Transcript of the above video: 

Yet again there has been a recent sort of phenomenon if you will of some foreigner posting something online and then everybody freaking out because what they were posting was erroneous basically. That said, I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Thaiger, that is thethaiger.com, the article is titled: Can foreigners really buy a condo in Thailand without paying taxes? Quoting directly: "A British buyer recently made headlines after purchasing a 56 million Baht Freehold condominium near Bang Tao Beach in Phuket and claiming the deal left him with no personal income tax liability on his global earnings." - let me get to that in a moment; just that key part, because the whole Global income tax thing and all this rubric about the way it supposedly works, we will see - quoting further: "The post went viral, sparked a wave of online debate, and left a lot of expats asking the same question: can you buy a condo in Thailand as a foreigner without paying tax, and is it actually legal? The honest answer is: partly yes, and partly no, and the distinction matters a great deal if you are planning to buy property in Thailand. The claim holds up on the income side tax but falls apart if you read it as a blanket "no taxes on anything" statement. Here is what the law actually says." Quoting further: "The foreign buyer confirmed that his £1.3 million (56 million baht) acquisition near Bang Tao Beach involved a freehold condominium unit, compliant with the Thai Condominium Act." And from that, it means he can take title to it. Now, as they get into further in the article and if you're interested you can go read it, but long story short is no, you're still stuck with the land transfer taxes that are standard associated with the real estate.

Now to the issue of well, this person transferred the money in, and was not subject to income tax. Well they may not be subject to income tax anyway. If it's their already pre-existing funds, it has nothing to do with the recent changes to the memoranda associated with assessability and liability in a tax context in Thailand. On top of that, there's this continuing discussion about how the LTR Visa works and you are not taxed on any of your global income. That said - and this is the key point - we really don't know what the terms of the tax and the liability associated with the LTR are until we start seeing people renewing their LTR Visa, because as they said in the beginning when they rolled this out, there would be an audit associated with maintaining one's LTR status. And as I've talked about in other videos, first of all it is a Long-Term Resident Visa, it is not a Resident Visa; Lawful Permanent Residence is covered by a specific section of the Immigration Act of '79. You get a red book, you get a blue book, you can get the white book and things. You are Permanent Resident, you are Thai PR, you are a landed immigrant. You have an Immigrant Visa to get in and out of the country. LTR, Long Term Residence, it's not that. It's just a really long Non-immigrant Visa; that's the way to look at it. 

Meanwhile this tax thing. At the 5-year mark, they basically review everything before issuing the subsequent 5 years; it was billed as a 10-year Visa, but again you get it in 5-year increments. I think this thing rolled out in '22 - they were talking about a lot in '21 - but I think the first ones were issued in '22, maybe at the end of '21. So the first renewals we're going to see on this are going to be at the earliest the end of this year, but more likely we are going to see a lot of numbers in earnest next year. 

Now this is what I've talked about in the context of retirees in Thailand many times going back years. Don't worry too much about taxes unless taxes become part of the renewal process for your Visa. Standard O Retirement visas, that's not part of it. They just want to see the bank balance in the bank and basically all the other documentation associated with one's identity and address, and then they'll go ahead and issue the renewal. 

With the LTR we just don't know what they're going to do, but we do know that there's a component of this that reviews one's tax situation. And again, if you read the basic law on this - and they'll say well that's exempted because of the creation of the LTR - maybe, maybe. That's dependent on interpretation. We don't know yet until we start seeing people audited in connection with getting their renewal of their LTR Visas. So again maybe, but the standard law says that if you're here 180 days and there's an inbound remittance, that in and of itself triggers two flags where they say, okay we're going to look at that. Now the nature of the funds, this is another one that everybody is just way off on, is they keep conflating just one's own money - which is just what one possesses - with income. It's also being mixed up with things like capital gains and interest, which is another form of possible taxable events that you have to do a different type of analysis on. But okay, I'm pretty sure this person in one year didn't earn 56 million Baht and therefore would be subject to income tax. I would presume that this was saved-up money, and again depending on the circumstances, and depending on when that person accrued it, it might not be subject to any assessability or liability whatsoever under Thai Law. So that's the first thing. 

Everybody is just way off mostly because - as I've discussed in many other videos - a number of charlatans have come into Thailand claiming to be able to provide tax advice regarding Thai tax, when in reality they are foreigners and they have no business whatsoever doing that; in fact it's criminal. But that said, let's leave that be for the moment. At the end of the day, with regard to the LTR, again I've been saying this since the beginning, I'm saying it again, until we see people starting to renew on that thing, I'm taking nothing for granted with regard to tax liability on the LTR; that's where I stand on it. I tell clients this and that's where I'm at. We have assisted folks in getting the LTR, but at the end of the day, until we see how the renewal works, I don't think it's safe to say that it's just "oh ironclad that there's no tax associated with folks that are on the LTR". Again, it's going to be subject to interpretation. I'm going to be keen to see what that is, and I'll be the first person to make the videos that says "hey wow no, the LTR, it looks like what they say is true; they're not interpreting it in such a way to sort of pull the rug out from under people and get them under tax liability." That said, knowing the nature of Revenue Departments around the world in multiple jurisdictions, their job is to get the most money they can, and if the interpretation of the rules can lead to that, it has been my experience that that is the way they tend to interpret the rules. 

So the thing to take away from this video is to understand, there are inherent taxes on condominiums in Thailand, and the tax posture associated with the LTR in my opinion, all remains to be seen until we start seeing folks actually renewing their status in LTR Visa status here in the Kingdom of Thailand.