Owen`

Worth nothing that there is a probability to the mix. It takes money to get here and time in one's job to have the multiple weeks of vacatin available. Guys in their 30's are still recovering financially from the divorce. Guys in their 40's have recovered and have the money and time and can make the trip. Note, however, that the chart is destined to slide upwards as the population of the West ages. The big bulge will soon be 45-55 rather than 40-50.

Bingo. You need to play this smart. You must establish residency in a zero income tax state FIRST, before you move. This involves changing your drivers license, renting a place or buying something (maybe a trailer), registering to vote . . . just do lots of things to have available as evidence. Hell, to play it safe you may even want to live there for 3 months before the move. Keep in mind this is not an unusual thing. Many many politicians and staffers in Washington DC who live in Maryland or Virginia retain residency in their home state by simply owning some $25K condo that they never stay in. This is a pretty typical thing. There are lots of maneuvers used by many different people to claim residency in a state they don't "live" in. The important thing is Do Not Think You Can Stop Paying State Tax Just Because You Moved Overseas. And don't think you can just be defiant. A state that decides you are in arrears will confiscate assets and they can also put out a warrant for your arrest anywhere in the US. Tax issues are powerful stuff. Don't try to finesse it. Do it right. Move to another state and jump through the hoops. Then leave the country.

I'm in Singapore headed back to the states and have been giving this matter some thought. My read is this. Given the new airport, there is about only one way to lose money on a high rise, ocean view condo purchase in or near Pattaya. That one way is to pay too much to begin with -- that is, get scammed. I think the way to play this is to buy one that already exists. This up front money crap from these folks (I was told the 50/50 ratio of foreigners to locals legal limit was being approached so I had to move fast or I'd be screwed) was just that, crap. They are trying to finance their building with purchases -- or more likely using deposits for loan collateral. I think not. Not with my money. I will start scanning the websites for a high rise condo already in existance and owned. If one exists that is less than . . . say, 5 yrs old, I will have to get serious.

Heads up, guys. It is state tax that slips by. You can increase your pension or interest/capital gains income by about 5-7% by simply establishing residence in one of the 0 income tax states (TX, FL, WY, AK, WA, NV, NH) before moving to LOS. I say 5-7% because that would be typical if you made your big move from, say, Missouri. You would not be paying that tax anymore if you establish residency elsewhere first, even if you still own property in the original state.

I let myself get the schpiel this morning in some store or other where they have models set up of the new condo highrise/tower. In general it looks like 1500 square feet (I think that's 145 sq meters) for about $250,000 all everything. Every unit has a balcony with a jacuzzi on it. Looks nice but there were worries, not the least of which were wanting money up front and the completion date is not til mid 2007. Anyone know more?

A moment for a bit of praise. I arrived in Pattaya today from the US. As all American BMs know, that trip is brutal. 25 hrs door to door minimum. A BM named lostinspace (Paul) and his wife Jan have started up a quality airport / Pattaya transfer service. I used it today. Jan met me with a sign with my first name on it, plus a particular shirt they identify to ensure no one co-opts your name for theft, she put me in a good car, weaved her way through a godawful parking lot and got me here. The traffic is horrible, as we all know, and she's deft at maneuvering through it without becoming aggressive or doing risky things and making you nervous. She's personable and is a nice tour guide during the drive. She also brings drinks if you want one enroute. I won't presume to quote their price here. It is higher than 1500 baht with all tolls paid, so if all you want is a taxi for that amount, that will be your cheapest option. We all know the risks with that. But I chose not to. I preferred no hassle with haggling after 25 hrs in the air. I preferred someone who speaks passable English. I preferred someone who took a few extra turns in Pattaya to show me Paul and her favorite steakhouses. And I preferred someone who waited for my late plane today. (And there's a thread on here explaining how she helped out one of our board members who got into a bit of a sticky problem with the immigration police over cigarettes. She translated for him.) Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth of testimonial. I got my money's worth and will use them again. And no, I don't know them and have no financial interest in their business.

A moment for a bit of praise. I arrived in Pattaya today from the US. As all American BMs know, that trip is brutal. 25 hrs door to door minimum. A BM named lostinspace (Paul) and his wife Jan have started up a quality airport / Pattaya transfer service. I used it today. Jan met me with a sign with my first name on it, plus a particular shirt they identify to ensure no one co-opts your name for theft, she put me in a good car, weaved her way through a godawful parking lot and got me here. The traffic is horrible, as we all know, and she's deft at maneuvering through it without becoming aggressive or doing risky things and making you nervous. She's personable and is a nice tour guide during the drive. She also brings drinks if you want one enroute. I won't presume to quote their price here. It is higher than 1500 baht with all tolls paid, so if all you want is a taxi for that amount, that will be your cheapest option. We all know the risks with that. But I chose not to. I preferred no hassle with haggling after 25 hrs in the air. I preferred someone who speaks passable English. I preferred someone who took a few extra turns in Pattaya to show me Paul and her favorite steakhouses. And I preferred someone who waited for my late plane today. (And there's a thread on here explaining how she helped out one of our board members who got into a bit of a sticky problem with the immigration police over cigarettes. She translated for him.) Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth of testimonial. I got my money's worth and will use them again. And no, I don't know them and have no financial interest in their business.

