Clear the gate — and count what it costs to

The money that has to sit still

Every retirement-visa guide tells you the financial floor. None of them price the floor itself — the capital you park to satisfy it, which earns the local deposit rate and loses to local inflation every year it cannot be touched. Check whether you clear the gate, then watch what the locked money quietly costs while it sits there.

The base case — ฿800,000, Thailand, 10 years

Interactive results need JavaScript; the base case is shown below. At the Thai extension floor of ฿800,000, a 60-year-old with ฿800,000 parked qualifies by the bank method with ฿0 to spare. The deposit must be seasoned before and held after the application; it is not spendable in that window.

What the locked floor costs	Over 10 years
Idle real loss (2% inflation, 0.263% savings)	฿126,200
Account-choice cost (savings vs 12-mo fixed)	฿19,840
Real value returned at unlock	฿673,800

The deposit comes back in full. The ฿126,200 of purchasing power it lost while it sat still does not. The O-A visa route additionally requires health cover of at least US$100,000 including COVID-19 (MFA / Ministry of Public Health); the in-country Non-O retirement extension carries no statutory insurance mandate.

Model only — the floors are quoted as published and dated, never interpreted into a recommendation. Read the pieces behind each figure:

Methodology & sources — the short version

Half A checks your capital and income against the published floor for the route. Half B prices the locked deposit: idle real loss = capital × [(1+inflation)ᵗ − (1+yield)ᵗ] / (1+inflation)ᵗ — the purchasing power the parked sum loses net of what it earns. The account-choice cost is the interest foregone by holding the savings account rather than the 12-month fixed over the lock.

Dated anchors — the floors are published figures; the yields and inflation are editable:

Thai extension floor ฿800,000 (bank method), 65,000 THB/month income alternative, or the combination — from the th-retirement-visa-threshold ledger (Royal Thai Embassy / Immigration order line). The O-A visa route additionally requires health cover of at least US$100,000 including COVID-19 (MFA / Ministry of Public Health guideline; new applications from 2021-10-01, applied to renewals from 2022-09-01). The plain in-country Non-O retirement extension carries no statutory insurance mandate — verify current terms for your own route.
SRRV Classic deposit tiers (50+): pensioner US$15,000, non-pensioner US$30,000; (40–49): US$25,000 / US$50,000. Pensioner route needs a monthly pension of at least US$800 (single). From the ph-srrv-deposit-threshold ledger.
Thai deposit rates (last full year, 2022): big-four savings 0.263% , 12-month fixed 0.511% — from the two deposit-rate ledgers. The PH deposit yield has no ledger and is an editable illustrative default, not a sourced figure.
Context: 126,654 people held the Thai retirement-track visa in 2023.

The full trace is in this site's source file for this tool (content/data/visa-floor.yml); the ledgers are open data under /data.