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

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 che

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

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

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 e

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

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. S

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 ad

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 f

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

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 n

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

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 w

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

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 ch

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 expens

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

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 a