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Sorry to hear of the theft, Gary. You probably have other ideas that you can market differently next time. Autocad. That's probably a skill people would pay for if you felt like it. You might not, retired. Or you could teach some local kids how to use it and send them off into the world to make a life better for themselves than they ever would have had otherwise.

Heads up, guys. The following link is an earthquake of sorts in the world of money for retirees who are not funding their retirement purely with pensions. It's a new study out by a guy(s) with solid credentials. Both have written on the subject before and their work has been peer reviewed. Guyton is not a crackpot. It is hard reading and will require a lot of time from you, so don't start on it until you have that time to sit, read, and think very hard about what is here. It's a new approach to determining your SWR, safe withdrawl rate, from your assets and be assured they will not ru

Gary once weighed in on this. I think he spoke of woodworking as a particular skill he'd acquired over the years as part of a hobby. That kind of thing can turn into a part time business, making furniture and selling it online. The one thing I can't see, and maybe it's bad for you too, sinkorswim, is going back to the 17 hr days for 7 days a week. I really don't think I need to go back to my old career or my old schedule to scratch the itch and maybe you don't either. One thing I have heard and intend to pursue is . . . the reality that one can't see what the answer is because one

Some of this thread is about guys really being uncomfortable with not having "a home". Housing is a huge part of any budget and if you try to keep a place you're not living in, you're paying for housing twice. Yeah, I know that guys . . . the UK guys especially . . . wave their hands and say "I'll keep a place at home and rent it out to pay for it." The real estate price run up in the UK has defined a lot of attitudes there towards houses and they just cannot bring themselves to accept not having a house. Well, okay, if you want to spend your days in LOS trying to orchestrate new ren

Bingo. HUGE issue. What the hell do you do? Well guess what, folks, we aren't the first to face this. Think of all the . . . in the US we call them "trust fund babies" that you hear about. Maybe you UK guys see more of it than we do in the US because your history of nobility is so long. When the son or daughter of some hugely rich guy hits age 18 his or her trust fund kicks in to provide living expenses and that person truly need never work their entire life. So what do they do? Well, often . . . drugs, or alcohol, or something stupid that gets them in trouble with the police,

Okay, here's my read on this. I don't get it. At all. What exactly is the problem? I think what you're describing is a mindset issue, not a matter of "reality". What does "moving to Pattaya" mean that is so worrisome? I don't think guys have this configured in their brains. Why do you think this has to be permanent? What does permanent mean? How long have you lived in your current residence? Five years? Is that permanent? You will have a maildrop of some kind back in your home country for various things that you want to show a local address. You will have no residence bac

3-5 million baht at 5% in the bank will earn 250,000 baht interest per year. That's about 21,000 baht per month. Should be able to rent a nice condo for that, with maid service, and not dip into savings at all. If off the beaten path, might be able to find an even lower rent? If so, then the 5 million baht will grow while you're living there -- just like owning. Shrug.

Okay, babble time. 1) 14 years is too long for something to go wrong. Personally, I'd assess your odds to be > 50% that the pension you refer to is going to be reduced by the time you start collecting it. If you're talking about Soc. Sec. the odds are lower for that, and if you manage to purposely have little reportable income at that time, then you won't be one of "the rich" and your odds are even better. But if that's a company pension, it's going to get hit. 2) Asset allocation and bonds. Okay, important item. The purpose of AA diversification is NOT to raise return. This i

Gary, for "membership" at USAA you must be a current or former US military officer, and recently they changed that to senior enlisted. I don't recall what enlisted level qualifies. But that's for membership. I don't think any such restriction exists to have an account at their bank. The problem you are having may be that you're outside the US -- but I don't know. Their exceptional service starts once you're on the inside. They are just hyper concerned about their customer well being. They are a full service financial firm and are the 6th largest insurance company in the US. Whe

Gary, email USAA. They have the finest customer service I've ever encountered and I've been with them 30+ years. They may not say things you will like, but they will respond. If you are ex military, that is their focus.

Gary, some data. http://www.flyertalk.com/wiki/index.php/Cr...oreign_Exchange

I think there may be an absence of understanding about this matter. This link below provides a chart of Halliburton's stock price. By setting the calendar date at the bottom right of the screen you can select and observe performance since January 20, 2001, the day Bush took office. http://www.smartmoney.com/eqsnaps/index.cf...&symbol=HAL The chart is back adjusted for a split in 2006. The dividend payout over the time period has been roughly 1%, which is also reflected in the chart and prices quoted. You will note that the price of Jan 20, 2001 was about $19/share. The clos

Not quite sure I understand the outrage here. If you think oil companies are grossly outperforming all other companies to make their greedy shareholders rich, then why not buy shares in Exxon?

