I know of 4 folks already in the last 6 months who have had their company assets (house/land) seized for using shell/nominee companies to control the assets. The long-tolerated illegal workarounds seem to have come to an end, or at least it seems to be the beginning of the end.
Just play GTA for a few hours and then ask yourself if you can handle it in real life. If the answer is "no" then pat yourself on the back fir not being retarded.
Their life but I would not advise anyone, especially someone in retirement age, to live here if they don't even have a lousy 800k baht liquid. Shit can go south real quick here and money is the only thing that sometimes gets you out of it.
Print out some ad for a 30 million baht pool villa and set up a fake email pretending to be the seller and produce some purchase process correspondence between yourselves. Print, bring to bank, and they'll fall over themselves trying to give you an account. As an extra, the clerk might even wanna be your gf (until she realizes the only villa you'll ever buy is v-an-illa.