And this, gentlemen, is when you walk away. Losses are far more important than profit. That's not a psychological statement. That's a mathematical statement. If you have 10 dollars and you sustain a 50% loss, you have 5 dollars left. Now give yourself a 50% profit. Do you have your 10 dollars in your pocket again? No. You have 7 dollars and 50 cents. It takes a 100% gain to undo a 50% loss. Losses are more powerful than gains. Do not buy land that is too expensive to make a good percentage profit. It's a recipe for failure.

Well, hell, this is no different than anywhere else. This is the quiet little business strategy of many non-chain restaurants in the US. You buy land, you put a restaurant on it, you sell food at the restaurant, you make a little bit of money selling the food. That little bit of money doesn't get you rich. The increase in value of the dirt under the restaurant is what gets you rich. If you didn't own the dirt under the restaurant, you're not gonna get rich. Some shopping center may trot thru the door and "buy your restaurant" for big big profit, but when you have taken their money and left, they bulldoze the place and replace it with a parking lot for their shopping center. The real estate places around Pattaya seem to think the place is growing. One would think it makes sense to own the dirt under the bar.

Ha! I've seen this sort of thing before, too. "Migration Economist", eh. Dr. Lawrence, eh. I got 40 baht that says he never finished his PhD dissertation. I got another 40 that says American Express in Hong Kong won't pay him to consult anymore and he's trying to make ends meet. And no, I don't know who he is. I've just seen guys who lose contracts in SE Asia find themselves unable to go home, for whatever reason. He would have deserved pity if he hadn't spammed.

Gentlemen, I know nothing of running a bar. I know something of money. There is only one rule of investing money that is always true. High return means high risk. If you want your 40,000 pounds you provide you 4,000 pounds of profit/income per year, that is a 10% return and that's a medium-to-slightly-high level risk situation in the world as it exists today. It Does Not Matter What The Vehicle Is That Provides You That 4,000 Pounds. They are all just a way to earn 10%. You need to look at yourself and ask what you need per year to live. If you're going to take the 4,000 pounds and maybe pay yourself a salary for running your bar, chances are that salary is going to -- by definition -- reduce the 4000 pounds of "profit". Rephrasing . . . if you need more than 4,000 pounds per year to live (and everyone does most places), then your 40,000 isn't going to get you there without risking it, and "risk" means "probably losing it". If you are planning to use the 40,000 to buy a bar and pay yourself a salary for running it, then you're just buying a job. I suspect you can get a job cheaper than that.

Thanks, guys. That airsafe.com website is great. I had not seen it before. The accident number for China Air still looks shaky to me. Equipment vs maintenance. I don't know. Still safer than driving a car, certainly. I have talked up SQ and their safety record looks good there (that website should display accidents per total flights or per total flight miles -- a small airline with just a few airplanes has an advantage with this presentation), but I will toss you guys one anecdote. SQ's trolley dollies have rigid requirements. They may not be married. They may not be older than a certain age. And they have a weight restriction too. They scent the air i n the cabin and all that super SQ service stuff -- but the flight attendants on US carriers sneer at them because there is a record of an SQ accident where those same trolley dollies opened the emergency exits and were the first off the plane. They didn't stay to do their jobs. Not good.

Google China Air and safety. No point in having polite service on a plane just before it smashes into the ground. No question Singapore Air is superior to any American airline. SQ's coach is better than United's domestic FC.

I'm a very frequent flier. I do over 100,000 miles per year on various airlines. Singapore Air is the finest airline in the world and everyone knows it. They dominate all the survey lists. That's that. You want the best, you fly SQ. You usually pay a few extra hundred dollars for that privilege. Delta is not bad. They codeshare broadly and after years of being badly run, they had a management change about 3-4 years ago. The new CEO is 70+ years old, has no personal money axe to grind, gave himself a 25% paycut recently and has said his last goal for his life is to save that airline and make it great. Delta is not responsible for Korean Air or China Air. Codeshare just means they are all part of SkyTeam. Thai Air is specialized. Always remember that. There are plusses and minuses to this. China Air has a very serious safety history. Personally, I won't fly them. Can't comment on the Aussie carriers. Never have occasion to fly them. United is in its 3rd year of bankruptcy. Bothersome. Northwest will probably survive, and will do so on its international routes.

