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Gary, I too never understood this tendency of guys to move somewhere and take their money with them until a few years ago when it all became clear. It's about lawyers. Guys get sued. They have to get their money out of the country or it will be confiscated. If it's something relatively minor, the creditor will not bother with trying to freeze passport renewal. So someone with a few hundred thousand dollars in US banks may need to get out and get out fast -- and once out the money needs to get out too before the lawyers arrive. If you can get out of the country without being sued, t

Interesting maneuver, and it's not altogether UK centric. I think what is being suggested here is the 800K is moved to Thailand to satisfy retirement visa requirements. Its Thai bank account interest is taxable, but if I read Thai law correctly, the amount of that interest will be under the threshold for paying taxes. The issue is then bringing more money into Thailand to live on -- without touching the 800K. The use of CCs or Debit cards to do this is the suggested mechanism and this would appear to be invisible to the Thai tax authorities. Well, I don't know, but it looks dange

I like to have these comments have some value to the UK cousins too. This tidbit from Bob . . . I guess I was vaguely aware the Brits have a mechanism available to them to collect "bank interest" from some source that is not taxable and Bob is making it more clear. Good! That's about 1/3 of the problem and for the US it is the hardest 1/3. It looks easy for the Brits. The other 2/3 is your equity or shares position. The US has some maneuvers for minimizing taxes from that segment of nestegg. The UK guys may want to step up with something on this. It's a solid and important issu

Ordering thoughts. A good thing. 1) How much is enough? Historically, 25X expected spending (inverted 4%) would be enough for 30 yrs if you expect zero pension at age 62 or 65 or whatever. If you DO expect a pension that is inflation adjusted, the historical number becomes about 4.5% or savings of 22X your expected spending is required. If you want to spend 80,000 baht a month averaged over a year -- that rule would say you need to have $570ishK if you expect Social Security. This rule would achieve 95% confidence historically -- meaning 95% of 30 yr periods did not see that money run

I know nothing of this. This will need some study, but in the link you provided I see the following: 1) 30,000 baht personal exemption for a single person (that's $810) 2) Section 3.1 says zero taxes from 0-100,000 baht income. (that's up to $2702) 3) " Interest income may, at the taxpayer's selection, be excluded from the computation of PIT provided that a tax of 15 per cent is withheld at source." The retirement visa I think requires $25ishK on site. At 4% (don't know what local yields are) that would be $1,000/yr interest. This looks to be erased by items 1 and 2.

US holiday today and I'm doing chores and numbers. I'll try to be a bit generic here so the UK folks can get some benefit from this, but they will have to do some translating. We all probably know at this point that the non pension approach to retirement is accumulating a nest egg and not withdrawing more than 4% in year 1 from it. For a 50/50 stocks and fixed income mix, with an inflation boost each year, this will probably (95% historically) survive 30 yrs. A question often arises as to whether or not taxes must be part of the 4%. The answer is yes, but the news is good and man

Amps do have a time component but only in the context of being a rate of change of charge. 1 Amp = 1 coulomb / sec. That is irrelevant to the point because electricity is priced in money per Kw-hrs. Half a kilowatt consumed for 2 hrs is 1 kilowatt-hour. And yup, that's the same as consuming 1 Kilowatt for one hour, i.e., 1 Kw-hr. Look at this way. If you consider your microwave oven, it will maybe say on it that it consumes 900 watts when it's on. If there were no time aspect to the billing, then how could you price it per month? If it was ever on during the month . . . for

The AC vs Pattaya electric data is good. Slight modification. That's per kilowatt-hour, not per kilowatt. Sorry for the nit pick. It can matter because guys can actually calculate how much consumption by adding up not just how many kilowatts a device consumes, but also how many hours per month it is on. 6.13 vs 3.6 is good, hard data. Thanx.

Jesus, this is scary stuff. I don't want to screw anyone up in either direction. I don't want guys to move to Pattaya and take a walk off a condo balcony 8 years later because they woke up that day out of money. I also don't want to persuade guys to stay locked in the cubicle with nose to grindstone longer than they need to because this is a formula for driving up their blood pressure and that will take years off their lives every bit as effectively as walking off the balcony. Even if the BP doesn't rise, those are years of life not . . . lived. So I don't tell nobody what to

Not new at all, Bob. Actually, it caught attention because the program shut down in 2001 after being in place for 30+ years. Military years of service after 2001 don't get this treatment. This is going to translate into a few hundred dollars per year, inflation adjusted. Not thousands. No one will get rich on this, but it will be a nice addendum for guys that want to splurge once in a while on something extra.

