fountainhall wrote:If you do not have or are not permitted to have a Thai will, what is the process for the finances of a deceased to be transferred out of the country?
I would still recommend a Thai attorney and contact with your embassy, but if it helps anything I do have a story about precisely that.
A few years ago an American friend opened an account at a Thai bank. He intended to purchase a condo. Since he did not yet reside in Thailand, he asked that monthly statements be sent by regular mail. That was fine with the bank, but they would send the statements only to a Thai address.
That's where I came in. My friend asked if it would be ok to have the statements sent to my address, and then I could either mail them to him or scan them and send the copies to him by Email. That was fine with me and fine with the bank. He could have had online banking, but for whatever reasons he did not want online banking.
Unfortunately, while he was still in the USA, he died. His sister contacted me to ask if I had access to the money. She found his debit card, but had no idea what the code was. Neither did I and I had no access to the money. If she had the code, she could have withdrawn the money from any ATM in the USA. But without the code, now it was a major hassle.
What she discovered was in order to get the money, she would have to produce a death certificate and proof that she was the next of kin. She would have to personally go to Thailand and personally go to the bank to retrieve the money.
No problem about the death certificate, but I never did find out what would be involved in proving she was the next of kin. The money was not an amount substantial enough for her to make it worth it to make the trip to Thailand, so that was the end of it.
To this day I still receive the monthly bank statements. She's not interested in them and they're of no use to me, so I just take a look and then throw them out. Every so often the bank deducts a minor service charge from the account. I assume that once the service charges eventually empty the account, the statements will stop. I could have had the statements stop coming if I went to the bank and presented a death certificate, but I never asked her for one and she never sent one.