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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawThailand Immigration LawRetirement Visa Conversion from a Business Visa in Thailand

Retirement Visa Conversion from a Business Visa in Thailand

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing changing or converting status from a Business Visa in Thailand to a Retirement Visa in Thailand. Roughly in the past 6 months we have seen a lot more of these than we usually would see. Now a lot of this could be due to the fact that in the past folks that were doing this, they would oftentimes just go ahead and do a Border Run or a so called Visa Run, i.e. they would leave Thailand on their Business Visa and they would come back in and either convert status to Retirement Visa or they would get a Retirement Visa abroad and come back in and take up retiree status here in the Kingdom.

The Government response to COVID-19 and everything that has come therewith has resulted in a lot of obstacles if you will to ease of travel especially the era of the Border Run at least for the foreseeable future just is not there where you can just hop across the border one day and hop back. So, where does that leave us? Well it leaves us with the situation where a lot of folks are converting status. They are going from Business Visa to Retirement. We have done other videos on this channel about this but recently, roughly the past 3 months, we have noticed this takes longer than it used to. So, getting all the ducks in a row with respect to ending Business status and then taking up Retirement status, in the past or I should say about a year ago, especially in the aftermath of all of this COVID lockdown and shut down, it wasn't taking that long; it was taking a couple of weeks. Now I think people need to be preparing for this at least 45 days in advance if not 60 days in advance to convert status because they need to go ahead and gather up relevant documentation to be able to move their status from one visa to the other.

Again, this is going to be very factually dependent. What is going on in your situation is going to drive the analysis into how best to proceed and there are more than one ways to deal with this in a very real sense. So again, it is probably not a terrible idea to contact a legal professional on this topic if you are looking to convert status from B, Business Visa status to Retirement Visa status here in the Kingdom of Thailand.