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Yup. No question. Tht $50K from the millionaire will likely have some tax on it. That tax can be considered an addition to your cost of living. Social Security gets special tax treatment and that would be one of the personal revenue streams about which to know the details. I don't know how it would be taxed if overseas and with only passive income. On my list of things to investigate. Another issue for Americans is medicare will kick in at age 65 and subsidize your medical costs, but as of now medicare won't send money outside the US. Another thread addresses another issue if you're American. State income tax. Even if you leave the US, your last state of residence is entitled to tax your passive income. If you don't file there and refuse to pay, they can confiscate assets and have you arrested as a tax evader. You have to move to a zero state income tax locale like TX, FL, NV, WY, WA, AK, SD or NH before you jump to Thailand.

Not gonna do dueling credentials. Here's a website where the Trinity Study is referenced. It first appeared from Trinity University at AAII about 8 yrs ago as I recall. AAII has, of course, moved it to their membership area. You may be able to find the raw study somewhere online. I didn't look very long. It is so widely referenced that the variations on it tend to be more focused upon than the original. I don't know if the AAII site requires any money to register, but if not and you do register, you can find it there. www.zunna.com I don't know who Zunna.com is, but most folks in the equity markets know who the American Association of Individual Investors is. If you search around Morningstar.com's website you'll find many references to Trinity and their work on sustainable withdrawal rates in retirement. There are many additions to the study that various academics have prepared to explore modifications to the asset allocation in the original work. An automated website based on the work is fireseeker.com's excellent firecalc applet, reviewed favorably by the WSJ. It is based on the Trinity methodology of 130 years worth of real world, non-monte carlo emulation and it provides many options for adding or subtracting personal revenue streams at various points in time during a retirement. Lots of options for use of TIPS, Commercial Paper of varying maturity of government bonds for the non equity portion of asset allocation. Enjoy.

Sam, thanks for your input and I did note your credentials at the end of your post, but I think you've neglected an issue here. Namely, the years when you don't earn 4 or 5% on your money. Some years you lose money, be it in stocks or government bonds. LT government bonds fluctuate in price just like stocks. The annuities you mention are computed by Prudential or JP Morgan to address the realities of the Trinity Study. They aren't the pure drawdown you are describing. That having been said, your paragraph above should inform BMs of the mechanism. Your lump sum supplies (on average, some years it loses) some percent return, but in addition to that you get to draw down the asset total with the intent being to hit either zero on the day of death, or some level above zero that you want to pass on as inheritance. So 5% return on 1 mill does provide someone more than 50K if they are drawing down principal, and thinking purely in terms of fixed returns. The Trinity Study showed how 4-5% is the right number to use, with an inflationary pay bump each year, to achieve good statistical probability of money survival over 30 years, using history as a guide to knowing how many years had negative returns on the portfolio and how many had positive returns. If you google Trinity and retirement, you'll find it pretty easily. But seriously, thanks for the above paragraph. It does lay out the drawdown concept well. The closer you are to death, the more money you get to spend each year.

Let me start out by saying . . . Eneukman is The Man. He posts superb cost of living data and he understands the idea of over/under budgeted amounts. Note from his data the following (and Eneukman, clarify if I get this wrong): 1) I see 27000 baht spent last month at bars for beer and women. That is the predominant expenditure of his life. He seperates the beer and women in his description, and maybe that makes sense if he drinks some nights he doesn't barfine. That may not be the norm for other guys. I don't know. But combined . . . bars are the predominant expenditure for him. Even more than rent. I do suspect this will be true for everyone -- unless they follow another BM's advice about getting a list of mobile numbers of TGs to just call to come over and P4P. That might cut this cost in half, though the whole bar scene may be fun and missed. 2) An apology in advance for possibly an invasion of privacy, and ignore this if you like Eneukman, but you mentioned blood pressure pills and listed an in-patient only health insurance plan. What are your monthly meds bills? This has no bearing on other people other than the fact that medical costs are the primary focus of many retirement discussions outside LOS and the degree to which that is truly NOT true in LOS may be important. So I guess I'm asking are meds cheaper there? 3) Note this guy has a 1 bdrm condo at View Talay. NOT a studio. That 20K is not the barebones configuration. He bought himself some comfort. 4) Are your Thai lessons anywhere in this total? 5) I see all bahtbus for transport. Any occasion to pay for any other kind of transport off the bahtbus routes? Great data, guy. This was a $2000 month for you and you had more fun than the rest of us in farangland.

