Gaccha

I definitely used it (Kasikorn) successfully and my card at that time (2024) had "privileged member" on it. Make sure in the App that you have high limits set for the card. Make sure that international transaction is set to on. And you have to hope that the security algorithm of Kasikorn that analyses your account's usage will not block the transaction.

The way to avoid the 2,000 baht fine is to arrive back within 90 days of an extension end date. If you time your travels right, you can skip 90 day reports with no consequence.

Political scientists describe this as political hobbyism. The function of the discussion is to fulfil the emotional needs of the spectator of politics rather than to actually do politics. American politics is particularly satisfying as a spectator sport (especially so for non-Americans), because it is unusually divisive because it is multicultural. This multiculturalism ensures that since there are only limited shared foundations, the politics takes on a religious flavour. Real politics, as the book above outlines, is extremely tedious. To the extent that even politicians and political journalists tend to avoid it and spend their time watching the structure of it (watching it like watching a horse race: who will win, who is getting promoted, who is losing) rather than the contents.

Your situation is the least complicated and the least affected by all this, but you are still affected. The British Pound will immediately be converted to Thai baht. You are then free to immediately convert them back to pounds within Wise or you may keep them as Thai Baht. For tax purposes, the moment of auto conversion to Thai baht will count as a "remittance" to Thailand (this is not yet certain but appears to be the likely situation). In other words, you cannot tactically wait for the Thai baht to weaken. You cannot store the Thai baht away from the tax authorities for the reason below. If you are a Thai tax resident then any money remitted into Thailand counts as taxable. However, as a pension, and for many other reasons, it is possible that the sum "remitted" is not taxable. In other words, the normal rules apply.

That's not going to happen. Below is the likely but not certain situation that will arise: The money you move into Wise will be converted automatically to Thai baht. You can then convert it back to US dollars and sit it in your US dollar account. You will still have a US dollar currency account. If, however, you have a US dollar virtual account-- a very different thing-- that will probably vanish. When it is auto converted to Thai baht it will be regarded as a 'remittance' in Thai tax law. So for example if you transfer $10,000 then your income in Thailand that year will increase by $10,000, even if that $10,000 you put into Wise you actually proceed to transfer to Germany or anywhere else in the World.

You're right. It seems the link function is inoperative. Here it is pasted out: https://www.expattaxthailand.com/wise-thailand-tax-update-2026/

Now that a few days have gone by, advisory groups are starting to write their opinions. And it's not good news. The opinion linked here by a tax specialist amplifies my fear that any money put into Wise in any currency in any part of the world will count as a remittance to Thailand. They are currently seeking clarification from Thailand's tax offices. Of course if you were simply planning on using Wise to send money to Thailand then except for timing issues (to maximise currency conversion advantages) this does not change too much. But if you are using it as a global bridging mechanism then this is a huge issue. For example, if you withdraw money from a financial institution in Hong Kong and transfer it to a Wise Hong Kong Virtual Account this will count instantly as a tax remittance in Thai law and count towards your income tax of that year. Right now it behaves like a local transaction within Hong Kong. You use the standard local transfer mechanism and pay the local transfer mechanism rate and stay within the local currency. But with new rules you will withdraw and instantly become a target of Thailand's tax system and presumably pay an international rate of transfer. Let me give you another example. You send a cheeky $200 to your American online brokerage from your French bank account to bet on some oil commodities. Right now it would cost almost peanuts to send it. But in the future that $200 will be converted to tire currency and then count as part of your Thai income and then be sent to the American account. From linked site:

We've gone from a situation of famine of 15 years ago where there really was a lack of choices for expats who wanted a Visa or MasterCard (to pay online purchases like Agoda etc) unless they were prepared to pay for premium credit cards, to the situation today, where we are absolutely saturated with debit cards using Visa, MasterCard etc. Any standard debit card now issued from a Thai bank is always linked to Visa, Mastercard or UnionPay etc. 15 years ago I only had the famous Kasikorn "web shopping card" as the way to make Visa or MasterCard payments. Now I have everything from a crypto card to a global money/journey card to a UnionPay card.

