A book publishing opportunity for someone:

Thai retirement extensions FOR DUMMIES

Not really joking. Someone who could make the formal visa regulations easy to understand with lots of examples and pictures. Trouble is the book would have to be updated constantly.

Yes I was going to say it changes about every two - three months, who the hel_l, and where are they, the ones making all the changes, must be a cage full of monkeys, pulling cards with different rules on them, out of a hat.

The Thais love our money, but do not want us here, or at least make us really work on staying here.

sorry you got the runaround...it's always confusing the first time. however, you will get the hang of it. if you had just read the relevant posts here, all would have been clear to you beforehand. don't follow their written stuff (from website or whatever), put a post up or find someone who renewed within the past month or so to see what the current regs are

i usually keep about 600k in a thai bankand have just toped it up to over 800k for my yearly retirement visa 4 months hence ,as i transfer money from my nationwide account via my debit card there is no record of my transfers except the slips from the machine ,last year in pattaya i was not asked for a letter from my bank ,does anyone know if they will ask for one as it would be impossable to get .

If you are a Nationwide flex account holder and are signed up for internet banking you can print off monthly statements or even all your transactions for a year. This will show where the transaction took place in Thailand, how much baht and the exchange rate.

I had my bank statements with me for last extension but was not asked to show, just letter from Bangkok bank and photo copies of all bank pages.

A Swiss man in our town went to renew his extension/married Thai and it was his 15th year, he was asked to produce photo's of proof of living together with his Thai wife. He did not have any as never been asked in the past. They gave him his one year extension but he has to send photo's of his house/with wife etc by mail to Suanphlu Immigration.

He called one of these visa solution outfits in Pattaya and there reply was "they can ask for anything" The long term ex-pats up here are now getting their camera's out.!