Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Financial Requirements associated with Thai Retirement Visas. I have made two other videos contemporaneously with this one and I have posted them so folks that are watching this probably have already seen those videos.

We are going to go ahead and put up what we are discussing here. There is the "old page" from the Royal Thai Consulate in Los Angeles's website, that is thaiconsulatela.org, and we will go ahead and put that up on screen. The title of that is: Non-Immigration category O-A: Royal Thai Consulate General, Los Angeles.

Under required documents on that page they note that: 

-need a bank deposit 800,000 Baht 

-need income certificate 65,000 Baht

 that is the standard old rules, we all know that. 

As discussed in the prior videos, there also seems to be this page on the Royal Thai Consulate website in Los Angeles, again: thaiconsulatela.org/en/non-o, and that is titled: Non-O Royal Thai Consulate General, Los Angeles, the title is, again we are putting this on screen: Non-Thai Nationals who wish to obtain a Retirement Visa or a long stay Visa. Non- immigrant category O-A. l am going to go ahead and throw up too; we went ahead and went to Google and cached this page. I wanted to verify that indeed or in fact this page was on the website and Google basically showed us a snapshot as you can see here what that is saying and as you can see: "no less than 1.2 million Baht for a bank deposit or 100,000 Baht for income associated with the Retirement Visa. These are the financial requirements. It would appear that the policy, at least at the Royal Thai Consulate in Los Angeles regarding financial requirements may be changing. Now we don't know. As I have discussed in other videos at length I do not know exactly what is going on here. My gut tells me it is very possible that these may be proposals that were drafted in website form for later upload and they may have inadvertently just gotten made public on this website. Again I tried to check to make sure that this really is coming from the Thai Consulate in LA's website and that is a Consular website. For lack of a better term, one has to take it seriously in the sense that consider it a credible source of information on its face. Now again and we have discussed this in other videos, I have talked to the Thai Attorneys here in the office that are processing Retirement Visas regularly and they are telling me they have not seen these requirements practically rolled out. Now when we started looking at this I would say there may be a caveat to that and say "yet". It may not have happened but it could happen in the future. Now it remains to be seen whether or not this will occur if at all. I could see a situation this might have just been a proposal and it just inadvertently ended up on the website. There is also the possibility that this may be a sneak preview if you will of requirements that are coming down the pike. I don't know what of those two alternatives is going on here. I can say that for now we are still dealing with the standard rules: 800,000 in bank balance and 65,000 in income to get a Retirement Visa. 

My gut tells me and I hesitate, I have seen some stuff posted by folks there are some folks even in the comments that sometimes get on me for being too speculative, like I shouldn't speculate so much. Fair enough, when I do that I am trying to infer what could happen based on what has happened and from experience how I have seen these things evolve over time. That said it might happen, it might not. I don't know and I will be the first one to tell you I don't know for sure but when something that changes fundamental rules regarding financial requirements appears on an Embassy website, especially we do a lot of cases out of the US, I have to take notice of that. So I think it is worth noting. To be clear for now, we are not seeing these financial requirements being raised as practical matter. I have definitely not seen anything to indicate that this would be happening internally here in Thailand. 

Now we do have a new Immigration Chief. We tend to see policy changes when we get new Immigration Chiefs. Does that mean that will happen here? I don't know. This website is under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not the Ministry of Interior which overseas Thai Immigration here internally so maybe there is zero connection at all. Maybe this is just a local set of rules that were proposed and inadvertently got online. Maybe it might be rules in the future. I don't know but what I know is it is interesting. I think it is insightful and it may provide again that kind of sneak peek to what rules may look like down the road in the foreseeable future.