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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawThailand Immigration LawObtaining a Thai Marriage Visa Extension Without an Income Affidavit

Obtaining a Thai Marriage Visa Extension Without an Income Affidavit

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai marriage visas; we are specifically discussing Thai O visas or marriage visas in the context of the “post income affidavit” era.

For those who are unaware, there are other videos on this channel where we describe what has happened and been announced by both the US Embassy and the UK Embassy here in Thailand and I think it is probably going to ripple out to other embassies as well where basically they have now announced that as of January 1st 2019, they will no longer be issuing Income Affidavits for those seeking extensions of things like a Thai O visa for marriage or the Thai retirement Visa. That being said, we are concentrating on the Thai Marriage Visa category in this video and what does the visa extension application process look like in the aftermath of the Income Affidavit regime?

For those who are unaware, you could get this income affidavit; it was a fairly straightforward procedure. Go down to the Embassy, fill out an affidavit stipulating one's income and then sign it, have it notarized, that notarization would be legalized by the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that entire document would be used as the basis, basically most of if not all of the evidence of one's financial ability to remain in the Kingdom and in the past, a Thai O marriage visa could simply be extended based on that affidavit.

As the embassies of both the UK and the US have made clear, January 1 will mark the end of that era. There will no longer be any of these income affidavits issued and moving forward, that is going to leave us in a position where we are not going to be able to deal with that instrument when getting a Thai marriage visa extension.

So where does that leave us? Well basically there are going to be two methodologies that I can see pretty much being a certain method of proving up one's ability to financially support oneself and one's family here in the Kingdom in order to get a Thai O Visa extended.

One, is lump-sum funds in a bank account for example if it is lump sum it is 400,000 Thai Baht in a Thai bank account for a Thai O visa extension or being able to show ongoing sustained and regular injections of income into one's Thai bank account on a monthly basis and in order to meet the monthly threshold requirement, one needs to show at least Bt.40,000 in a Thai bank account coming into that bank account on a monthly basis. So those seem to be the two hard and fast ways of dealing with this matter.

I suspect there is going to be a little bit of nuance that we may see regulatorily, probably six or eight months down the road, where we start seeing perhaps other documentation can be used as sort of ancillary documentation to prove up one's financial ability to remain in the Kingdom but as of the time of this video, those two are going to be the hard and fast ones that we know we are going to be able to use in post income affidavit era.