Money Transfers

[kyb789]

Everyone it talking about it here, but always leave out the details. The 10% tax applies to what? Any money brought into Thailand? What are the limitations? For example..

1. How much money can be transferred into Thailand from the U.S. "at one time" without being taxed? Can I do multiple transfers to get around these taxes?

2. How much money can be transferred into Thailand within 1 year without a transfer tax?

If we are talking about less than $10k, what transfer method do you recommend? I just want to get some money over here and have it available to me. Thanks in advance.

Edited December 23, 2007 by kyb789

[PattayaParent]

What transfer tax? Never heard of it unless you mean a tax the US imposes on transfers into Thailand?

Are you getting confused with the Transfer Tax on property?

[backflip]

I'm confused too. Until the OP mentioned it, I've never heard of a transfer tax for money entering/leaving Thailand. The best way to move money to Thailand is through a SWIFT. Both the sending and receiving banks MAY charge you for the SWIFT transfer.

[kyb789]

What transfer tax? Never heard of it unless you mean a tax the US imposes on transfers into Thailand?

Are you getting confused with the Transfer Tax on property?

This was in the PINNED section:

"The onshore/offshore dichotomy exists as a result of capital controls introduced by the BoT to reduce speculative inflows intending to profit from an appreciation in the baht. These controls put an effective 10% tax on large inward speculative remittances and introduced a ban on certain inter-bank transactions between onshore and offshore institutions. This leads to an artificially stronger baht in the offshore market. See post #119 here for further details on this:..."

[monty]

There is no such thing as transfer tax!

What the pinned topic talks about is the discrepancy between onshore and off shore exchange rates (which by the way are less then 10% by now).

In short this only means that you have to make sure that when you transfer funds to Thailand, you do it by sending an amount in your own currency and let the exchange happen in Thailand (at the better on-shore rate).

For Americans, send for example 10,000 US$, the US$ funds will arrive at your Thai bank and they will change it to Thai Baht at their on-shore exchange rate.

If however you order your home bank to send 400,000 Thai Baht to your Thai Bank, then they will first calculate how much US$ they have to charge you at their off-shore rate (which is much lower) and then send the money (already in Thai Baht) to your Thai account.

The latter scenario is indeed more expensive, but not a worry as long as you clearly order your home bank to send foreign currency to your Thai bank, so the exchange will happen in Thailand.

How exactly the Bank Of Thailand envisioned this would avoid the Thai Baht appreciating has escaped everybody, especially since the Thai Baht kept on appreciating, regardless of several other silly rules imposed!

[monty]

There is however another rule that I think is still active, which is the 30% withholding on inbound transfers for over 20,000 US$.

This rule was there also to keep currency speculators put undue pressure on the Thai Baht trying to make a quick gain while the Thai Baht was appreciating. Again, this rule did not work very well, on the opposite this rule managed to crash the Thai stock market

As a result of that crash they quickly relaxed the rule a bit, basically as long as you can prove what the funds are going to be used for (buying condo, car, even just living expenses), then you should get the full transfer through, although sometimes with a few days delay, the time needed to convince your bank that you're not a currency speculator!

Whether or not to withhold the 30% is up to your own Thai bank to decide, and I don't think anybody genuinely needing to spend the money in Thailand ever had serious problems getting 100% of their transfer...

[kyb789]

There is however another rule that I think is still active, which is the 30% withholding on inbound transfers for over 20,000 US$.

This is what I was looking for. Thanks for the good input. I remembered something about the 30% withholding but didn't understand the details very well. I wonder if it applies to more than 20k US$ at one time, or annually. It would be so easy to make multiple transfers.

[Naam]

There is however another rule that I think is still active, which is the 30% withholding on inbound transfers for over 20,000 US$.

This is what I was looking for. Thanks for the good input. I remembered something about the 30% withholding but didn't understand the details very well. I wonder if it applies to more than 20k US$ at one time, or annually. It would be so easy to make multiple transfers.

USD 20k or more each time, no "compounding".