I only used the AI for the tax revenue modeling. I had it present the calculations so I could check. Obviously AI cannot be reliably used for researching these changes, but in the last year, certain AI models have massively improved with pure maths calculations. The only factor that matters to show huge cost implications are the assumption that there is a tax remittance when a conversion to Thai baht is made in the Wise system. This is my assumption. It is unconnected with AI. Obviously, Wise will not provide tax advice so they will not say if there is a tax implication, and I'm sure the Thai tax revenue lawyers are now licking their lips to argue about this. The entire spirit of my original post remains valid. You are free to do the calculations yourself, even using an old-fashioned Excel spreadsheet if you want.

This is absolutely terrible news. I'm making two reasonable assumptions: Wise users will no longer be allowed to directly transfer into and out of multiple currency accounts, and any money placed into Wise will count as a remittance under Thai income tax laws. Frustratingly, the linked page does not clearly state this but it is implied with everything else they write. None of this will be relevant to pensioners simply transferring income to Thailand or people with simple lifestyles occasionally transferring money outside of Thailand. I'm talking to people who have global financial interests. Most expats with serious funds will follow the standard practice of A to B to C: citizenship of A, bank savings/investments in B, living in C. This minimises tax implications. One of the major functions of Wise is to act as a global bridging mechanism. That is, to move money from A to B or from B to A using local access accounts. But with these changes it appears that Wise will force the money to go via C (since the auto-conversion to Thai baht is likely to count as a remittance in law), creating a huge tax liability and creating a double conversion charge. You might suggest that the expat should simply use a competitor to Wise such as TorFX. But that will not work because most financial institutions require that your money is withdrawn to an account in your name. And for whatever reason only the "virtual" accounts of Wise are accepted (e.g. it is currently remarkably easy to set up a Singapore bank account with Wise, which is widely recognised by financial institutions). Other competitors do have virtual accounts which you can open various countries but they are simply not recognised by the financial institutions. Running various scenarios through Gemini AI, I found the cost implications to this Wise change to be unbelievable. I strongly recommend others in this position take a look. Not only will you be charged for a double conversion of the money but you will also be hit with an income tax bill on it (30%+ of the sum transferred?). There are no viable FinTech alternatives to Wise for these global bridging mechanisms. I think the only choice is to open a premier/priority bank account such as with HSBC or Standard Chartered or Citibank etc. I'm interested to hear how other people are handling this. (I think for the basic user of Thai resident Wise the access to a wise card and being able to transfer out of Thailand will be mostly beneficial.)

Just here to report that Chaeng Wattana (Bangkok) continues to not allow reporting online for the first 90 days report after returning from abroad.

I strongly suspected that radiologists would be the first specialist doctors to lose their jobs to AI. It is just a matter of time before AI hits the 97/98% mark in detection. At first there will be resistance, but the economic case is absolutely overwhelming. The annihilation of middle-class jobs has just begun.

What were the grounds for the refusal? What precisely was the government response to the solicitor's enquiries? What did the solicitor recommend? Was any further appeal made?

I relentlessly have made the same point. I'm not writing a "story". I'm stating a legal point. And I've had to now state it four times so that even someone with special learning needs can grasp it.

There most certainly wasn't. I suspect in your case, the parent was not a British citizen by descent but a British citizen born within the UK, or fully naturalized etc. "By descent" has a meaning not obvious and requires a reading of the law. I strongly suspect you don't understand this key point and because of that on three occasions now you have failed to grasp the legal position pre-2006.

Irrelevant, as you can see if you read the entire comment I quoted. I've read it. I'm clearing up the obvious confusion. Prior to 2006 there was no automatic right to citizenship in the circumstances of one parent holding citizenship.

Prior to 2006, if the child was born outside the UK, to only one UK citizen and that citizen acquired their citizenship through descent then citizenship was not automatic. This has since been abolished.

Bingo. VAT is a highly regressive tax. It hurts the poor more than the rich. In addition, the aim of the tax is to increase the wealth of the old at the cost of the working young, right when the population is aging and the young already are shrinking relative to the old.

You clearly need baby steps to grasp this point: Nominal= far below the real value or cost The cost at VFS is higher than other options The VFS cost is therefore not below the real value or cost My subjective feelings play no part in the determination of the real value or cost

You seem to be struggling to grasp the point here: what I think or feel as to cost or time spent is completely irrelevant as to whether it is nominal or not.

It's irrelevant if I think it's too much for me. It's not nominal because, to quote the dictionary, it would need to be "far below the real value or cost" for it to be nominal.

