Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Thai Retirement Visa specifically kind of looking at this in sort of a broad if you will, kind of looking at it broadly throughout Asia. So what are we talking about here? 

Well I made a number of videos recently and in fact I have been taking nothing but grief from a certain cohort in the comments section. I'm not big on reading comments on this channel particularly and don't really go out of my way to read them all that often although the staff here will from time to time sort of will be doing something, will be going through comments. I saw a number of them regarding Thai Retirement Visas here in the past few weeks; I've been accused of all sorts of things; yet again scare mongering. I've been called all kinds of things, real fun, real fun to make free videos where I try to provide information to the public and just sort of getting excoriated in the process but whatever. 

So one of the things and one of the reasons for the videos and I will get to this in another video I'm making contemporaneously with this one is I have been talking about Retirement Visas and Thai Immigration for going on about 7 years now and look at the end of the day there have been things people have not liked that were trends that I sort of saw coming before they were actually promulgated and then they came online. I've also seen things, "travel bubbles" comes to mind; we talked about that a lot during COVID. That seemed to be something that was coming to a head and never did and it ultimately didn't come to fruition. At the end of the day I make this channel, I make these videos to try and provide whatever insight I can sort of on a day to day basis. Now at the same time we don't make these videos necessarily daily. In fact we usually shoot them all at once and sort of cut them up later and then put them out as time goes on but I try to stay on top of it as best I can, at least on a weekly basis and whatever, I guess I get a lot of hate in the comments for what I'm doing here, fine. 

That said, I think people have some misconceptions on what I think of the Retirement Visa and I think of the standard Retirement Visa as basically the best option that I can see in all of Asia and I would argue it's high on the list of best in the world. And again, there are certain aspects of other plans that one could argue are better; certain aspects of the cost associated in other jurisdictions or throughout the world compared to here in Thailand that depending on a one-to-one comparison, one country might offer something a little better than Thailand. I get that. But in the aggregate, in the totality of everything, I honestly do believe Thailand's Retirement Visa, the Retirement Visa, the standard Retirement Visa, the O or the O-A that many foreign nationals come to use to live long-term in Thailand, is when all things are considered in terms of cost, standard of living here in Thailand, cost of living here in Thailand and the benefits accrued associated with getting a Long-Term Retirement Visa compared to other jurisdictions especially here in Southeast Asia which don't even offer the alternative especially mainland Southeast Asia, there just really is not a comparable Retirement Visa scheme to the Thai Retirement Visa scheme, now again, taking everything in the aggregate. So I am not talking about that yeah again I think somebody put up something about a Retirement Visa in Cambodia that that was better because XYZ, and then somebody made some points on that but at the end of the day I had a hard time rectifying in my own brain that in fact, everything, again standard of living, cost of living, everything associated with medical infrastructure when you look at Thailand compared to Cambodia that Cambodia really stacked up under those circumstances. Now again, people's personal preference has to factor into things etc. so I am not saying Thailand is better in the sense that it's monolithically better, there are exceptions and reasonable people can't disagree, but I think when you stack up all the benefits associated with retirement in Thailand, there really is no better especially Visa scheme at least here in East Asia.