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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawThailand Immigration LawThai Retirement Visas: Single Name Bank Books for Bank Balances

Thai Retirement Visas: Single Name Bank Books for Bank Balances

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Retirement Visas yet again.  

This is a specific video I made with respect to bank books and the reason I did is we had somebody commenting on one of the videos and some other people had emailed me with respect to this specific issue. They basically said "Can you can you go ahead and bring it up in your next tranche of videos?” and I decided, “Yes, it probably isn't a bad idea to bring it up.” 

So what are we talking about? Bank books, single name bank books. There are some folks that will get a joint account with their Thai spouse here in the Kingdom and therefore the bank book will have two names listed as the account holder on the bank book, on the account. I don't think that this will necessarily preclude someone from using 800,000 baht in a joint account, but as one of the commentors and emailers pointed out, it is just one more level of murkiness if you will. It creates a level, not a great level of opacity, but a level of uncertainty with respect to who actually has the funds etc.  And like with many things associated with the Thai Immigration process anything non-routine should be avoided if possible.  So the reason I made this video was just to note that folks that are looking to bring in bank balances and there's presumably going to be more of them moving forward since there have been changes to the regulatory enforcement procedures associated with the Thai retirement Visa.  The thing I want to make this video about is if you're going to be bringing it in I can totally understand why you would want a joint account but it may not be a terrible idea to have one’s bank account that is used in association with extension or application of Retirement Visa, it is probably not a terrible idea to have it in one's name exclusively so that there is no question that those funds are exclusively the funds of the person who is seeking the visa. Now that being said, from a policy standpoint the concern seem to be whether or not the applicant has funds on hand for use, for example in medical emergencies and to just sustain themselves while here in the Kingdom. So I can see where they might go ahead and use their discretion to allow a joint account and in fact I think that's probably relatively likely to happen.  I think it's probably a pretty good bet that they'll go ahead and do that but that being said if you can avoid it, why take the risk?

So the thing to take away from this video is I think it might be prudent under the circumstances to just go ahead and have a single name bank account associated with oneself used to go ahead and sponsor and act as evidence for a Thai Retirement Visa application or extension.