Owen`

If I understand you correctly, hybrid, the entirety of your retirement income is rent paid for these two houses you own and some kind of bank interest on 15,000 pounds you have in cash. You seem to be saying you expect to collect rent of 1700 pounds per month. Are you over 50 yrs old? Back to the 1700 pounds. I'll assume you're competent and this is net of periods of time of vacancy, any mortgage payments you might have, maintenance expense for tenants breaking things, maintenance for fixing the furnace, maintaining the landscaping and whatever else landlords do in the UK (in the US snow shoveling in driveway would be an item). The 500 pounds "slush" per month are to add to 6000 pounds and I don't know what 4 trips cost. I'll guess 700 pounds total (ticket, food, onsite transport, lodging) each. UK rents rise as fast as Thai inflation? Don't know. In the category of there is no magic in the world, could you say in general what the value of the two properties is? If you are going to spend about 110,000 per month (1.3 million baht per year) plus 4 trips (200,000 baht total?), then frankly, for you to try this with no pension income I would recommend you have a net worth of 25X that total or about 37 million baht. That has inflation built in and a margin for error -- and it would cover you 30 yrs. If you are dying later than that, you'll need more. The 25X rule of thumb has academic studies behind it. It is not guesswork. If you have less, you may die before your money does, but it's not likely. Hope it all works out.

I'll toss in one more comment. Forget it. If you are up against the edge of your budget and you need to make 4 trips to the UK per year (plus food/lodging/transport while there), then you have no business trying to live in Pattaya. You have no margin for error -- and if your income is pension vs asset proceeds, you have no assurance you can keep up with inflation. Dispose of those assets and park the proceeds somewhere that yields interest or dividends. Then you don't need 4 trips home per year (though maybe still 1). Think about inflation. Inflation is the killer.

Search for posts by BMs Eneukman and Soi7, both of whom have provided excellent budget profiles for different choices of where to live and drinking different amounts. BM Torrenova has also posted excellent perspectives on the degree to which drinking and women are hugely influential on your total budget. My only comment on your numbers is they imply you will never ever make trips "home" or go exploring in Laos or Singapore or anywhere else. Also, nodding to Torrenova's usual comments, I compute that about 25% of your budget is spent on your woman or women. The live in would be cheaper -- at first. You have included BG costs and tilak costs both so your monthly budget should be lower -- unless you plan 20 LTs a month even with a tilac in the house.

You are not the first US military man to discover that the military pension is not sufficient for life. All generally start working when they leave the military, but the pension is still paid. This means you are making about 50% more money than all your coworkers. After a number of years, you retire again with perhaps two pensions. Then you can really retire. If you find a job as a Dept of Defense civilian, your military time will count for tenure. It means you will start work at 26 days of vacation per year and 13 days of sick leave plus excellent medical benefits and a pension plan. If you look at the numbers, you may decide a few years working in this configuration is better than immediate time in Thailand living on a tight budget.

Wait for the final verdict. You have plenty of time. A year from now it will be clear.

A suggestion. Rent. For 3 month leases. Go to Cambodia. Rent. For 3 month leases. You'll be "relocating" every 90 days, or you can just put stuff in storage for 3 mos each place and not "relocate". I suspect some 3 month lease apts are going to appear near the border pretty quickly to support this. Nothing convenient about it, but at least you don't pay for two living arrangements.

Re: satellite dishes and tower condos. That close to the equator, there is probably less concern about which side of the building your condo is on. The dish will point almost straight up so there should be few places shadowed by the building. Be sure to check before renting, though, if that is your intent.

