Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we have had some comments on our channel recently asking about Permanent Residence and retirement here in Thailand. Had a lot of retirees asking me, "hey I want to become a permanent resident. How do I go about doing that?”

Well it honestly depends on your circumstances. So generally speaking though, notwithstanding the fact that yeah, there are multiple ways of becoming a PR, or at least ostensibly, as a practical matter, effectively you really need to have lived and worked in Thailand for a fairly prolonged period of time before you are going to even be eligible to apply for PR. And, in most cases involving retirees where they have never actually worked or been work authorized in Thailand, it renders the analysis regarding Permanent Residence such that effectively they probably won't be able to get it. I'm not saying that's the case in every situation. Again, all cases are different, all cases are unique, all cases are driven by the specific facts in the underlying case. That being said, effectively PR probably for most retirees is not going to be possible. 

Meanwhile though the notion of permanent. Well, what do you define as permanent? I mean to my mind, somebody that comes here and gets into an O Retirement Visa that's pretty darn permanent. Yes you have to renew it, yes it's not guaranteed the renewal is going to happen but I mean it's not guaranteed insofar as you can't guarantee anything in an adjudicatory sense, but yeah, at the end of the day, if you get into a long-term O Retirement Visa - I mean there are people who are living in Thailand right now who have been in that status for decades - and there are people who come here, retire in that status and then pass away here. So to my mind, that's about as close as permanent, as close to permanent that you can affectively get.