As far as I know, the cheapest out/in flight is to go to Vietnam either Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) or DaNang. I've seen flights as cheap as $40USD each way so it's super cheap and you could even stay a night or 2 to check it out if u want. As for 5500b for a 30 day extension?? - you should just go to immigration in Jomptien and do it yourself for 1900b. The agency right next to the lineup area will fill out the forms for you and give you the proper pics and their help only costs a few hundred baht So add on Bolt taxi cost, and it comes in less than half of what you're paying and it's one of your basic Thailand experiences. Just make sure you arrive before they open to get agency help right away and get in line so you're done in just an hour or 2.
Gvoice is a great backup option regardless. It's free, accepts text, calls and VM. It also forwards texts to email and even transcribed VM to email. And it works around the world for voice calls on wifi (call quality is not the best though but for free it's great).
Only reason some institutions won't be successful with using it for 2FA is because there's so much fraud and they're tightening their security.
Hopefully that fee covers you for a full year. Typical agent fee to handle everything needed for a retirement visa (incl not having to lock up 800k baht in bank) is 35k-42k. The one year actually ends up being 15 mos and it's done when you're already in Thailand.
What's hilarious is that although VPNs are used to protect oneself while traveling, many financial websites are now detecting when a VPN is being used and block access...."for your safety". 🤯
Confused. When I had my retirement visa, it did not have the multi entry stamp so my agent had it added (after I rec'd it). I thought this was added onto the retirement visa during processing (or afterwards) for an extra fee?