Hard to argue with Singapore. Malaysia is not uniformly bad from Muslims, but that situation is likely to worsen rather than improve -- and really, for the situation described -- the bottom line is where is the best access to elsewhere via airlines. Bangkok and Singapore have the discount airlines that go all over Asia based in BKK or SIN. Singapore is more expensive, but with a Euro salary he's still going to come out ahead and it's an English speaking city.

The UK guys on the board have a different perspective, kafka. We Americans know the US real estate boomed, but the boom was very regional. Areas of the US went insane. Other areas did not. The UK is much smaller geographically and the degree to which their real estate explosion was regional was far more constrained -- and so their perspective is that real estate by its very nature is going to explode and make the owners of such, very very rich. So they will not have a good instinctive read on your paragraph above. And for good reason. THEIR net would be very much superior to TIPS and

Concerning advisory services and publications. They will be right, sometimes. Never confuse wisdom with a bull market. Guys, we just uncorked a double digit year in 2006. We are all feeling really smart right now, having seen our net worth numbers surge very nicely. We are all financial geniuses after such a year. eneukman/alan has always kept his head level on his shoulders per: None of us expect great returns next year. None of us expect horrible returns either. None Of Us Has A Clue What Is Going To Happen -- and that includes the advisory service publication

Okay, listen up. This is important. That website is indeed a great depository of information. It derives from a larger very sophisticated community at early-retirement.org. The calculator you're looking at there is at best a 1st order solution to the problem. It's a VERY GOOD 1st order solution, but it's only a first order solution. The more sophisticated calculators are . . . we can call them higher order solutions. The key difference is the unfortunate tendency of folks, young and old, to want to embrace the concept of average return on portfolio. Average returns are the w

Congrats on that good performance. The US market finished the year up 13ish% and the UK market was up about 10ish%. Japan was flat. A rising tide lifts all boats. Here's the math for you. 44% compounded out to 2040 would be . . . yes, you can take your present investment in that vehicle and multiply it by 242283. So if you have $100,000 in it that will be 2.4 X 10^10, or I think 2.4 trillion. You will be a rich man.

Sometimes it's as important to have a focus on the BIG PICTURE as on the nitty gritty details of the bark on the individual trees of the forest. Have a look at this link: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EN225&t=my Guys, that is the 2nd largest economy in the world. It has been 16 f*cking years and anyone who bought and held in 1990 is still down over 50%. Think carefully about that. They had a market crash, and in 16 years it has not recovered. No, anyone who bought in 1990 and held for 16 years is NOT stupid. This is true because no one EVER knows what is going to happe

This is just excellent input. Okay, here's the situation on this. "Early Retirement" in a broad sense involves projecting inflation adjustments onto your expected cost of living for all the years of the rest of your life. That's the standard procedure for all calculations. There is a significant school of thought on this matter, in a broad and non-Pattaya specific sense, that says exactly what emil says, but for a different reason. It says that it is not correct to take your current living expenses and project inflation on them for the future. There is a lot of debate on this. H

That changes things a little, manracer. Works pensions are likely more vulnerable to being reduced than state pensions. So you have more income in the long run than you expected -- this does not affect the reality that you need to fund 5 yrs between 55 and 60. Good job on doing solid analysis before taking the leap.

Glad the threads are helpful, but let's note that a "thread" is only a thread if there are a lot of posts and most of those came from others who are solidly helpful as well. I shudder to think of the guys who don't hang out on the boards and just decide to swashbuckle and wing it and quit their jobs and move without any idea if they have enough. Think about it. If you reach adulthood at age 18, and live to age 80ish, then age 50 is only about the 1/2way point of your adult life. Trying to retire at age 50 . . . it's a full half of your entire adult life at issue. Guys need to be analyt

Xmas break wrapping up and end of year assessments about to start for all of us. manracer above looks to me to be a real typical sort of the category that I'll call "Early Retiree BM Wannabe" so let's go thru his numbers in careful detail and maybe help clarify concepts for others. Congratulations on lasting 53.5 years and paying off a house mortgage/loan. If this was 1906 instead of 2006, 53.5 year olds were rare. 18 months is a long time. Don't count your chickens before they hatch out of an egg. You do not know this until the cash is in your hand and all bills/f

Here's the deal: This comment above is pretty solid. The problem with it is not all people want to, or have the aptitude to, manage their own money. That's a big % of the population. Not over 50%, but a big % -- and no I have no idea what -- I'll guess 30%. Think about the woman born in 1920. She's 86 now. She is from an era when women got married and kept house, watched the kids and cooked for her family. Her husband died 3 years ago. She never managed the money, knows nothing about it, has no chance to figure any of it out at her age. But the one thing she does know is h

There are many threads in search about state of residence for tax purposes. Just a heads up to all that this particular issue is much bigger than it seems. If you have a friend or relative willing to endure your mail (junk and otherwise) for years and years -- okay. But most probably don't and for them the paid maildrop services are called for. Remember, your address (mail drop or whatever) needs to NOT establish some high state income tax state (like Calif) as your state of residency.