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The Whole Package: Thai Taxes

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing another segment in our series, the Whole Package. 

I made this series as a more holistic approach to dealing with trying to immigrate into Thailand, trying to get roots here in Thailand, operate a business, have a home, maybe perhaps get Permanent Residence, maybe perhaps get citizenship one day; basically just sort of a holistic approach rather than, I tend to do videos which are much more sort of task oriented or specific to a given narrow subject. This is kind of a bigger picture. 

A question that comes up a lot in this context or I should say maybe a statement that gets made is "well I want to do all of that but I want to try to minimize as much Thai tax as I can". That is certainly fine and legally trying to minimize one's tax exposure is oftentimes a good idea but I would say that from a big picture perspective, especially if you are looking to gain residence in Thailand or even possibly citizenship or just be here long term and just have a more pleasant life, worrying constantly about tax exposure is probably the wrong paradigm to have. It is probably a better idea to maybe worry more about meeting certain legal formalities to get you on to the next phase of what you are dealing with in Thailand, for example getting your company set up to get your work permit; or getting your housing situation in order; or perhaps if it is Permanent Residence, going ahead and getting a filing, an application perfected.

If you want to immigrate into Thailand you are going to have to deal with a certain level of taxation. There is no real way around that. Now again there are legal ways to avoid overly exposing oneself to too much tax liability that one doesn't necessarily need to do and be legal in essentially sort of, not circumventing but just basically dealing with it in such a way that you are only paying a reasonable amount of tax. But to try and think about it from the standpoint of trying to for example "pay no tax", that is a bad way to look at it.