Search is your friend: http://www.pattayatalk.com/forums/index.ph...p;p=entry

If it's not an "interest only" mortgage, you're paying some portion of your $563 for principal. The $37 is additional principal. Most mortages would be like that, but the recent invention of interest only mortgages service only the interest and pay no principal. It is not likely you have that. It's more likely you are paying almost $100/mo total on your principal. I'm not a real estate guru. Someone may want to weigh in here. And I am also sure these rules are different in the UK. The rental tax breaks: 1) Depreciation: Because the property is renting, it is a business asset. Use of a business asset ages it. This ageing is presumed to reduce its value and that reduction is called depreciation. Typical accounting maneuver would be to take the purchase price and divide that by 10 or 15 yrs. So if you bought for $100,000, that is $10,000 in depreciation per year. That depreciation is a business expense. If you have renters and they pay their rent, that rent would look like taxable income. But because you have that $10,000 of business expense to deduct from that rental income, the rental income can be largely tax sheltered. 2) Recapture: You must keep track of the accumulation of depreciation of all the years you own the property. If you bought the place for $100,000 and held it 4 yrs, depreciating it $40,000, then your "cost basis" is $60K. If you get a purchase offer of $120,000 and sell it for that much, you have taxable capital gains of (120K - 60K = ) 60K. That 60K gain is taxable. There are various maneuvers you can try at that point to avoid this 60K of taxable capital gains, but in general the depreciation tax break is recaptured by the government when you sell, if you sell above your cost basis. 2) Insurance, maintenance, real estate mgt company, etc: These are business expenses because you are in the business of property renting. You can view them in two ways. Either you can reduce rental income (beyond the depreciation reduction) further with these expenses each year, or my suggestion is to view them in a different way -- namely that the price of the expense (insurance premium, maintenance cost, mgt company cost) is subsidized by the government so you get essentially a 25% discount. After you claim it on your taxes, that will be the overall effect. The $70 mgt company fee is really $70 X 0.75 = $52.50. 3) Exotic and aggressive claims: If your computer is used primarily to manage your rental property, it is a business expense and can be deducted from rental income. Drives to the property to deal with landscaping . . . the gasoline is a tax deductible expense. Anything you do related to the business is deductible. Ads in the paper looking for renters, getting copies of lease agreements signed, all that stuff are costs that cost 75% of what you think they cost. Enough of this . . . off to the store.

Good morning, gentlemen. It's a little bit chilly outdoors here in the US of A at this hour and it's a work holiday so I have some time to type stuff that may help BMs with their thinking, and myself with mine. Let's talk about risk and "the market" and real estate and inflation. The guys who have never ever been in the stock market can have an inclination to remember talk of the Great Crash of 1987 and the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Crash of 2000. They hear that stuff and lose all interest in the market. Well, think for a moment about why anyone would be involved. Is everyone involved in stocks stupid? That's pretty much impossible. There are too many for all to be stupid. Why, instead, isn't everyone in real estate? Why aren't they buying houses or condos low and selling them high, like everyone who is in real estate does? Why would anyone screw around the stock market and its crashes when you NEVER hear about real estate crashes. Maybe you hear about a bubble pop, but never ever crashes. Right? So why? Well, clearly if real estate was always guaranteed to give you an exceptional return and never have crashes then JP Morgan, Merril Lynch, Piper Jaffrey an all the other stock broker firms would invest solely in real estate, right? In fact, if real estate was always guaranteed to give you an exceptional return and never have crashes, Procter and Gamble and Walmart and Lockheed and Ford would never invest any internal money in their own businesses because that would not be in the best interests of their shareholders -- the shareholders best interests would be served by those companies being in real estate. You go where the returns are best with money and if its real estate, you go nowhere else, right? So this leads up to the answer. It is that the premise is wrong. RE is NOT guaranteed to give you an exceptional return and it DOES have crashes. The real estate industry has achieved something that the financial markets have not achieved and that is camouflage. Prices of house transactions are not listed in your daily newspaper in long columns of numbers showing the effects of trading. You can't look in a newspaper and find out what your condo will bring in TOMORROW if you sell it. There is no visibility into the performance of the real estate market so all its crashes can be called the popping of a bubble and the local real estate agent can wave his hand and say "oh, the market gets a little soft now and then but everyone knows you make money if you wait out that soft spell". You can lose money in a popped bubble just like you can in a crash. There is NO QUESTION lots of BMs can and will post their personal experiences buying some property, maybe renting it out, or selling outright and making big money. The wonder of this board is no one has any reason to lie. They are telling the truth when they say that. People can make money in real estate. The difference between it and stocks is none are likely step forward and announce they bought a 4 plex for $350,000 eight years ago and that it spent those 8 years 50% vacant of renters because illegal immigrants moved into the neighborhood, then the furnace broke in year 3 and needed a $7000 repair, one of the renters had pets he was not supposed to have and they urinated on the carpets which cost $3000 and when one tried to sue him to get him to pay for it, he left town with no forwarding address and had no money anyway, the next door neighbors repaired junker cars in their front yard and dragged property values down and the roof started leaking when it rained hard and three independent inspections by the roofers said the leaks would go on even if patched because it was simply time for new shingles . . . to the tune of $10,000. The guy finally sold for $340,000, which is $10,000 less than he paid and that was pre-commission of 6%. See? That's human nature. People don't like to talk about their failures and in real estate, with no industry-wide requirement for daily visibility, you never hear about this. Hell, even in the stock market with its full visibility . . . there is a famous quote from Barron's, a financial publication. The quote was published in November of 1987, one month after the crash of '87. It went like this: We have researched carefully what happened last month and we have concluded that there was no crash. We say this because we contacted money managers up and down Wall Street and asked them how they did. Without exception all of them said that they had sold all their stocks in June. We therefore conclude that since everyone on Wall Street had already sold in June, there could have been no one with any stock shares left to sell last month and thus there was no crash. Moral of the story: You can lose money in anything other than government bonds. They pay 5% pre tax and pre inflation. If you want more than that, there will be risk. Just because you don't hear of real estate losses doesn't mean they don't happen.