Suggestion: Yes, dehydration is a factor. But the biggest factor is sunlight. If you return home and it is cloudy during the day it will take a very long time to re-adjust. The key to jetlag is sunshine. It resets your clock. If it is overcast during the day, then you need to stare at lit lightbulbs during the day. Sounds silly, but it's true.

No, I don't think folks ever really try to stop a young guy from trying something that is financially shaky. The reason is . . . frankly, young guys just starting out can lose "everything" but "everything" for them is not much. There is that romantic admiration of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple risking "everything" to make it big -- but if you look at what they risked, it was a VW van and a hand calculator. That was their initial money. That was their "everything". If they had failed, they would have gotten jobs for a year or two and replaced "everything". The point being, at 19 yrs old you can recover from financial debacle. What you can't recover from is getting stabbed because someone saw you open a wallet filled with baht and decided to take it from you on a dark street somewhere. Or finding yourself in jail because you could not understand a policeman telling you to do something. Or wandering into a quarantine area during some adventurous backpacking outing because you could not read the local newspapers or roadsigns. Back when I was an Air Force officer I once heard a master sergeant talking to some young troops going on a trip for leave. It went something like . . . "Adventure is fun, but it's just as fun for a longer time if you're careful."

Guy, in about 30 years you're going to learn something we older folks have learned, which is that even though it's not wise to try to provide wisdom to young people, it's a hard temptation to resist. Suggestions: 1) Don't do anything that locks you into a situation. Period. You are too young to know what you want to do or to know what is likely. 2) You know your own business best, but you are too young to have seen a recession. A very good rule of thumb in any business is that success is 20% your own doing and 80% luck in that macroeconomic conditions are favorable. The world is overdue for a recession and no matter how good you think your web business is, it will be hit by any recession. No one is insulated. 3) Parents have seen it all. The internet wasn't around when they were your age, but there were other things that arrived on the scene and changed the world and they know how all that worked. 4) Keep your money in banks and have ATM cards. Don't carry a lot with you anywhere. 5) Don't underestimate the obstacles that exist because of language. Okay, that's enough failed temptation resistance. Good luck.

Concerning a new UK pension law: I have noticed in this thread that there are comments made by the Brits and Americans that would be useful to both if we understood each others' normal arrangements. FYI in the US the government "pension" plan is called Social Security. It starts paying out an inflation adjusted amount at age 65 for current retirees. That age is due to slide upward over the next few years, in terms of at what age it starts. There is also an old age medical insurance plan called Medicare that covers only beyond age 65 for a very small premium (which all Americans have extracted from paycheck at all ages). As for company pensions, this is becoming a thing of the past in the US. Only 1/4 of companies in the US pay a traditional pension to retirees. Some of those programs do "early outs" and start pension payments for employees in their 50's, but the norm is 62-65. Government employees still get this, though the pension is not very big. The norm for the US now is more or less personal pension plans called 401K's (the paragraph number in the tax code that authorizes them) into which people put money that they then invest in stock shares or mutual fund shares and the growth they obtain is tax-deferred each year until retirement. It is for this reason that you hear about guys in this thread talking about having hundreds of thousands of dollars to multiply by 4% to get the Trinity based withdrawl rate. They will start tapping their 401K accounts and are concerned they will run out. So if your new UK law goes from age 50 to 55, you're still getting a good deal vs much of the US.

Excellent data. Thanks. The ReEntry visa . . . do you have experience with that? Do you have to requalify each departure from LOS, meaning do you have to have a recent bank statement with you to traverse the airport?

Wow. This is good stuff. I don't know how the other Americans are reading this, but for me the UK posts are interesting. I have to deduce from the context what the US equivalent is that is being discussed in terms of taxes and pensions and yields and returns. Posts like this one: . . . make a lot of sense. The terminology could be unfamiliar, but when someone says "my after tax yield is looking to be in the region of 4.6%" one can easily translate that into US equivalents and it gives a very good feel for what sort of vehicles have been chosen. What I think I'm reading above is that for the retirement visa one does tie up money, but one does not generate interest that is turned over to the Thai government. Rather, one is merely demonstrating that one is not destitute and that one has funds to live on and spend in Thailand. Given that demonstration of an ability to bring money into the country, the Thai gov't agrees to give you a permanent visa. And apparently it needs to be an amount that hits the minimum threshold each year, so you can't deposit and spend it down to zero over X years. As for the Thai banks not paying farangs interest, are the Thai banks connected with Thai brokerages? Maybe there is some maneuver for holding an account "with a Thai bank" but in an offshore account that is positioned in British govt bonds or US Treasury bonds or whatever that do in fact pay interest.

