eyes-property-economic-boost-with-residency-visa-plan-for-foreign-investors), so competition seems to be working for the benefit of all of us.

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

While each case varies you should probably expect to hear something from the BOI approximately in mid to late December

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.

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.