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Thai Visas: Issues with Joint Bank Accounts

 Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai visas and joint banking facilities. 

In a recent letter that was sent to the Bangkok Post and this is in the print edition December 19, 2020. The letter is titled: Immigration Games and it was apparently sent from someone called Farangs Anonymous. Quoting directly from one segment it says: "Why does Immigration demand that joint spousal bank accounts hold 800,000 Baht instead of the publicly stated 400,000 Baht? Is it because Thais do not trust their spouses when it comes to finances and have separate accounts? I have seen this in virtually every Thai family I know whereas westerners trust their spouses in virtually every case and have joint accounts." 

Well I don't really think this has anything to do with spousal trust. This is an Immigration policy. So what we are talking about here is O Marriage Visas. In order for one to be able to extend their O Marriage Visa status, 1) They need to be married to a Thai National and 2) They need to be able to show a bank account with a balance of at least 400,000 Baht or income coming into a Thai bank account, generally speaking into a Thai bank account as that is easiest to prove, of 40,000 Baht or more. So the question here is "Well if I have a joint bank account with my spouse like a household account, and it has 400,000 Baht why isn't that sufficient? Well long story short it comes down to the presumption under Thai law that any jointly held property is basically 50/50 between the two parties to that marriage. So in point of fact the best that an Immigration Officer could presume legally speaking with respect to the amount of money in a Thai bank account of 400,000 Baht, is that half of that money is the foreigner's because if they are married, the way the Thai Law treats marital estates, and I don't want to get into all this and I have run this past our Thai lawyers here just to make sure I am not completely talking off the reservation, but 400,000 Baht would be presumed that half of that is the husband's. That is the best presumption you can get the way that the legal framework, the legal paradigm works with respect to the marital estate. So you would have to show 800,000 Baht in a joint account to get the presumption that 400,000 of that is the husband's and therefore meet the requirement for the O Visa extension. 

Yeah, I understand this can be a frustrating thing and it seems like kind of a pedantic fine point but when you see it in the broader context of the way that the marital estate rules work here in Thailand, it actually makes, in my opinion, a lot of sense. 

Those who are looking to get an O Marriage Visa extension and have joint bank accounts you need to be aware that you need to be able to show at least 800,000 Baht as opposed to 400,000 Baht so that you can meet this presumption of half of that being the foreigner's money.