Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing married couples, retirees, 400,000 Baht; let me get into it. The reason I thought of making this video, I was reading a recent comment from our channel, quoting directly: "The bank deposit of 800,000 Baht is too much. A married couple only has to have 400,000 Baht. This requirement needs to be lowered but won't happen. Retiring to Thailand is not an attractive option." I have already made a video where I disagree that it's not an attractive option. Comparatively, I really don't see a program better than Thailand that provides the level of benefits in this type of country for the financial requirements that need to be met. I mean it is pretty minimal compared to say for example Indonesia which has like $128,000 requirement; there are other places in South America. Here in the region, Malaysia My Second Home Program, they upped the financial requirements on that; Vietnam does not have a retirement Visa; Cambodia's Visa is kind of in a Nation form; I've heard mixed things about the Philippines, I'm not going to get too into that on Retirement Visas, but again the so-called Golden Visa programs and things throughout the world, again the financial requirements are way higher than anything Thailand is imposing. 

The reason for the video though is I just want to quote this again: "A married couple only has to have 400,000 Baht." I think there's a little bit to unpack there because I think there is a little bit of a misnomer there. I think what the poster was saying was a foreign national married to a Thai need only show 400,000 Baht in a Bank Account for the Marriage Visa. That is true, that is the financial requirement. We have discussed that at length in other videos on this channel. That said, as discussed in other videos on this channel, there is heightened scrutiny on Thai Marriage Visas as a result of scams that were pulled some years ago. Look, I know folks that have O Marriage Visas that have been investigated multiple times at their house in association with their application for an O Marriage Visa. I've never seen this in the context of just standard Retirement Visas. So okay yes the O Marriage Visa, it's a different category and it has different requirements. If you're married to a Thai, you need to show 400,000 Baht in a bank account as opposed to 8. 

Now that said, this brings us to another question which often trips up married retirees, so I thought this was a good opportunity to speak to that on a topical basis. The married couples, if they are both foreigners, still need to independently show that they have the 800,000 Baht required in order to get a Thai Retirement Visa. It doesn't get split in half because a married couple is married. If they are both foreigners, they each have to independently meet the 800,000 Baht requirement on their own. Now they may be able to do that through a joint account but it's going to have to show more than 1.6 million Baht in it. In most of the cases involving our retiree clients that are married where they are a foreign married couple, we generally tell them to go ahead and just set up separate bank accounts, deal with it that way, it's the cleanest way to deal with it. Again different offices are going to deal with this differently, it's going to be circumstantially dependent, but for the most part and I think the best rule of thumb if you are a married couple looking to retire in Thailand, presume you are both going to need to show independent ability to financially support yourselves individually.