Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing changing or what I call converting to a Retirement Visa here in Thailand. A lot of questions about this but a big one is, is it possible? Maybe. Under certain circumstances it may be possible to convert to a Retirement Visa. Now it is not necessarily a foregone conclusion and a lot of this type of thing is operating at the discretion of the adjudicating officer so you may end up in a situation where that adjudicating officer doesn't see any issue with doing that conversion or they may have a problem with it. They may say: "No, you have got to leave the country, come back in; get yourself a Retirement Visa and come back." So it is going to be very dependent on who the adjudicating officer is. 

The other thing is the reasoning behind it. So depending on circumstances, if you have got a good reason to deal with the conversion, oftentimes we have found, Immigration Officers are pretty sympathetic but there are circumstances where they do have an issue. For example, I have seen a number of folks that had some real problems with conversion coming off of a really prolonged "Covid Amnesty Visa" and basically Immigration said "look, we don't really believe you are here", this was literally said in one case, not for one of our clients. They came to us after but Immigration said "We don't believe what you are telling us. We don't want to issue this conversion", and they wouldn't. We ultimately found a solution in that case but it took some real doing. 

So the thing to take away from this video is yes it is oftentimes possible to change to a Retirement Visa in Thailand but it is not always possible and it is going to be very dependent on the facts in that case.