Thailand - Long term visas for expats

[shri]

Looking for a long term visa at the moment, can you explain bit more?

Been a long standibg tradition in Thailand to use a fixer or agent who, for a charge will facilitate your visa renewal. Decades ago this involved them taking your passport to a random entry point and getting it stamped with an exit and reentry - extending your stay.

May be this has changed now.. No clue.

Not recommended in anyway as it opens you up to more severe losses down the road and is mostly used by 'desperate individuals'..

[ndt]

Looking for a long term visa at the moment, can you explain bit more?

If you are willing to pay a bit upfront for service and peace of mind, Look into Elite easy access visa for single or Elite Family excursion for couple.. No hanky panky with agent, lining up for 90 day reporting or cross over to Combodia for yearly renewal..

Covid has made Elites relatively popular compared to regular yearly visa..

[hktraveller]

Thailand is one of those countries (beside the Philippines China and Indonesia) where I would not invest anything more than what I can stick into my mouth right away. And Hong Kong is putting itself slowly onto that list too.

[er2]

I could expect this visa to be pretty successful with the remote software developer crowd. Saw plenty of them in Chiang Mai before covid. Salary / investment conditions would be easy to meet for them and I'm quite sure a few of them would like to grow roots. And @shri plenty of them are brown folks...

[ndt]

I could expect this visa to be pretty successful with the remote software developer crowd. Saw plenty of them in Chiang Mai before covid. Salary / investment conditions would be easy to meet for them and I'm quite sure a few of them would like to grow roots. And @shri plenty of them are brown folks...

+1, i see Thailand is probably the only country in Asia developing into proper Digital Nomad hub in short-medium term and Govt is trying to seize that opportunity right on time.. Couple of other countries have smaller hubs but Govt policies are not pro-active and expat friendly echo system not as developed as Thailand which will be its another advantage being an early adopter.. Lets see if Malaysia changes its tune now or goes insular/xenophobic and if other Asian countries come up with similar plans..

[xhkge]

Looking for a long term visa at the moment, can you explain bit more?

If you're over 50 with a retirement income around US2000 a month or are willing to deposit around US25k into a Thai Bank account then these visa shops provide a quite legitimate service where they help you fill out all the forms and use their contacts to help whisk your application through the Immigration office. It's also fairly easy, tho sometimes a bit frustrating, to fill out these forms yourself. The visa lasts one year, and you need to visit Immigration every 90 days or so just to say hello and/or prove you still have some money in the bank. More recently the complication and expense of needing health/COVID insurance has been introduced for some applicants.

If you don't have the required income or bank deposit this is where things can get a bit more shady as, so I've heard, they can arrange a temporary loan or to have these requirements "overlooked". People have been doing this for years, but occasionally they'll have a "crackdown" (maybe as "friendships" with officials fell out of favor) and make an example of a company involved, and you certainly wouldn't want to be caught in the crossfire as this could see you Blacklisted from Thailand for a number of years.

If you're under 50 there are still other legitimate options. A more expensive way is to set yourself up as a company and give yourself an annually renewable work visa. Whilst this costs more if done correctly, it does provide a path to PR (although that process is quite complicated). If done the shady way it can be a lot cheaper, but of course there is more risk.

There are also a number of legitimate 1 year "education" visas for studying anything from religion, to Muay Thai to Thai Language. The latter is particularly popular and actually a useful thing to do if you're in Thailand a long time. To qualify you have to attend language lessons a few times a week. On the odd occasion immigration officers may test your Thai to make sure you have been attending classes, but again if you use one of the "little shops" this might all be done just for a bit of a laugh, and if your Thai is awful there won't usually be any consequences. Of course with lockdowns and COVID this type of visa may be very difficult to obtain or even impossible presently.

All these approaches are fluid, and you need to check with the little shop every year to see what the latest arrangements are. And as ndt points out, if the government are trying to role out a grand new scheme they may have a "crackdown" on some of these other options.

I won't go into details of the various quite legitimate "Thailand Elite" offerings as you can easily read those for yourself: https://www.thailandelite.com

Been a long standibg tradition in Thailand to use a fixer or agent who, for a charge will facilitate your visa renewal. Decades ago this involved them taking your passport to a random entry point and getting it stamped with an exit and reentry - extending your stay.

May be this has changed now.. No clue.

After a "crackdown" these type of "visa run" arrangements using either tourist or business visas became less common and more problematic. Most people moved over to either an "assisted" retirement visa if over 50, some form of education visa if under 50, or either the Elite or proper work visa path if the budget was there.

The main thing is, immigration rules and interpretation thereof seem to change all the time in Thailand, and although there are people who've lived there for decades on simple retirement visas with no issues other than the occasional frustration with the bureaucracy, I personally would still hesitate to invest a large chunk of my savings there.

If the new long term visa schemes recently announced are introduced, I suspect these same "little shops" will roll out a whole bunch of new services to "ease" the application process. That's what they do.

[ndt]

@xhkge interesting insights , Hypothetically, if new scheme comes with high bar/investment (i.e. All options have some kind of high investment), obviously no point moving any large investment to Thailand but assuming Thai Elite co-exists with new scheme and wind up of cheap yearly scheme, whats your view on Elite?

[xhkge]

@xhkge interesting insights , Hypothetically, if new scheme comes with high bar/investment (i.e. All options have some kind of high investment), obviously no point moving any large investment to Thailand but assuming Thai Elite co-exists with new scheme and wind up of cheap yearly scheme, whats your view on Elite?

I've no association, but I've used them for years when I was visiting for work meetings because they made life simple. I always found them professional and helpful. If you hit a "bureaucratic" niggle with a lower immigration official they will go over their head to get things fixed (as long as it's not a real problem like you're smuggling drugs , but just some lowly official trying it on). I like the scheme because, once you get over the hurdle of the initial paperwork, you can basically continue on cruise control, even getting a new visa every five years is all handled at the airport.

But you do have to pay - the price has steadily increased over the years, and the services have diminished, but not the core functionality of a long term visa, which was the main thing I was interested in. APEC is another option, but then you don't have the local support if you do hit some kind of hurdle (such as someone at immigration control saying "You come here a lot, are you SURE you're not working here?!). Also I think APEC was only 90 days whereas with the Elite visa you can basically extend indefinitely. As an occasional tourist it's probably not good value, but a digital nomad who amortizes the cost over the duration of stay against possible tax benefits on their income, it may end up being very good value indeed. I think the Thai government have recognized this, and want to cash in on it. It could be hard times ahead for Elite unless they somehow get involved with the new schemes.

After some problems with APEC, I was able to get my old employer to pay for the Elite visa. They didn't want me wasting hours dealing with immigration any more than I wanted to myself.

[kchan99]

I am over 50, 25k is about the limit of how much I would want to put into Thailand considering all the risks past and future, as a semi digital nomad, looking at Thailand as a medium term base, so 10 year visas is bit of an overkill for me.

[ndt]

I am over 50, 25k is about the limit of how much I would want to put into Thailand considering all the risks past and future, as a semi digital nomad, looking at Thailand as a medium term base, so 10 year visas is bit of an overkill for me.

Thats round about the price for ELite Easy Access for 5 yrs.. No income proof needed, easy application process and other advantages mentioned on Elite website.. BTW, One good thing about Elite i like the most particularly for passive income earners is it gives flexibility to move around portfolio and not tied up to generate income, in fact its a huge plus for early retirees who probably want to keep higher allocation in growth portfolio or someone who wants to keep it in vanilla broad-market ETFs..