The overseas work thing provides not only tax sheltered income, but it also shields you from domestic TV and its professional advertising that extracts money from you for consumer non durables.

The BM's 4 methods listed above are a good top level description of how it can happen. Some elaboration might help. First and foremost, don't denigrate your own $30K. That 30K probably puts your net worth in the top 50% of the US, and maybe higher age adjusted (don't know your age). People DO NOT save in the US. This will generate a train wreck, coming as the baby boomers reach retirement, discover that the pension norms of their parents no longer exist, that Social Security pensions are very low and . . . son-of-a-gun, they have no savings. A LOT of people will be living their final years in trailer parks. Everyone is using their parents as a role model of what they expect in retirement, and that's just not going to be true. Pensions are disappearing every year. Gov't pensions will start to erode soon and that will be that. But in general your question is . . . how do you accumulate more money? There are lots of financial columnists around to answer this. Unfortunately for most BMs, the number one answer is to start early. Compound interest is an equation whose most powerful component is time. Given that answer being denied you, the other things you can do to improve is maximize the tax shelters of Roth IRA and I think the military has a TSP? US civilian employees have a TSP program that is equivalent to private industry's 401K. The temptation to "juice your returns" is what it is. Anything beyond 5% nowadays has risk. You have to endure some risk to address inflation. So . . . most rational advisors recommend an asset mixture of risk profiles that might generate a reliable 6-7%, given a percentage of your money in zero risk instruments and a percentage of your money in non-zero risk instruments. Gary is getting 9% on some carefully selected vehicles, but I'm sure he doesn't have 100% of his net worth in those so his non 9% money averages down his total return to something less, which is exactly as it should be. I'm not gonna point anyone at anything. I just want to be sure BMs know that they juice at their own risk. It's real easy to turn that $30K of yours into $15K without breaking a sweat. The old saying of Live Below Your Means is absolutely critical. This almost always translates into paying off your credit cards every single month. Credit card companies juice their returns at your expense. Don't let them. Okay, I'm done. I will say that if your goal is a $100,000 condo paid for in cash and you're starting at $30K, then to accumulate 70K in 6 yrs is NOT 70K/6 ($11,000) for your yearly savings. At 6% return it is $8000/yr required, assuming the 100K condo doesn't go up in price over those 6 yrs.

