Guderian

Just to make it easy to avoid the drivel he posts, the OP should please change his board name to Vladimir_Brewsterski67.

Thanks, that's useful. When I was living in the UK I had a Vauxhall Omega and I used to just disconnect the 12V battery when I went away on holiday, that did the trick nicely. Here in Thailand, it seemed much more difficult to do that with the Fiesta so I had the GF start it up every week, and that worked OK too. I thought about the solar powered charger as the car is left outside under a car port, but there's plenty of light there. That would only keep the 12V battery going, though, I don't suppose there's an equivalent for the hybrid battery? And if there was, where would you connect it, I have no idea?

This may have been covered already, but I did a search and didn't find anything. I bought a new Toyota Corolla Cross GR Sport last October, just after I'd returned from my annual trip back to the UK. I'm very happy with the car and really enjoy driving it, but my next annual trip back is only around 10 weeks away now and I was wondering how to store the car while I'm away for about 6 weeks so that both the normal battery and the hybrid battery don't go flat. In the past, when I had a Ford Fiesta, the GF used to come down once a week and run the engine for 10 or 15 minutes while she was cleaning the place of dead leaves. When I took the car in for its last service in April I asked one of the technicians what to do and he looked very doubtful, as if nobody had ever asked him this before. He said that I needed to find someone to run the car for 20 minutes at least three times a week, and preferably to drive it. The GF can only usually get down here once a week, twice at the max, and I'm none too keen on letting a stranger drive the car while I'm away. I can't be the first person to have this problem, so what do you other folk with hybrid vehicles do when you leave Thailand for a month or two?

A week or so ago, a severe weather warning flashed up on my phone saying that heavy rain and strong winds were imminent. It was blue sky and sunshine outside, so I checked the TMD weather radar and the nearest rain was a shower over the hills along the Thai-Burma border, nothing else for 200 km in any direction. Whoever puts out these warnings never seems to bother to look out of the window at the actual weather before pressing the 'Send' button. lol

No problem, just get TAT to start another international programme to attract the dregs of the earth here as tourists, and in the meantime raise the taxes on retired farangs to keep the government's budget healthy and pay for more handouts.

The "monsoon mayhem" in my garden this afternoon... lol

Uncle Xi will be clapping in his palace in Beijing since so many Thais use Chinese phones.

Yet another reason to move elsewhere, along with their desire to tax expats to pay for the government's electoral bribes to voters, the disgraceful double-pricing in national parks, their refusal to allow expats to own any land at all, even when married to a Thai woman, raising her kids and paying Thai taxes.

Well look at how well that worked out during Covid...

It's currently 36° C with not a cloud in sight in Pattaya. I'd welcome some rain.

Good to see the Chinese joining the British, Swiss, Russians and Australians in the massed ranks of TAT's Quality Tourist programme!

Yes, indeed, the financial calculation is simple enough, but the personal cost of the upheaval is down to each individual to decide. When they were only talking about taxing remittances to Thailand it was a no-brainer for me, stay put and cough up whatever small tax they may decide I owed, if any. Taxing my worldwide income, though, most of which is offshore and tax-free at source, is another matter altogether. I'm not really interested in spending my retirement filling in tax returns and paying accountants and juggling my affairs to minimise my tax liability, I haven't done so for the last 20 years and see no reason to start now. The cheapest option would be to spend 5 months of the year in Cambodia or Malaysia. I could drive the car there and use it, which would save money over renting a vehicle, and then rent a house, which would be the only real additional cost over staying put in Thailand, as you have to eat and drink and use electricity wherever you are. Say the local equivalent of 30K THB/month, or 150K THB for each annual visit. The TRD doesn't have to come up with a particularly onerous tax bill to make the migration worthwhile, and then it's down to our own subjective estimate of the personal cost of the inconvenience.

To be honest with you, I'm getting quite depressed by this whole nonsense. Of course, it's been on the horizon for the best part of a decade, but I think we all forgot about it, or assumed it would never happen, so nobody has made any real plans. When it was restricted to remittances to Thailand I could live with it, but half of my income arises tax-free outside Thailand, and it'll be a cold day in Hell before I pay any tax on that. As the OP said, it might be all noise and bluster and nothing will change, but if that's wrong then it would cost me and many others dearly. My own affairs are hardly on the scale of Richard Branson, but I know one guy who worked for a big oilfield service company all his life and his pension, which is all paid tax-free offshore, is worth over half a million Baht a month. I doubt if he's going to sit idly by while the TRD draws up a bill for 2 million Baht in tax each year. The only sure solution I can see is to make sure that you're never tax-resident anywhere, which wasn't exactly how I imagined spending the last 10 or 15 years of my life. One reason for moving to Thailand back in 2004 was that they didn't give a monkeys about your financial affairs outside the country. Times have changed, it seems, and so maybe it's time to move on for good.

