Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Retirement Visas and the issue of so-called "interchangeable" financials. 

Now I have discussed this in many videos at length in the past; I have even done a video correcting myself because I had said for years that "hey it wasn't an actual stipulated requirement that you could do mixing" and even after I corrected myself, I basically said hey don't depend on this because this sort of interchangeable financial stuff, it always ends up going down a path that you don't really want to go because you are using discretion and whenever you are trying to rely on the discretion of someone in the Immigration Bureaucracy, that is not a rock to build a long-term basis for staying in Thailand just generally speaking, that's the way I sort of look at it. 

That said, I thought of making this video after reading a recent letter, a recent piece of correspondence from a viewer, quoting directly: "Hi Ben, I'm a Danish national living in Thailand on an O Retirement Visa. I just had it renewed for another year. This is my second year and in the first year I used monthly income from my foreign pension plan to document my financial situation. This year I decided to use the bank deposit of 800,000 Baht instead. This was accepted by the Immigration Officer but she told me that in the future I would have to use this method only." Quoting further: "I thought that these two ways of documenting your financials were interchangeable from year to year. Do you have any experience in this particular matter?" Yeah I do, and that is you don't, how do I put this? Getting creative or trying to like make in-runs around the Thai System - and this person isn't trying to make any kind of in-run and I appreciate the letter, the email it is noteworthy, that is why I am making a video - but when you try to get all creative and try to sort of move things around and shift stuff and be in a state of fluidity, not a good way to deal with Thai Immigration generally speaking; not a particularly good way to deal for that matter with any Immigration Office including in the United States. You want to sort of set yourself on a path, maintain it. 

As we have discussed, the notion of mixing the bank balance with the pension, again it is stipulated as a possible way of maintaining long-term status but as I have said before, I have never seen any long-term routine use of that method and I think that what is going on in this particular piece of correspondence reinforces that presumption which is, look when you start moving things around, eventually they say "hey you need to pick a lane and stay in it", and I think that's what's going on in this scenario is this Immigration Officer said "hey look, at the end of the day we have got hundreds, if not thousands of cases we are processing in any given year. We don't really have any inclination towards each and every time you show up to do a renewal you have a totally different set of paperwork”. We like to see it in sort of a routine, "stay in your lane" kind of situation. That is what they prefer and quite honestly Thai Immigration's preferences are at the end of the day what is going to count when it comes to the final adjudication of whether or not you are going to get your visa. 

So the thing to think about at the end of the day is hey what way do I want to do this and then set yourself on that path and stick to it.