A point here worth mentioning. Gary is a sharp money guy (as evidenced by 9% while "professional money managers can't beat the S&P's 5% last year). As such he has stop loss orders in. For the uninitiated, this means he has a sell order (good-til-cancelled) embedded in his accounts that automatically triggers and activates if the price of his item falls to touch a particular price. He says 15% of the purchase price -- but I'm sure he meant 15% down from the purchase price. No way a Gary is going to eat 85% loss. Just a typo. Some nuances of this for the benefit of guys here. Stop losses can be moved. Gary's item is probably pretty stable in price and tosses off that 9% dividend each year (so hell, who needs price movement when you can get 9% in dividends). But you can do this with vehicles that move in price too. If you buy something that goes up, you can change your stop loss to follow it up, keeping it always at 85% of current price rather than purchase price. This is called a sliding stop because it slides upwards as the price of your shares move upwards. At no time will you lose more than 15% from your high, not just from your purchase. Another thing, and Gary maybe a heads up on this for you. Stop loss orders are not perfect. Many are set up as "touch" orders. This means if the item (stock, fund, etf, whatever) price moves down and "touches" the limit price you set, that triggers the sell order to activate. Well, in hugely volatile crash-type markets, the price of your item can fall so rapidly that it jumps over your limit price and that price is never "touched" and your order never activates and when you check price that night, or end of that week or whenever, it could have fallen way under your sale target and no sale ever happened. Not good. Another frown is the nature of the sale order that is activated. If your target price is "touched" and the sale order is activated, that order is a "market" order -- meaning the price you get that instant for your sale is the going rate for trading that exists that moment. In a major crash, there may be no buyers at your limit price and you might wind up selling for many points lower than the price you thought you would get. So these are caveats worth mentioning, but heads up guys, they are caveats that would be very rare and they are caveats that are not so debillitating that they render the concept invalid. Gary has done very wise things putting these stop losses into place. 99.9% of market environments will see those sale orders executed successfully very close to that desired price. So Gary's model is a good one to follow. Just be aware that it is not perfect. Nothing else is either.

Two comments. Alfred's post has the word "bloody" in it and that usually points at the UK, so I got nothing to say about his post or UK index funds, about which I know nothing. In the US, an index fund has a cost of about 0.2%/yr as management fee -- because there are no decisions to be made. Active management funds . . . 80% each year underperform the index, and it's a different 20% beating the index each year so you can't pick the manager who pretends to have an edge. Gary, as for ETFs or closed end funds, ain't nobody gonna argue with 9%. But if those were held outside a tax advantaged account you'd be paying taxes on every one of those dividends, and if the fund was holding the relevant stock for less than a year, you'll pay full tax rate and not the new, reduced dividend rate. That will eat into that 9%. Also, ETFs . . . in general when they pay a dividend like that, and you want it to compound, you have to reinvest the proceeds and there would be a commission on that. But I do think I've heard of some discount brokerages that will waive that (though I think it's usually the brokerage that is sponsering the ETF). Clearly if you have the ETF in an IRA the tax point is moot. Morningstar does some evaluation of funds as regards their "tax efficiency". Index funds do very well in those ratings because there is essentially never any trading. It's the buying and selling of stocks that generates taxable events. As for closed end funds, they have the advantage of being able to see a book value and comparing that to market price. The concept of over or underpriced becomes less subjective that way. But again, can't argue with 9%. I hope it continues.

I had forgotten this situation. I guess the board software changes is resurrecting some things. My original two suggestions should still stand, and given talk of firearms, especially item #1, no alcohol permitted while carrying. As for #2, selling it to someone else . . . I got no reason to want to bear bad news or good news and this is just perspective from one BM to another . . . so in general real estate is valued by And Only By the usual two criteria -- what someone is able to pay for it, and what someone is willing to pay for it. If there are no willing and qualified buyers for it at a quoted price, then it's not worth that quoted price. Might be worth it next week, or next month, or even tomorrow, but if there is no one offering that price today, then that's not what it's worth today. When you find a price that generates an offer, then you have found the current value of the property at that moment. If your price is higher than that price, you are speculating that someone will show up willing to pay it. Might not happen. You got a tough situation. My sympathy. I think your best solution is to be rid of that property. Hopefully you can be at an acceptable price.