The 4% rule is statistical. What was done was 130 years of data were gathered and broken up into 30 yr periods. An assumption of 50/50 asset mix was made of stocks shares and bonds. It was found that if someone yanked 4% of their assets out in year 1 of retirement, with each successive year having an inflationary "pay raise" applied, then 100% of the 30 year periods did not run out of money. If 5% was yanked out, about 90% of the 30 yr periods did not run out of money. This means a millionaire only gets to spend $50K per year. The determining factor in a successful 30 yr period vs unsuccessful is if the year you retire the markets decline sharply and kill off your assets before they have a chance to grow further. If this happens, your yearly expense withdrawl will erase your total before you die. If the markets are flat or up the first few years of retirement, then you'll be in the 90% of 30 yr periods that didn't run out. Note that this study did NOT factor in the appearance of some kind of Social Security beneft at age 66 or 67 or whatever -- and a decline in expenditures due to Medicare kicking in and reducing your medical expenses. Right now, at this point in time, the thing that makes this calculation difficult is probably most retirees are getting pensions -- even in their 50's. They are not relying strictly on their own assets for income. There is significant danger in this given recent erasures of pension plans and stealth erasures like cutting the yearly inflationary increase, but regardless of this, pensions are funding most current retirees. It is assets that will fund most future retirees as pensions become a thing of the past. As for 12 yrs before you can touch your 401K or IRAs, well, that's what assets outside retirement vehicles are for. YOu spend them first, do a small yearly conversion of traditional IRA to Roth (keeping the amount convereted low enough to avoid taxes), and when you reach 59.5, start drawing on retirement vehicles.

Maybe. OTOH, the problem is not Pattaya's alone. Lots of folks everywhere are trying to figure out what lifestyle they want in retirement. The world's demographics is making this a very popular concern right now. Meaning . . . it's a two step process. Figuring out what lifestyle you want and then stumbling onto what someone else who is living that lifestyle in Pattaya is spending to achieve it. This sort of gets in the way of pricing out individual parts of the lifestyle. Some part that is more expensive than expected can be easily jettisoned if the lifestyle choice wasn't certain to begin with. Anyway, one thing at a time. We need yearly data, not monthly.

Worth noting here that condo price, however hard it is for you to raise the money, is not money "spent". The money doesn't disappear. You're not drinking $30,000 and it is gone down the toilet. It is just a translation of form. The money stops being numbers in your bank account and starts being walls and floors. Whenever you want, with some hassle and commission (friction) in the process, you can always convert the money back into numbers in your bank account. The goal, in addition to picking a place comfortable, is to pick a place that increases those numbers such that commissions and hassle are more than paid for.

They are beneficial, but now it's been done. Here's my want-to-have. I want to know what people in various age groups and levels of . . . life spend to achieve those different levels of lifestyle. We all have our own desired lifestyle. Each person that posts what they spent does indeed fill in a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, but what is now happening is a lot of guys are filling in the same piece already filled. I recall being curious about how much travel guys were doing in their quoted budget. I was thinking in terms of 3 day weekends to Singapore or Hong Kong. When I asked what travel was in various budgets, the reply is to describe where they went in Thailand. This is good, solid, data, but we already had it because many guys talk about going to and fro within Thailand. A byproduct of this is asking questions like "How many vacations do you take a year?" and getting the reply, I'm on vacation all the time. This is true, of course, but it isn't answering the question asked in that the word itself "vacation" is being interpreted differently by different people. Maybe there's no way to accelerate this process. We just have to keep reading these threads until someone who is pursuing a lifestyle that sounds like what I wants posts the desired data. Oh, one other want-to-have, and this is important. Way too many posts are now reporting just 1 month of expenses. I know the guys are rational and trying to be helpful and make an assessment of how typical that month was, but it's a year that matters to someone contemplating relocation, not a month.

Well, maybe you guys are right and we are adding some tidbits to the body of board knowledge with each thread. Which would explain why we talk about searching for other threads but still hang out on each new one.

The theory is any infection would be new and the viral load of HIV would be light in your system. Taking the drug cocktail at that point could kill it all. It would be a true cure. You might never become HIV+ because the viral total could be erased and antibodies to the virus (it is the presence of these antibodies that is tested for and defines "HIV+") might never appear. The problem with the recommendation not being a slam dunk obvious thing is that the odds of infection are low to begin with and the drugs have some possible side effects. It is not clear that the statistics balance compels taking the drugs. The low probability of side effects could outweight the odds of being infected. This is not a political or religious thing at all. It's statistics.