What about health insurance?

Pretty sure I got this right. Housing and subsistence allowance were not taxed. Still aren't. The theory is you may sometimes be forced to live on base and eat on base, if that base is a battlefield. The rule just tosses some SS benefit to folks for being willing to endure that. This is from about.com: "Below are the rates of tax-free housing allowance (Basic Allowance for Housing, or BAH) that are provided to commissioned officers (without dependents) who are authorized to reside off base at government expense." It's not huge, but it's a nice cushion for some bad thing t

SS has a reduction in benefits, as I recall, if the recipient is getting any other form of federal pension. Or it could be that other pension that is reduced. But in the text that outlines this little bump in SS benefit for military service, there is no mention of anything else. The general answer to your specific question would seem to be no. There are other effects on military pension, but this isn't one of them. The idea is that while military some of your pay was housing allowance and food allowance and no SS tax was extracted from that. At the time you were happy about that, b

Write your Congressman and ask. Or watch TV. Both are a waste of time.

There is considerable debate about the accuracy of the inflation index. It is not intentionally inaccurate. The problem is that a few items are holding the overall index down, and mostly they have to do with technology. The price of X amount of computing power costs a fraction of what it did 10 years ago and the CPI properly tries to measure this. The same thing happens in car features. Can you imagine what you would have paid for a GPS in your car 10 years ago? The price of a DVD player or a plasma TV screen has just collapsed in 10 years, and this has to factor into the CPI as a p

The Florida Guy is right. Soc. Sec. is inflation adjusted. That's $96 2006-dollars. Whatever a 2006 dollar is worth in 23 yrs, multiply it by 96 and that's what they will send you additional each month. Meaning . . . a 1983 dollar is probably worth something like $2 in today's money, so maybe your $96 number will become something like $192 in 23 yrs. That's about 7 barfines. If it's there. 23 is a lot of years for it to stay safe, but that particular pension will be the last one touched because there will be so many voters affected. Your odds are good you'll see some portion of it,

Yes. Yes.

US military vets. Heads up, in case you didn't know. When you reach Soc. Sec retirement age (or if you already have), if you notify Soc. Sec. that you have military years of service it will increase your pension payout. The form they send you each year showing you how much money you contributed to the system does NOT reflect this additional total. The ssa.gov website describes the formula, but in general it is $1200 more per year of military service. For a nominal 5 yrs of military, this adds maybe $60/month to your eventual pension. It's a nice, unexpected, chunk.

Thanks for the numbers. It's good that the Navy is taking good care of you.

Good numbers, sir. Are you including healthcare in your various miscellaneous categories? And is the 75K pension inflation adjusted. At your age that sounds a lot like Social Security is the pension you're describing -- so thumbs up to you. You're collecting back from all that money you paid in over the years.

Two sides to every story.

early-retirement.org Use their search feature for discussions of various countries. or www.internationalliving.com Others have done this before us -- but my read is that none have done it in our particular socio-economic envirionment. Which is BS phrasing for . . . pensions are going away and people have to figure out how to retire without them and how to get health care.

Not while these boards are around. I pound the keyboard on these threads to inform guys way ahead of time what is coming. There will be no shock effect for guys who read these boards. They can see problems coming and address them long before they see zeros on their ATM receipt and decide it's time to step off a roof. A comment on your phrasing "worrying to think how many farangs sell everything leaving no return route home." I have never understood guys saying "you may want to hold onto that house or condo back home so you 'have a place to come back to'". Of course there are ret

Usual caveats here. You don't know me. I should not be listened to unverfied. Do your own research. I got no reason to lie to you. I'll do the best I can providing info. blah blah. Search for Eneukman and Soi7 posts on what they spend to live in Pattaya. They are on the ground there. I'm not. I would not presume to quote costs based on my relatively brief visits vs those guys who live there and have learned what constitutes life there. They both took the time and made the effort to provide the data to guys like you and me who are interested. And it's excellent data. Search will

Guys, focus here. The gentleman makes a good comment. Flexibility of spending can accommodate rental vacancies (I guess you Brits call them voids). This is a much broader concept than simply vacancies. This is about 30 years, people. 30 years for something to go wrong. Suppose a tenant burns a property down. You are on an airplane the next day to get it "sorted out". What's that going to take? Well, you'll be insured, of course, and the coverage will take care of rebuilding. But it won't cover (presumably) loss of rent during the build process. It won't cover the fact that you'