Guys, Inflation historically is 3% long term. That is the number I use. No one knows for sure what it will be. The various central banks around the world have learned over a period of 50 yrs and presumably manage it better and maybe can get down under the historical 3%, but history does not include the depletion of global oil supply to spike energy costs higher. I use 3%. No one knows what it will be. Social Security (or pensions at age 62 or 65 or whatever, for the Brits) is a very important question in the projections. Firecalc.com does have a SS input and it is inflation adjusted. You just need to go to ssa.gov and work out what your value will be to insert in that box. Personally, I use the full amount I expect for my work history. Note that it will NOT be the amount you would get if you worked til you were 62. That's an effect of "early retirement". You stop putting money into SS early. So you won't get the $20K numbers from SS. Maybe half or less. You will get full Medicare, but that's a different issue. Healthcare costs and mechanism are enormously important. They drive your personal inflation rate in Pattaya, as does currency exchange. Tax rates should not be the focus of too much worry, if you are funding this from assets and not from pension. If from assets, you have many maneuvers available to get money moved to Roth IRAs. Every time there is a down year in the market that costs you money and gives you a "negative income", you can move money to the Roth IRA and erase that capital loss of that year, and then move more to erase your personal exemption and deduction and then stop and move no more (because moving money to Roth's is a taxable event (unless there is a loss that year to shelter it)). Everytime this happens you move more and more to a Roth. Then when you have good years in the market, the Roth grows tax free. When you have to start tapping the Roth, that's tax free income every year. If you are funding everything from a pension, you're helpless and taxes will eat your pension influx. The long term rate of return is modeled in Firecalc. It is 7% for equities and about 4% for bonds. There is nothing you can do to know your future rate of return for sure. The goal is to do early retirement At Exactly The Right Time. Too early and you run out of money before death. Too late and you drive your blood pressure higher sitting in your workplace hating it -- and high blood pressure takes years off your life. From a money perspective, there are several factors in waiting: 1) You have fewer years to fund from retirement money (non salary) 2) You put more in Soc Sec and get a higher pension from Soc Sec when the time comes. 3) You presumably save more money. Note that waiting, however, does NOT guarantee you will have more in your retirement account on which to retire. The reason this is so is the market can move down as likely as up. If you wait and it moves down during your wait, you have less in your retirement acct. No way to know. My plan is to do a bit of consulting and writing in retirement. I plan to travel a month and a half each year and some could be for consulting. My income will be tiny compared to pre retirement, but not zero. This reduces the yearly living expenses -- and it also adds to the eventual Soc Sec number. As for your budget in retirement NUMBER ONE: ignore the talk of 70% of your pre-retirement salary. That is crap. Total crap. Your living expenses should be way under that number. It's not a matter of not paying for work clothes or gas for the commute. It's that you don't pay taxes on income anymore because you don't have any unsheltered income. Pensions are taxed, so this statement doesn't apply to them. Regardless, work out your living budget. Do not try any crap rules of thumb of 70% of previous salary. Those rules are wrong.

Good find Zeus. I like the layout and the approach. But. Some significant nits to pick. You would have to do a lot of composite computation offline to use this because quoting a tax rate . . . doesn't address the reality that pretty much all Americans (anyway) have some of their networth in non taxable vehicles. Same thing is true of a composite rate of return among all your various investment vehicles. You are right about Soc Sec being worrisome, but with that voting block my presumption is it will be there at some magnitude greater than zero. No way to add that here, and no you can't just cut expenses by that amount because SS increases by COLA adjustment each year. It needs to be a seperate entry. Not inclined to rain on this parade tho. There is good stuff here.