There is just something about this topic that refuses to stop. Somehow there has to be some kind of consolidation. But referring to Eneukman's quote above . . . I'm coming to believe that this defines a lot about why this topic keeps arising. We really REALLY need to define categories of retirement. I'll offer 3: 1) The desire for available women has led men to Pattaya. The prices are low. They are willing to sacrifice various things in life to be in Pattaya. They will live an absolute barebones existance just to be in Pattaya. This category of existance . . . for 20 years perhaps, costs XXXX baht per month in 2005 and inflation is totally unestimated. 2) Perhaps this is Eneukman's category. He wants a comfortable life, spends what he needs to spend for comfort and pays attention to outflow. Meaning, he budgets, but it is a comfortable budget. This category is XXXX baht per month in 2005 and Eneukman has spoken on this subject before so I know he has some sort of estimate of future inflation for whatever number of years he wants in Pattaya. 3) This category of person wants a life of relative luxury. Pattaya's weather, expense and women bring luxury within reach rather than mere comfort. This category of person may have only a winter residence in Pattaya and is elsewhere for part of the year. This person expects to spend XXXXX baht per month and has an estimate for future inflation built into his projections. Given those 3 categories, however, an absolutely critical factor that can move the numbers for each a great deal is simply how much drinking and barfining is intended at beer bars and Go Gos. I think someone estimated 2000 baht for a night of socializing, LDing, bar fining and LT. That would be a mid scale beer bar TG. Well guys, multiply that by 30 and you're down 60K baht for the month before all your other numbers arrive. So category 1, 2 or 3 can be nudged a lot depending on the individual guy's sexdrive. The point is . . . can someone go get a girl whenever he WANTS one. If he wants one every other day, the 60K becomes 30K. If every third day then 20K. The point being that one's wants would, in a perfect Pattaya semi-retirement, define this frequency. Not one's budget.

My 2 cents worth. Upper respiratory infections are usually viral. Strep is worrisome, but the majority are viral. The question of transmission vector has been debated forever. Two classic studies yielded slightly different results, but the truth evolved from both. In one study a person with a cold was put in a room with 10 other people and they stayed there talking for 1.5 hrs. The person with the cold was coughing and sneezing. Of the 10, two got a cold within the next 2 weeks. In another study, a person with a cold was put in a room with 10 other people. They stayed there 1.5 hours playing cards. No other change to the experiment was done. Simply, card playing was substituted for conversation. Seven of the 10 caught the cold. Sneezing is an obvious issue, but most infections are through physical contact with infected surfaces. So . . . to cut down on your headcolds, do two things. When you need to scratch or touch your face, get in the habit of doing so with the back of your hand, not the palm. The palm has lots of bugs on it. The back of your hand doesn't. If your nose itches, scratch it with the back of your hand. The second thing is use your left hand to open doors. It will fit around a knob differently than most who grab it and this will reduce germ pickup.

Guys, There just has to be a better way to do this. Here's a suggestion: Forget Pattaya specifics. Add up the things you want to spend on that are not subject to variability depending on what lifestyle you want in Pattaya. Start with healthcare expense. There are threads on this. BUPA is widely talked of. Pick a plan and that's your health care number. Now increase that number by about 9%/yr. That's right, this exercise in "what does it cost to live in Pattaya" should be a 5 yr estimate, minimum. Not one or two months. If it were one or two months you would use the word "visit", not "live". Next is transportation. I see debates here on the board. My read on this is that the question is not one of quality of lifestyle. Buying a motorbike or using biketaxis all the time may not be more extravagant than walking or bahtbus. The reason is it is so dangerous. The bahtbus is conceivably the pinnacle of transport lifestyle in Pattaya. I kind of suspect a typical day of getting about on the bahtbus will be well south of 100 baht. Ramp up a year's transport by 3% per year. Next is food. People eat what they want. They don't eat what is luxurious. Luxury in food happens once in a while. Not every day. Make your guess on this but this total looks south of 300 baht to me. Ramp up a year's food by 3% per year. Anyway, that's my suggestion. Do all your living expense estimates over 5 years and do housing last. I suspect you will find it is not the #1 expenditure in your budget in Pattaya -- at least not if you want to travel or chase women a great deal.