Their photocopying fee is certainly not nominal.

AI tools have made it dramatically easier to learn Thai. I have discussed before the dramatic improvements in listening Apps in the last year. This time I want to point you to a function within the more general Grok AI App. This is entirely free. With Grok we can get it to make for us the exact difficulty level of reading materials, on topics of our choosing, and we can then have Grok send the materials to us on a schedule of our choosing. This lifts off us the tedious burden of finding suitable reading materials. You simply go the "Task" and set it up. Example: In the prompt you simply write what you want to be produced for you. If you are not sure you can even ask Grok to suggest a suitable prompt for itself. In the example below, I simply selected some text of a well-known forum very popular among young Thais. I would describe this text as around lower-intermediate level. The prompt I have created via Grok is: "Every day at 10:00 AM Thailand time (Asia/Bangkok timezone, UTC+7), automatically generate one Thai-language paragraph or short dialogue (about 150–300 characters) written in natural, spoken Thai style, similar to everyday Thai people chatting or venting on social media / Line / close friends. The language level should be the same as or slightly more advanced than this sample text: [หนักใจมากๆค่ะกับพฤติกรรมนี้ของแฟน ทุกครั้งที่มีเรื่องทะเลาะกันแฟนมักอัพโน้ตลงในโซเชียลเสมอ ทั้งๆที่เคยคุยกันก่อนหน้านี้แล้วว่าถ้ามีปัญหาหรือไม่พอใจอะไรกันให้มาคุยกันตรงๆเราพร้อมรับฟัง แต่เขากลับเลือกที่จะโพสต์ความน้อยใจความไม่พอใจผ่านโน้ตไอจี เรามองว่านี่เป็นปัญหาของคนสองคนระหว่างเขากับเรา การที่เขาทำอย่างนี้ก็เหมือนกับไม่เคารพความเป็นส่วนตัวของความสัมพันธ์ของเราเลย เราไม่โอเคมากๆ นิสัยของเขาค่อนข้างเด็กกว่าเรามากๆ บางทีก็รู้สึกเหมือนว่าคุยกันไม่เข้าใจ เราเป็นคนที่ชีวิตยุ่งมากๆกลับมาจสกเรียนก็ประมาณ 5 โมงเย็นเกือบทุกวัน กลับบ้านก็ต้องทำงานบ้านต่างๆกว่สจะได้ขึ้นบ้านพูดคุยกับเขาอีกทีก็ประมาณ 2 ทุ่มแล้ว พอบอกเหตุผลที่ไม่ค่อยมีเวลาไปก็เหมือนเขาน้อยใจเราไปแล้วที่ไม่ได้ pay attention กับเขา ตอบมาตลอดว่า 'ไม่เป็นไร เข้าใจ' ท้อใจมากค่ะควรคุยกับเขาอย่างไงดีคะ พยายามจะประนีประนอมกับเขามากๆ] Topics can be very wide and varied (randomly choose one each day): personal relationships, dating, love problems, family issues daily life struggles, work stress, study fatigue, time management friendships, misunderstandings with friends self-doubt, anxiety, low mood, overthinking basic psychology topics (e.g., attachment styles, emotional triggers, communication problems, people-pleasing, boundaries) light / everyday politics in Thailand (e.g., opinions about news, government policies affecting daily life, traffic laws, cost of living, social media reactions to political events – keep it personal and emotional, not formal analysis) basic economics in daily context (e.g., complaining about rising prices, salary not enough, inflation affecting food/shopping, side hustle ideas, debt stress, saving money difficulties) health & lifestyle (sleep issues, exercise motivation, diet struggles) random relatable Thai-life moments (commuting in Bangkok, weather complaints, food cravings, LINE group drama) Style: natural spoken Thai with casual particles (ค่ะ/ครับ/นะ/อ่ะ/เลย/มาก ๆ etc.), some English loanwords if common (pay attention, ghosting, red flag, etc.), emotional tone – like someone venting or asking for advice. End the paragraph or dialogue with a question, feeling of frustration/confusion, or request for opinion/advice to make it feel interactive. Format the output nicely: break into short sentences or lines for readability if it's a longer paragraph. Do not use formal written Thai; keep it very conversational."

Obviously complete nonsense.

I added this App about a week ago. Google Translate is still simply not good enough for Thai for some reason so I also went hunting for alternatives.