This stuff is like a boiler room. Word gets out that XXXX is the price and if you don't move NOW, the price will be XXXX + YYYY next week and even more thereafter. It's a technique that works. It doesn't have to work on you. It just has to work on someone. That someone, if he's not walking around with a net worth of at least $10 million, could have his life destroyed by a scam like this. Truth is, as with all "investment", is that there will always be another one along in a few days. If someone then says that this is a chance of a decade, well, someone will say that about the next opportunity next week, too. And who knows, that next opportunity could be the same condo, being resold by someone -- for less than he paid.

Nod. Maybe we could negotiate a quantity discount.

Re: baht bus I actually did sit down and figure out what the baht bus means if you configure yourself such that you never even hesitate to use it during the course of the day to go various places. I live here in the US in a place that is about 1.5 miles from the nearest convenience store and maybe 5-10 miles from a mall or Walmart or Target. If one excludes work, one drives somewhere, anywhere on a weekend maybe 2-3 times per day. So presuming the same transport habits here's what I come up with. 3 trips per day. Let's split the difference and say 1 trip cost you 20 baht and 2 were shorter and cost 10 baht. Each way. 1 (trip) X 2 (each way) X 20 = 40. 2 (trips) X 2 (each way) X 10 = 40 so that's 80 baht a day. If you walk a lot, it will be less. If you can't bear to be in one place for long, it will be more. If you do this every single day then 80 X 365 = 29200 baht per year, assuming you take no vacations elsewhere so that you're not using the bahtbus. This is about 789 US dollars per year for local transport in Pattaya in retirement. I suspect it is very pessimistic in that some days you won't go to the big C or anywhere particularly that you cannot walk. And for me, I'd expect to be out of the country 4-6 wks per year so that would be 42 days not paying a bahtbus. But contrast that $789 / yr with owning a car or motorbike, its fuel, its insurance, its liability risk, its danger overall, its need for parking. I'm sure it is convenient at times, though, or guys wouldn't bother with them. Anyway, my guess is 29,000 baht per year for local transport if you choose to ride . . . practically on a whim.

I have another tidbit. Re: Saving money each year and letting it accumulate to pay for medical costs sometime in the future -- thereby self insuring. In the US, an option available for people under 65 who are retiring early and have no health insurance bridge in place til 65 (when Medicare kicks in) are High Deductible Plans That Qualify for HSAs (Health Savings Accts). Only high deductible plans allow HSAs. The HSA is what was described above. You save up money to pay for medical issues in the future. You do have some top end coverage, but the "high deductible" is $5,000 or $10,000 or higher. Meaning, if you go to the doc to get blood pressure pills or maybe a shot of penicillin to deal with an STD, you're paying that out of your pocket because it will not add up to $5K or $10K. But if you have a heart attack and have to be in ICU for two weeks, you will not be ruined. The insurance policy will kick in beyond $10K. Now then, the HSA that covers this rolls the money over year to year and Every Contribution Is Tax Deductible. This is a nice plus. Things that are tax deductible should be thought of as having a 25-30% government subsidy on cost. So this opens up a new question for investigation. Will any of these high deductible plans cover us in LOS post move. Or if they will cover for "vacation", how much time is a vacation. Maybe we move, visit the US for a week or two a year and say we are still residents of the US and merely on long vacations in LOS. Shrug. My understanding is the high deductible plans still have the pre-existing conditions limits. Now that I think of this, I think I'll make some phone calls tomorrow and investigate, and I'll pass along my findings. Heads up, the plans differ from state to state so make sure what you want to have happen can happen in the zero tax state where you'll claim residence.

