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Jayman, on 2012-03-13 00:51:31, said:
I wonder how this would effect those of us that are married to thais with children and own our primary residence that is obviously in the name of the Thai spouse. Certainly if all the paperwork was done and filed correctly then no laws were broken right? No intention to break or circumvent any laws either.
Last year they were saying this is no exception and that just because all the paperwork was filed correctly, laws may still have been broken if a spouse could not prove that she had the funds prior to purchase of the property. It was clearly pointed out that, married or not, if a Thai person used a foreigner's money to buy land on behalf of the foreigner, the transaction became illegal.
One way that this might be avoided could be for a foreigner to act as a lender and contract for a spouse to borrow the money from the foreigner to buy the property. This provides a transparent paper trail for how she made the purchase and apparently, there is no law prohibiting a Thai from borrowing money from a foreigner to purchase land and home. Of course, some sort of payment schedule would have to be in effect and the payments would have to be made but the lender could approve the contract so long as it was not obviously unrealistic.
One way to achieve a realistic contract may be to have quite low payments for 10 years or so and then have a balloon payment, or some other form of adjusted rate financing. Certainly the documents would have to pass muster. Being a lender to a spouse gets the foreigner on the title as lender and protects the property because if the contract and payments are not fulfilled by the spouse, the foreigner lender has the right to liquidate--although not own--the property in order to recover the invested financing.
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