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Another possibility is the internet service is noting use of utorrent and given such users have been recognized as heavy users, they get throttled back when such packets are identified on an ultra high speed service. This would not be service inadequacy per se. Many services do this all over the world. You can surf on this to investigate workarounds. eMule, perhaps. Or maybe some utorrent camouflaging plugin.

Shilo, I think there is a uTorrent based limit on downloads if the person is not doing original seeding. It may have nothing to do with your link. The utorrent people do this to get more content available.

At this particular point in time, there might be merit in addressing the question in two parts, rather than one. Rather than looking into "Is it a good idea to buy rental property in Pattaya?" maybe a different question might be better to ask, namely . . . "Will I know the answer to that question better one or two years from now?" Meaning, investment decisions always have three answers. Not two. It's not Yes or No. It's Yes, No and maybe later.

I missed this thread when it was more active. My only comment is to caution guys to greatly de-emphasize their personal experience with regard to inflation and more or less almost anything else. This is not the world we all grew up in and I think the odds are very poor that it will ever return to what it was. If the future is to be devastated by scarce oil, then there will be no economic growth anywhere in the world -- and oddly, despite the scarcity of oil, probably not much inflation. If that is what unfolds, then the focus should be on safety because crime will be rampant from the hundreds of thousands who can't find work. If money printing means a future filled with inflation, we have different problems to solve. My overall point is neither scenario looks anything like our lives to date. It's very hard to reach our ages and then face a need to reject all those years as experience of no value, but that's my read.

Continued excellent data. The problem with discussion like this on this board is that far too often it turns into "I don't do that, I do this! I do that!" And then there's argument about what the poster should or should not be doing and criticism of what makes him comfortable and it's more or less insane. This is an excellent presentation of what a 1000 pounds per month lifestyle looks like in Jomtien and it's valuable. I'll bet somewhere along the way someone is going to have an idea of how some specific something can be found cheaper elsewhere. That doesn't criticize a choice. That saves money, which is pretty much always a good thing. Let's also not forget there is no amortizing the visa cost or health care in this presentation, yet.

Stole your aftershave? Did you call the UK embassy? This is an act of war!

Very good data. 1000 pounds a month and then detail. Very good. Could you add just a bit about how much of a drinker you are? And how many girls a week. Not how much you spend but how many beers a night. That sort of thing. You can drink and grab women however much you like. I think it might be useful to know how much of that defines the 1000 pounds a month lifestyle. And one trip out of country in that six month period. Also very good data defining the lifestyle of 1000 pounds a month. Thanks.

There are many threads on search about this. They cover the subject extensively.

I'm not going to get into the argument of who gets good advice where. I am curious about an aspect of Thai real estate (condos). Namely, insurance. Anyone ever have a place burn down and make a successful claim? What are the Thai insurer ratings and regulatory processes that ensure the insurer isn't collecting premiums with no intent ever to cover claims?

If they already have it, then its cost is X per year and gets added to the rest of the cost of living per year. If they think they don't need it, then its cost is 0 + the amortized yearly average of all medical expenses they will ever have. Theoretically the first number will be greater than the second averaged among all the people, since the company makes a profit. Anyway, it would be nice to know the going rate for health care insurance for CM expats.

FYI, it's not the cold. Plenty of them in Alaska. It's wind. That's why fans work. There isn't much horsepower in a mosquito engine so when the wind speed is up to about 7 mph, they go to the ground and stay there. Wind blows, no mosquitos. Fan blows, ditto. Air con is cold, but it also has a blower.

Keeping an eye on this thread for the always elusive present price of healthcare insurance.

Do more than just your homework on this. Look past numbers that are quoted, because many are wishful thinking at best, and outright lies at worst. There is an enormous disconnect between sales and engineering. It's almost inconceivable that you could have enough surface area in panels to power air conditioning. The technology just is not there yet, and frankly, physics being what it is, it may never be there. Don't think in terms of payback. Think in terms of possible.

