You can go to your home country, as that is the only place you can travel to on a short time passport. Thai immigration does not care where you go but out is strongly recommended.
For those that are within a year of your passport expiring, get your renewal started today. It is pretty useless with less than six months.
You can spend it after depositing it but it must be deposited each month, not just 12 times. It can be hard to meet the monthly transfers from the US without the embassy letter. Your IO has discretion on what they will accept. They would prefer the 800k in the bank.
Cool, glad to hear it. It was always a dumb feature. Now if I could get them to take my yellow book and forget about the TM30, we could get really efficient.
The deal with the STV is two 90 day extensions. You should be able to extend with the usual documents and 1900 baht. Make sure you do your TM47 and have your TM30.