The step-by-step plan for Thailand

This is the point where Thailand differs fundamentally from every EU destination on this site, and from most visa countries. You don't get a residence permit here that runs until you cancel it. You get permission to stay, for a fixed period, and that permission you as a rule apply for anew every year at the immigration office of your province.

There's no route to permanent residence that's realistic for most pensioners, and there's no automatic build-up towards citizenship. Whoever has lived here for twenty years has applied for an extension twenty times.

That sounds heavier than it is in practice — the extension is routine if your papers are right — but it does decide how you have to approach this journey: not as a move with an end point, but as an annual cycle you have to keep up with.

Three routes matter for Dutch pensioners, and they differ mainly in where you have to have the money and how often you have to go back to the counter.

The O-A you apply for from the Netherlands, from age fifty. The O-X is the ten-year variant with a much heavier money requirement. And the Non-O with annual extension is the route most people end up taking, because it's arranged within Thailand and asks for fewer papers — but then the immigration office of your province decides, and those differ noticeably in what they demand.

If you're still working, the picture is different: then you need an employer who applies for a work permit, or you look at the LTR visa for whoever meets the income or investment thresholds. Choose this route before you do anything else — it decides your whole planning.

Life in Thailand is cheaper than in the Netherlands — that's true, and it's the reason people come. But the costs of the journey sit in places you don't expect: the health insurance you from now on buy yourself and which rises steeply with your age, the 800,000 baht that is locked and so makes no return, the flights and the sea freight, and the annual extension with everything around it. Work it out with your own choices.

Of all the steps in this journey this is the one people misjudge later, so it stands here at the front instead of with the closing.

Within the EU you slide into the local healthcare system with an S1. To Thailand that route doesn't exist. Your Dutch basic insurance stops on deregistration, there's no treaty, and from now on you buy an international or Thai policy yourself. Thai private healthcare is excellent and much cheaper than the Dutch — but the premium rises with your age, existing conditions are often excluded, and above a certain age insurers simply no longer take you on as a new customer.

So request quotes now, also for ten and twenty years from now, and discuss honestly what you'll do if a policy is cancelled or becomes unaffordable. This is the question that decides whether Thailand is sustainable for you.

Besides healthcare, three things deserve an honest conversation. The language and the script: Thai has an alphabet of its own and is a tonal language, and outside the expat towns and healthcare, English is limited. The status: you remain a guest, even after twenty years — you can't own land, you vote nowhere, and your residence hangs on an annual decision. And the distance: eleven hours' flying, and in the event of family circumstances in the Netherlands you're not home tomorrow. Also discuss what happens if one of the two of you wants to go back.

Choose below the date on which you want to be in Thailand. The step-by-step plan works out whether that's feasible and from that moment guards the clocks of this journey: the months your money has to sit in a Thai account before an extension, the ninety days between two reports, the validity of your re-entry permit and the 180 days that make you a tax resident.