Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Long-Term Residence Visas. That term is in quotation marks, as we have discussed many times on this channel, they don't actually provide residence, they can provide some long-term status much akin to the Thailand Elite Visa insofar as they are granted with five years validity on the actual visa sticker and they can have an ongoing validity for as long as 10 years per application.

I have had a lot of people asking me about this and yet again I am going to say what I have said sort of since the beginning when we started discussing these. Much like Smart Visas, this whole category is for a very small subset of people, it's really not an overly useful category for everybody. I have had a lot of people contact us about them. Now there are people that do qualify for it and for folks that do fit the qualifications it can be quite beneficial. However, there are upsides and downsides to it. I am ambivalent sort of personally and professionally on them. Not ambivalent, I guess it just is what it is. Some people can gain a benefit from it. Many people that see this and think that this is like some great work around for anything and everything they have ever wanted to do, oftentimes that is not the case and the way it has been sort of marketed if you will, it is sort of kind of everything to everyone. I get it, it's new, I am not trying to be overly cynical, it is just for every time we have been in correspondence with people come over the LTR, the vast majority of folks either don't fit the criteria or don't have the documentation if they at least in our experience say that they fit the criteria. So it's out there, it is an option. 

My opinion, a far better Visa in virtually all cases is probably just going to be some sort of standard Visa be that the standard Retirement Visa like the O Retirement Visa or for example like a standard Business Visa. As we have noted in other videos, the LTR does not actually put one onto the path to Permanent Residence either, true Permanent Residence which is very different from many of the standard Non-Immigrant categories which have sort of been the traditional visas utilized by the vast majority of people who stay in Thailand long-term. 

So the thing to take away from this video is yes, they remain out there again but much like the so-called Smart Visa there is going to be a narrow subset of people that will find them to be extremely useful. Short of that, there aren't a lot of people that are going to find the LTR overly useful because it is not a particularly broad Visa category; it is not really designed that way. It is designed, if you go back and we talked about this going in I think to April 2021, this was designed to be something to attract so-called wealthy foreigners, VIPs, digital nomads, whatever you want to call them that hit a certain with regard to financial ability. That's only going to be a narrow subset of people. So again the thing to take away from this video, you may fit into that narrow subset and that may be very beneficial to you but in a lot of cases that we are seeing, I just don't see where everybody is going to benefit from that, or a lot of people are going to benefit from that.