Added tidbit about US to BKK via SIN. I've done this twice now, once on SQ and once on NWA. Both flights arrive at SIN at 12 midnight local. There are BMs who quote different schedules that arrive in the daytime, but this is what I've experienced twice. Heads up. If you're doing this, and taking an Asian LCC north to BKK from SIN, use the Transit Hotel at Changi Airport. It is excellent. After 20 hrs in the air, you can get a shower and about 5 hrs sleep before getting up for your LCC flight north. $35 US. Great deal.

JohnnyK is right. I'm not a multi year board member, but despite the brevity of my membership I've seen perhaps 3 good threads on this subject. None of them seem to answer the question. What you will see on the threads is lots of talk about what it cost each individual poster to live in Pattaya. Soi7 has a good quote on this . . . something to the effect that "one can live on (insert small number here), but that's not the question. The question is can YOU live on that small amount." That's what I have a hard time deducing from the threads. No one person is likely to want to live your particular desired lifestyle so it's difficult to extract information from multiple posts that describe particular expenditures for particular things that sound "right" to your preferences. In general, it appears there are two truths that are universal among BMs: 1) It can and likely will be much less expensive to live in Pattaya than in Farangland at the same level of lifestyle. 2) Item 1 will not be true if you try to go drinking and woman chasing every night of your life.

FYI tetanus is interesting. For a time the UK and US did not have equivalent immunization schedules for tetanus. The reason for this is it is not 100% clear that a sequence at childhood with a final booster at 18 is not good for a lifetime. I think the UK took that position and the US wanted 10 yr boosters. There is a study of nursing home residents who got tetanus vs those who had vulnerable wounds and did not. Those who did not get it had a common denominator of having been in the military. Military folks get a mandatory booster. They'd left the military in after one term in their early 20's and gotten no more shots, but clearly that one had protected them. The reason the US wants periodic boosters is some other study measured levels of immunity and found they did drop after 10 yrs. Shrug.

Good input, guys. Thanx. Well, if there are a lot of empty condos, this is not encouraging at first glance. At second glance it can be. We all got our opinions, and mine is going to be less qualified than the guys already living there, but I do have some semi macroeconomic thoughts that are in play as part of the choice. 1) The new airport. 2) The aging of the population in the West. 3) Divorce prevalence. 4) 2&3 combine to create lots of single, middle aged men. 5) China's oil infrastructure has created a bottle neck. This will hit the news in about 3 months. Their growth rate this year stopped spiking. Economic growth requires growth in oil consumption and they don't have the roads or tanker trucks to get fuel to the factories inland from the coast. It is slowing their growth rate. This has nudged up their labor costs. Thailand is now competitive in labor price with them. 6) Thailand's history as a staunch US ally will serve it well as Muslim pressures from Indonesia and Malaysia reduce their attractiveness to US semiconductor firms. Anyway, that's what's in my crystal ball. We'll see. The rent for a while thing makes a ton of sense as long as word doesn't emerge that all those empty condos are filling up. I will pop back over there in a few months and look around some more.

Interesting. But of course this means demand remains unchanged but supply cannot increase because nothing can be built with water in it. This would make current existing condos even more in demand because new ones can't be built. I heard there were water problems there that were resolved by weather I guess. This problem, btw, would limit all growth of the city itself. Hard to see how the real estate industry allows it to persist.

Well, that sux. I'll offer up an inadequate tidbit of advice, and I stress inadequate. I've spent a career of business trips accumulating about a million frequent flyer miles and acquainting my back with every hotel bed style known to man. I learned one Road Warrior trick a long time ago. You can effectively add a "virtual" $75/night to the price of a hotel room by investing $1.25 in a pair of foam rubber ear plugs. The suckers do work. They will take all noise down about 25 db and you will sleep just fine when you didn't think it was possible. I suspect your issues are not at night, but so it goes. It's good input. Thanks. My current home in the states has an acre of land around it so I don't have any noise problems, but I paid my dues living in apartments when I was younger so I know what you're talking about. We'll see.