Whoa! I think I read somewhere there is a way to get a "retirement visa" that provides one with permanent residence with no need for visa runs every 30 days. What I read said something like . . . you have to have X amount of money on deposit at a Thai bank. That would get you the retirement visa. The only downside seemed to be that if you were discovered "working" it was a serious offense. It seemed to say that the money just had to be there to show you were not destitute. You kept the interest the bank paid, and you could leave and take your money when you felt like it (but don't expect to do that more than once). But what you say above is rather different. It seems to say that you put X money on deposit and the interest earned on it needed to be 11K pounds, which was turned over to the Thai government? That is rather healthy rent someone is paying, in addition to their housing expense. I suspect I am not understanding this.

FYI the Fireseeker website is known and talked about on various retirement planning websites and well thought of, but don't rely on it too much because some of the calculation algorithms are not published. It's not really rocket science. If you get returns on your money that exceed your spending, you will see your portfolio grow. If you don't, you will see it shrink. Add to that simplicity the reality that no one knows what future inflation or returns will look like so everything beyond that simplicity is guesswork. The guesswork from the study is to use history and presume the future will be like it. Period. That's the whole conceptual banana. 4% is totally safe if history repeats itself for 30 years. 5% is mostly safe if history repeats itself for 30 years. I was pleased to see the Firewalker computation come close to that conclusion. As for "retiring" in one's 30's or maybe even 40's, this will categorize one as "idle rich". Does this really work for . . . 40 years? Maybe the thought configuration is . . . why is this permanent? If someone does not own a residence back "home", then leasing a condo in LOS means what? I suspect nothing. If you want to spend time back in farangland, make the trip. The longer you're there, the more money you'll spend. While you're there, you need not really be away from "home". Maybe your lease expired. I guess that depends on how much stuff one wants to have with one in Thailand and how willing one would be to just walk away from it. Ha, perhaps it is good to realize that money tied up in "stuff" doesn't earn interest.

I must have done something wrong. The BUPA website provides an online quote that does not force you to wait for anyone to call or anything like that. I picked their lowest level coverage. I'm 50. I specified living in Thailand. With $400 deductible, they quoted $1200 per year. That's not so bad, but it's not 3-500. I must have done something wrong. Maybe a higher deductible gets it down to $500.

Thanks for this data, guy. This is really important for the Americans. I imagine the UK guys have their government health care that covers them, but Americans pay this out of pocket. Did you say 300 to 500 dollars PER YEAR? That's not a typo and you meant 3000 to 5000 dollars? What is covered for 3-500 dollars per year. Your HMO (from the US) covers you in Thailand? Isn't this unusual? And do they cover only some certain percentage of something? I will google BUPA, but if you can get coverage in Thailand for 3-500 bux, why have an HMO? Isn't that a lot more expensive?

I'll wing a quick financial analysis of the above data. I will let the other guys tackle the medical insurance issue and the English teaching issue since I have no idea how that works. As a EE I would think you could find a company in the states to outsource some emailable work to you, perhaps reviewing competitive proposals the company might be preparing. Or even reviewing designs. Companies like to pay independent people to do such reviews. It costs them no SS, no benefits in general and you're not on the payroll. Okay, from your data above, the first question is where is the $1300 coming from? Is that your age 62 "early" social security payout? If so, it won't get any bigger other than from inflation adjustments. You also talk about things happening at age 65. That means you have 2 more years to do . . . something. Are you working? If so, adding to the 200K nest egg would help. But let's just make assumptions and crunch numbers. Let's assume that is $1300/mo AFTER TAX. That is $15600/yr and if it's from SS it is inflation adjusted per US CPI inflation annual numbers. A poster did mention above in the thread that US inflation is not likely to be equivalent to Thai inflation and Thai inflation will be worse. This should not be a huge issue, but it does exist and it is a risk. The 200K at . . . (AFTER TAX) 4.5% withdrawl adds 9000 to your 15.6K. Don't panic about the after tax thing. If your IRA is a Roth there is no tax. Anyway, that's a total of $24,600/yr of spendable income in LOS. There seems to be some disagreement in general as to whether or not this would be "enough" in Pattaya. If not, the other jobs you might seek will have to get you to the final target number. I sure hope other guys weigh in on this "enough" thing. That's not clear at all. One other thing. At age 65 . . . the Trinity study based 4.5% is probably too conservative for you. Thirty years for you takes you to 95. Possible but not likely. This means you could yank out 5% or maybe even 5.5% and your risks of running out of money are possibly acceptable. 5.5% withdrawl would increase your Pattaya spendable money per year to $26,600. That should translate to fewer English lessons taught, no pun intended.