I've no idea, but as this is an initiative from the champion of Big Government, i.e. the OECD, I suspect it will only be available to governments.

It's not a worldwide tax system, it's a worldwide (well, almost) individual income and earnings reporting system, supported by the OECD and called CRS (Comprehensive Reporting System). Without this, Thailand would never have the ability to find out about your offshore financial affairs, but now all they have to do is pay the CRS filing fee of around $70 and the information held by every bank and financial firm in countries that have joined CRS - and that's most of them - will be available. I hear what you're saying about them not having the resources and I agree. Many years ago, I had to go and see the tax people in the Jomtien office. There were about 10 of them in a large office, and as it was during the summer holiday several of them had brought their kids to work. No security checks or locked doors or armed guards, it was all quite a nice family affair. Given that the office seemed pretty busy back then, I don't see how it could possibly do its normal work, as well as checking on the affairs of the tens of thousands of expats that would come under its purview. And as for the Thais being the hub of confusion in announcements and plans, it appears that way to us, but I often wonder how it looks to the politicians at the top? These guys are not stupid, and I suspect a lot of what we see as governmental chaos is, at least partly, down to poor and confused reporting by the media. The reason they never bothered with the 180-day tax resident status before is surely just because they knew people would simply say the money they're bringing to Thailand is savings or income from previous years, and so under the 'old' rules was not taxable here. The first announcement they made months ago changed all that. Just remember the story about the opening of Suvarnabhumi airport. Back in 2006, it had already been completed for quite a while and was just standing idle. One day, it must have caught the PM's attention (Thaksin, as it happens), and he asked his aides why it wasn't open yet? They replied that nobody had told them when to open it, so Don Muang was still operating normally as Bangkok's main airport. Thaksin got them moving, anyway, and not long after it was finally open for business. The message I take from this is that what can appear as disorganised chaos to us actually happens for completely different reasons, it's not that the Thais lack the capability, it's that they need strong leadership to tell then what to do.

None. You still can't even legally own a square foot of Thai land to accommodate the pot that you p*ss in! lol

Thailand is leading the world in recycling its old and broken politicians, like Thaksin, lol.

Pathetic, they can't even stop their own ignorant people burning half the countryside and causing massive, damaging pollution every year, and now they're trying to act all First World and tax carbon, which even Europe hasn't figured out how to do properly yet.

I recall reading in an article last year that not a single independent radio company had applied as the prices were so high. Unless things have changed since then, as in the price being asked has come down significantly, it just means that we'll only have the output of the national broadcaster to listen to, no contrarian views will be available. I guess we can always access our home country stations via the internet on our phones and cast them to the car's infotainment system, until this fascist government decides to block them, of course.

Human rights? What about no taxation without representation, for a start? Someone please tell the lamebrains in the TRD that their recent changes are also making Thailand a pariah.

Blimey, that must be some heavy rain, it seems that Chonburi, Rayong, Chanthaburi, and Trat have all drifted north-west into the Central Region! lol

Take it slowly, I have around 12 million Baht invested in Thailand, far too much to just walk away from or hold a fire sale so I can exit quickly. Go the 180-day route, as you suggest, and try the other places in SEA that you've either been to or fancy living. At least you'll see some new things, and you may find somewhere you like better than Thailand. Then you can sell up here and move there full-time. Of course, at the moment to avoid CRS it's only Cambodia and the Philippines that didn't sign up for it, and there's no guarantee that they won't at some point in the future, so the nomadic lifestyle may be the way to go long-term. I kept my place in the UK and go back there every year for 6-8 weeks, so it's not an impossible hardship to buy another property somewhere in SEA, spend 4 or 5 months a year there, and make sure I'm not tax-resident anywhere.

The big piece of empty seafront land north of Jomtien and south of Pattaya Park might be a contender.

Well that helps explain why Thailand is only No. 11 in this list. However, with Taiwan at No. 2, it's democratic but is hardly a star holiday destination for anyone not of Chinese descent. And as for the UAE at No. 5, that's a joke, surely. If they mean Dubai instead, OK, but then say it, and even then it's not democratic or scoring high on the other factors, unless you're a rich, exiled kleptocrat (like our own square-headed Chinese chap from Chiang Mai, lol) Here's the full list if you're interested:

Perhaps they should learn from the success of San Francisco's famous waterfront? For example, Pier 39 is very popular attraction these days due to the huge number of sea lions that can be seen there. Of course, Pattaya is not famous for its sea lion colonies and, rather than doing the usual Thai thing of buying them from elsewhere and then mistreating and neglecting them, they could simply do a sweep of the bars in Soi Buakhao and offer all the obese farangs in wifebeater vests free Chang for the day if they will go and lounge around in the sun as a tourist attraction on the Bali Hai pier, flopping about a bit and making the occasional barking noise.