Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Retirement Visas and we are now out about a year past the withdrawal of the Emergency Decree and here recently, I have gotten a fair bit of correspondence mostly from folks that are not in major hubs if you will, not in major sort of tourist centers, major urban areas: Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, Chiang Mai any of those places. I am not hearing this from people that are in like major cities yet, but I have gotten a few pieces of correspondence from folks that have said that they have tried to go to Thai Immigration and change, sort of 'convert' that is what we always call it, convert to a Retirement Visa.

Generally speaking in this correspondence, I am not going to quote anything because I have received a few of these, I am just kind of sort of going to amalgamize them and then give you sort of a breakdown of just overall where things stand. But long story short, it is from folks presently I have got correspondence from people from relatively less populated areas that have an Immigration Office and they have been told when they come and they have like a 30-day stamp or they have a Tourist Visa or some other kind of Visa, they basically come in and say "Hey I want to change over to a Thai Retirement Visa here in-country." Now during COVID and even in the aftermath of COVID we saw this as a possibility although it was dealt with on a case by case basis. As we discussed at the time and continue to discuss, at the end of the day it is at Thai Immigration Officers' discretion but and the thrust of this video is a point to remember which is, it is not a foregone conclusion that Thai Immigration will allow for a conversion. In fact going into this whole thing starting, let's call the cutoff point quarter one of 2020, if you would have gone backwards from that date, generally speaking the modus operandi of Thai Immigration here in country was not to allow conversion in country, but instead it operated on the presumption of "hey you need to go out, do a Visa Run, get a visa and come back in and then extend," and we saw this in many different categories including the Retirement Visa. It was not unheard of where you would see people come to Thailand and say "Hey I am going to retire here", and they tried to convert and Thai Immigration says, "No, you need to step out of the country, get yourself a proper Retirement Visa, come back in and extend it." Not unheard of at all.

So what we are talking about here today is it looks like it is possible that we may be seeing sort of a reversion to the mean if you will, a reversion to the situation as it was prior to the whole Emergency Decree, the whole COVID situation, the lockdowns and everything, we may be seeing sort of sort of a reversion back to that. Based on what I am saying I think it is maybe possibly creeping back up. That said we haven't seen so much of this in a more urban context and we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as that situation evolves.