I will have to apologize to the UK BMs here. I was vaguely aware that there was a requirement that they buy annuities in some time window, but it slipped my mind and I spent all my time trashing the concept in general -- which derived from the US centric perspective. Let me grab out quotes from the comments above: That's from utip and I'm not going to say I disagree, but let's examine it closely. We're talking about M62's situation which can be summed up as age 58 and smokes like a chimney. No offense. :) Here's the thing. The magical 4% derives from history (which, in the end of the world scenario that is unfolding may NOT be particularly informative about the future) and it gets you 30 years of inflation adjusted money. An annuity is not going to outperform that if all the parameters are fairly compared. If you have been quoted 6+%, it's because . . . as you said . . . there's no indexing and they expect you to croak at 68. Inflation will affect it. The magic 4% number extracted from your lump sum if you DIY is indeed inflation adjusted and if you don't ask 30 years of it, you can get it up to 6 and 7 and 8% withdrawls from that approach. If you are going to croak in 10 years, clearly you can take about 10% out a year if there are no fees (see how they got down to 6% offered to you? Guess whose pocket the difference between 10% and 6% is going in? Right, Mr. Posh Insurance Executive's). But there I go again. This point is moot. You're required to buy a UK gov't approved annuity. So let's have a look at some math. Let's say you beat the smokers' odds and last to 78. This is not laughable and I hope you do, sir, and let's give medical science a nod that they may have a cure by the time you need it. But anyway, that's 20 years. Let's also assume your Gordon Brown is a genius and all the extra money getting printed around the world (and London) doesn't translate into anything more than 5% inflation per year. Here's how you crunch that number. 1.05 ^ 20. Simply that. 5% compounded 20 years will render your 7000 pounds per annum to be 7000/2.6 = 2638 pounds in 2009 pounds equivalents that you'll be funding life with at age 78. That isn't good. Don't be deluded by the bigger number on the annuity that is not inflation indexed. Inflation is lethal in a world running out of oil. I refuse to try anymore to persuade you Brits about your damn houses. You guys will cling to those things and try to get them buried with you. If you can't sell it at the moment, it's worth ZERO. Repeat, something that you CANNOT SELL is worth ZERO. Now, I know you meant that you would have to reduce the price to sell it. Well, there we have it sports fans, it's worth whatever price you have to reduce it to for sale. Done. Oh, and put me in the utip column of encouraging you to tell them you are are a race car driver that smokes and skydives 3X a week while taking insulin for diabetes and reporting for the BBC from the Gaza Strip. Good luck, guy.

No reason to destroy your post. You have offered superb input for this topic and it's a topic that can be valuable for the guys on this board. I try to keep in mind on this board that there are many UK folks reading, so this topic can be examined in a non-US centric way. I also think in terms of many BMs having spent their lives supporting a family by welding or doing machine tooling or other blue collar work that did not require them to do sums in their brains every day. They could be reading this. These guys didn't sit on their asses on the dole their whole lives. They went out and worked. There's no reason they should not have a chance at a retirement. So here's the thing, broadly. It's not good news. A huge proportion of BMs would like desperately to find a way to put their money somewhere, get a good return that will fund their TGs and themselves for the rest of their lives and not have to ever look at that money or worry about it. They would love a hands-off vehicle that is lucrative forever on autopilot. It doesn't exist. It never has. It never will. Annuity salesmen will sell their product with that teaser, but it's a lie. For the ex-welders reading . . . an annuity is sold and described and has to some extent the nature of a pension. In effect, you buy your pension. You hand YYYYYYY dollars of money to the annuity company and they promise to pay you XXXX pounds sterling or dollars per month for the rest of your life. The amount of XXXX depends on how much YYYYYYY you give them. That's how they compute their scam. XXXX vs YYYYYYY will derive from market rates as they are, predicted market rates as the annuity company predicts them, inflation as the annuity company predicts it, and your life expectancy as the annuity company predicts it. They pay you for the rest of your life. If you die early, they keep what's "remaining". If you die late, they lose money (which they take from those guys that died early and lose nothing on balance). So it's one of very few places in society that if you tell them you're a smoker, you get more money paid out. You can also get XXXX pounds or dollars per month indexed to inflation by adjusting severely how much YYYYYYYY you give them up front. This is another maneuver available to them to increase their own profit (and bonuses). utip above correctly points out that the pooling of all the annuity buyers enables them to pay the guys who die late. The later mortals don't "run out of money". The annuity company covers the ongoing payments with the money left over from those who died early. That's the basis of the whole scheme. The risk? The company uses a prediction of market rates and inflation rates for computing payouts (and their own profits). If they are wrong, they go bankrupt. If they go bankrupt, technically they take your money with them and it's gone. In practice there is risk management by that company having what we'll call bankruptcy insurance or better yet . . . the US or UK governments willing to step in and cover losses. But . . . . sometimes, that loss coverage is not total. In the US (and probably in the UK) there are annuity protection laws that step in and take over in such a situation -- but they don't cover your monthly payment 100%, and if you had inflation protection it will be gone. Also from utip: >> These mortality credits along with the insurance companies ability to invest this money allow someone purchasing a lump sum immediate annuity to recieve a higher lifetime income stream than using a sustainable withdrawl rate from an investment account even after the annuity costs. >> I disagree. The definition of sustainable withdrawl rate (the magical 4% number) has average life expectancy built into it for a 30 year withdrawl period at 95% confidence. Lumping of early death and late death guys together doesn't affect how much that company can pay in an annuity. Early and late death factors balance. The annuity company can increase their payout with a simple wave of the hand at their internal predicted market rate numbers. If they increase those, they can say they can pay out more. Or the markets of today could have an uptick and provide them illusory mathematical justification to do the same thing (and presumably grab customers from their competitors). The basic point is they do nothing you can't do yourself, and they pay themselves an enormous amount of profit in their XXXXX to YYYYYYYYY ratio. Every penny of that comes off your XXXXXX. If you do it yourself, you keep that profit -- or your heirs do. utip suggested the mechanism for "doing it yourself". Mix together short term bonds, total stock market index funds (what's the UK equivalent name?) and money market funds. And hope the world doesn't end. Because . . . guys . . . if the world unravels, it will be very hard to find a place to hide. Gilts, US Treasuries . . . shrug. The worst case scenario is guns and farmland as the only assets of value. Let's hope we don't get to that stage.