I had no idea that the UK did not have an equivalent mutual fund array, especially index funds. Make no mistake, there are mutual funds in the US charging management fees and front end loads of 5%, but they are becoming few because the "no loads" have been so thoroughly studied and found to perform the same. The crushing study was the one that showed 80% of managed funds underperform the S&P500, and those 80% differ year to year and indicate no one really has a "knack". There is a handful of managed funds that provide some value. TRowePrice and Fidelity have a few funds that charge < 1% management fees and in effect provide you with diversification and asset allocation in that they spread their money around industries and they always have both bond positions as well as stock positions. There are other fund families (Putnam, Oppenheimer, Franklin Templeton etc) that do the same, but in general they have all had the management fees forced down by the realities of the business. As for ETFs, I'm not an enthusiast. A full 35% of long term gains from equity positions derive from dividend distributions -- and those are compounded only if you reinvest. Dividend reinvestment is commission free (in the US) for mutual funds, but for ETFs it would be just like any new ETF share purchase and commissions would be applied. No free lunches.

Firecalc is excellent. Some very sophisticated folks have contributed to what it does. Go to the Advanced tab and you'll see what flexibility it has. Reality is, for a typical stock/bond mix, firecalc is going to tell you 4% is the magic number. It is. A lot of study has gone into this. It has been challenged and examines extensively. Successful 30 yr series reduce sharply in number as you move even a little bit beyond 4%. But note carefully that if you add some future Soc Security influx at age 62, that magic number becomes 4.5%. That 0.5% is huge. It means a lot of living expenses added to your lifestyle. The same effect is true for the Soc Security case. As you try even a little bit above 4.5%, the success numbers collapse. The biggest value of this tool is to tell you unequivocally what would have worked in the past, and because the sensitivity is so great and just a little bit more than 4.5% starts to fail so much, the future would likely have to vary a great deal from the past for 4.5% to cease to be true.

My understanding of how it would work in the US (where they are probably more sensitive to such things than elsewhere) is: 1) Fat will mean nothing and is not a pre existing condition that precludes coverage for anything. 2) Smoking probably isn't either. I suspect there are insurance plans where it WOULD preclude coverage for something, but not for most insurers. They will simply jack up your premium in general because you smoke -- but they won't deny coverage of anything related to it. You'll have to ask. 3) The eye won't be covered. That's pre-existing. Might raise your premium a little, but this is NOT a pre-existing condition that will deny you coverage. You tell us after you do it. My understanding is very few ins. companies go beyond the questionnaire. I have heard of one asking for a physical if you have not had one in a long time, but I have also heard of no such thing req'd, so it varies from ins. company to company. One thing that is important to understand is that your medical database exists. Perhaps this doesn't apply to you, but for others . . . if you lie on the questionnaire and you have a problem related to a pre-existing condition, before they send you a check to pay for your bills they will likely do research. In other words, you can think you're covered but you may not be. If you have something questionable in your history, tell them and know up front if you're to be covered. If you're not, don't do business with them -- or plan to self insure that particular matter. As above, your chronically ill parents are not a pre-existing condition (unless you have some genetic disease like Huntington's -- that might be an underwriting shutdown). Excellent thinking and you're not the first. Many generic early retirement websites have a lot of folks doing this very thing. They want to retire from their jobs, they are not sure they can get health insurance re: pre-existing condx, so they go get the policy before quitting -- being sure all pre-existing info is revealed, and THEN they go to their regular doc and find out if anything new is wrong. In the US you have to apparently be careful of this because both insurance carriers will try to claim the other one is primary -- but that won't apply to your case since one policy only covers you in Thailand. Keep us posted on any new discoveries you make.

Steve, don't presume this is a bad thing. Your houses are worth $XX and you can collect $YY rent from them in total. YY/XX is your yield. That yield number will compare to available interest from treasury bonds, or dividends from Exxon stock or CDs from the bank. Make sure when you calculate YY that you include the number of months per year the houses are empty, the interest portion of any remaining mortgage payments, insurance on the house, property taxes. All that deducts from collected rent. The result is what you divide by the XX value that you could put in your pocket, after all broker's commissions and repair expenses before the sale. The result of that division . . . is what you compare to CD rates etc. And keep in mind you get that CD rate (or treasury rate, or Exxon dividend rate) without lifting a finger to fix things when they break, without mowing the grass, without putting ads in the paper looking for renters when it is vacant, and without putting in new carpet when a previous renter trashes the place and disappears with no money to pay for it.