Interesting. You're not the first to say it, either. I don't have cast iron plans. My net worth is just about to the substantial level where I may choose to early retire. I can envision Pattaya/Jomtien as one of 2 or 3 residences around the world -- perhaps seasonal. I am interested in your comment about the noise. I would not expect that as far south as Jomtien but I don't spend the time there that expats do so I would not know. I do believe condos and real estate near the beach in that area are destined for growth, and given that owning a residence there, in that context, costs nothing at all the temptation is clear. One sells it when one is done with it and living there cost nothing in housing. The risk is, of course, govt confiscation but that kind of risk exists everywhere outside the US or UK. The plusses are: 1) the place is very cheap. When one chooses to early retire one takes a risk that healthcare inflation or energy inflation or any of lots of things could go wrong to define the amount of money you thought to be "enough" to be "way too little". If any of those things happens and it runs out before you die it creates some rather miserable final years. A very cheap place to live several months per year reduces that threat. 2) The place is warm all the time. I am tired of the cold. 3) The women are hyper available. 4) I have a passion for travel. There are many places worth seeing at very low air travel prices from BKK with almost no jetlag to endure. 5) I like water views. It is relaxing. The negatives: 1) Lots of unknowns. I'm dealing with those incrementally. 2) Possible boredom. I have a strong suspicion this will derive from "retirement" and not from "retirement near Pattaya". 3) A sense of losing touch with "home". I envision myself consulting in my current industry now and then during retirement -- as part of the issue above of perpetual doubts about "enough" vs "far too little". Consulting can be done through the net, but every required meeting will include 25 hrs of enroute time. I would hope only twice a year. Anyway, the good news is one can apparently extract money from Thailand that is invested in a condo. This guarantees the first item under plusses.

Not sure. They were marketing it as ocean view this and ocean view that. And I thnk they are building in Jomtien. Is that the place? When I was in Pattaya in late Nov the presentation was elaborate in the RG mall. It may still be there. Dunno. I sensed white collar very upscale scam -- meaning not that they steal your money but that they take your deposit, hold it, wait to accumulate more and build the place eventually, but possibly 5 yrs late or something like that -- all while refusing to refund your money. I'm sort of dismissing them and preferring a place already built and for sale.

Stayed at the Sawasdee Sea View about 3 weeks ago. No joiner fee. Not a lot of noise, but if you're on a floor with high occupancy, there will be sounds now and then. No pool. No in-room safe. The tailor on site provided me with shirts at a good price with a very fast turnaround. He seems to accidentally project an impression of scam artist, but he's honest. There are a handful of small beer bars within about 100 feet of the entrance. Also, next to them, there is a convenience store that has the Bangkok Post every morning. Beach Road is about 100 feet from the entrance. I did not get a sea view room. I asked for one but they didn't have one when I stayed. It was disappointing. The TV is not good quality. About 1/3 the channels are grainy on the screen. I suspect it is cable loss to the satellite dish. This might have been only my room. I didn't care much so I didn't change rooms. The bed is comfortable, the aircon is adequately powered, housekeeping does a nice job and provides some extra bottled water and an extra towel if you just leave 20 baht on the pillow when you go out each day. The breakfast is at best, average. Other alternatives are easy walking distance. Breakfast is buffet, and you can take your plate out into the foyer where there are many tables and chairs and watch a big screen TV in the morning with other guests. It's pleasant, but the food is subpar. The Sportsman is a couple of sois away and it is far superior breakfast. The front desk staff speak English adequately, but not superbly. Laundry service is a tad slow, but only a tad and reasonably priced. It's pretty good value. No major complaints.

I'm quoting myself on this matter because I've done some additional research to pass along to the board. The strategy of pursuing a condo for an investment is pretty conventional just about everywhere. What not has my attention, and concern, is the value of the money obtained. Meaning, if one buys a condo and holds it for a few years, the new airport goes in, real estate/condos in Pattaya spike in price and lots of buyers want to buy mine and give me a nice profit -- so what? So I make a profit? What value does this have if I can't access the money? I am not talking about the fact that I'd have to buy another condo and its price will be up too. I mean taking the money out of Thailand. There are apparently enormous obstacles to taking big money out of Thailand once you bring it in. Anyone have data or experience?

Well, I don't do currency trading on a daily basis, but I take my laptop with me and work a little bit every day when I'm on vacation. I have to be online about an hour for email each day as part of that. Then there is portfolio management in addition to work. And also just chatting online with friends. The 'net is a requirement of life, not just work. It's a lot more interesting than television and takes less time. WiFi is a plus for anyplace that has it.

You can email him. He's listed on the "calendar" and clicking his name gets to his profile and a way to email him. Though by now he is probably enroute. Worth a try in case he checks email at an intermediate stop?