I have quite a few friends that live here in Da Nang and quite a few people I know that pop in and out. Vietnam is a relatively easy country to get visas for and the process is rather no nonsense. They don't seem to really have a problem with you getting basically infinite amounts of visas over and over again even if they are consecutive and many years in total.
I don't know about all the countries in the world, but I know a fair bit about Thailand and they seem to take great issue with people getting tourist visas over and over and over again and even had a policy at one point (that was quickly reversed) that you can't spend more than 180 days in the country in a year's time. They abandoned this program after realizing that it was going to take a long time for the immigration officials to do calendar math at the desk.
Anyway, this isn't about Thailand, this is about Vietnam, where I have just extended my long-term visa for the 2nd year without a hitch.
There are not many options for long-term visas in Vietnam, and the only ones that I am aware of are marriage visas, work-visas, and investment-visas.
marriage visas and work visas are well, something you probably encounter by chance by falling in love (or pretending do and arranging a fake marriage with a willing co-conspirator) or by having a genuine job, of which, unfortunately, there are very few of in this country. The investment visa is the easiest one to get but I'm here to tell you that this is not going to be for everyone because there is a substantial amount of money that you have to put into it to be considered.
The minimums change but when I got involved it was necessary to have $20,000 genuinely invested in the company or corporation that you are getting involved with. Therefore, this is not something that just everyone can do.
I do know a few people that are retired and there wasn't really any other option to be retired and live in Vietnam outside of doing visa runs every 90 days and at least to me, that isn't much of an actual retirement at all. So many of those people just pony up the cash and get a retirement visa. The way I look at it is that if you don't have 20 grand in the bank, can you really consider yourself retired anyway?
Moving away from the requirements, which I have already established pretty well in the past, lets get to the part where the law is kind of grey and it ended up working out in my favor recently.
As you can see here, the length of time on visas is from 1-10 years. With 10 years being awarded only for the highest level of capital investment. VND 100 billion is no joke as that is nearly $4 million. People looking to invest this amount of money can probably gain long-term access to any country in the world so this is nothing special. The part we will focus on is the less than VND 3 billion, which is the category that I fall into.
Because I hired an agent for this process I had insider information to know exactly what sort of information the gatekeeper with the approval stamp is looking for and it was approved. I got a 1-year visa shortly thereafter and all the while the agent kept promising me that if it doesn't go through, I will pay nothing.
Well it did go through and not long after I had a 1-year multiple-entry visa. This was a very nice feeling to have this because so few people do. I am sick of visa runs and am willing to pay for the convenience of not needing to do so.
I was a little concerned because according to the legal website that I took the above graph from, the maximum that you can get is 12 months for an investment of the magnitude that I made so when I went to go and get it renewed just a few weeks ago, I was worried. My agent wasn't worried though, and I guess that is more important.
I do not know what happened behind the scenes but he came back with a new 1-year visa for me which means I am now on my 2nd year with less than VND 3 billion investment. So I know first-hand that it definitely can be done.
I have been assured time and time again that I am not breaking the law here and this is important to me. I don't wish to be gaming the system, I want to be playing by the rules when it comes to visas.
So for people out there that are getting fed up with making visa runs over and over every 1-3 months just know that there is another choice, you just have to make the commitment to actually invest a sizable amount of money into an actual company.
Ignore any agent that says they can "fake" the investment for an additional fee. Not long ago the government cracked down on this sort of scam and there were very harsh penalties, including long-term visa blacklists for anyone that was involved in them.