Does anyone know whether safety deposit boxes are available at banks in Bangkok? What banks are most likely to have them?

I am going for 6 months to a year and some valuables will never be safe in a hotel room or inside the apartment.

I have heard of horror stories of condos being broken into in spite of the "security guards" who never saw nothing.

Any info on the subject will be appreciated.

I got a 1 year visa without any trouble by mail in Houston. I am in Kalifornia. I can give info on exactly what to do to get it.

T I A

Pisico

I've been trying for the past few months to find a safe-deposit box in bangkok with no luck.

Every bank I've been to says they don't have them or they're full.

My last experience was at SCB at Siam Square and went like this:

I first got the usual reply that the wait list is very long, which they hoped would make me give up and go away. I said I live here and don't mind waiting and would like to be put on the wait list, and then was passed on to the next employee. This was repeated three times. Finally, someone gave me a scrap piece of paper to write my name and number on. I just sat there and didn't want to leave until I was put on the official wait list.

Then someone else came who spoke really good English and told me for the bank manager to help me out by giving me a safe-box I also had to help him out by purchasing a minimum 1.2 million baht 15-year savings/insurance endowment plan. Apparently by purchasing a savings plan the wait list wouldn't matter anymore. Endowment plans are very difficult to calculate an average rate of return for because there's inflows and outflows at different times. After a lot of research I was able to use the IRR (Internal Rate of Return) function in excel to come up with a return of 2.6% before tax deductions and 4.3% after tax deductions. The advantages are your money is secure and you can deduct up to 100,000B off your taxable income per year.

After that experience I gave up. Keep in mind I've been with that branch for the past four years and my salary is paid into that branch every month so the account is used a lot.

You're not totally out to lunch worrying about your condo being broken into to either. My condo was broken into a few years ago a week after I bought a new laptop so someone was definitely staking me out. I've since moved into a more expensive building with better security.

Good luck and let us know how the search goes.

You literally need to go door to door with the banks. They will want you to open an account (any may or may not specify how much you need to put in it). They don't have a central records system so Bangkok Bank (for example) in location X won't be able to tell you if other Bangkok Bank branches in their general area have any empty boxes or not. So time-consuming but you should eventually find one if you persist (and perhaps are prepared to travel)

You can get a SDB at 3 or 4 locations In BKK-----that are not banks. There was a thread here not long ago with this info. Happy searching!

Try large branches, or newer branches. Also, there tend to more smaller boxes available than large ones.

Although it's been a few years, I used to use a safety deposit firm at Charn Issara Tower on Rama IV Road.