autonomous_unit

I've been here a while, and have decided it doesn't really suit me. For my wife, I moved here. If she didn't have to be here, I would not feel any desire to return at all. In fact, if I hadn't fallen in with her, I probably would have never considered traveling to SEA a first time!

I do feel like I've grown and changed a lot here, but I'll never be sure how much that was due to Thailand and how much it was just due to aging from 29 to 34 years or living (anywhere) abroad! I've also learned that I could handle being an expat, but I don't much like the tropics nor the developing-nation vibe for my home environment.

Unlike some of the folks here, I never felt any real hatred for the western life we left, even with plenty to criticize there as well...

Just recently, I've taken a new US job and am now drafting plans for the family extraction. Who knows where it will take us in the long term...

That's good to hear, Mobi. Here's hoping you'll soon start to notice the positive effects of all that oxygen on your general health!

Hmm... Most of the Thai students I knew in the US (through my wife) were on these sponsored scholarships... I got the impression there were a handful of such students at each of the top-tier and many second-tier universities. I only met a few parent-supported students who moved at the periphery of these groups. I guess the scholarship students are a pretty tight-knit group, as they seemed to be sent over in waves organized by a Thai government agency which consolidated all the activity from multiple sponsoring organizations.

If you think eight years is a long work obligation, you should see how long it is when they sponsor both undergraduate and graduate studies back-to-back! The general formula in the past was two years of work for each year of sponsored study.

My wife was a grad student in the US when we met. We had a frank discussion very early on about the fact that she'd probably have to go back to Thailand once she graduated, because she was there on a scholarship and had to go back to work for the sponsoring organization. I honestly didn't know what to make of it, and we decided to just see what happened as we got to know each other better... Here I am, starting on my fifth year living in Bangkok now.

Easy weekend trips to the Sierra Nevada.

If you are looking for "bang for buck" you could try assembling a custom PC from parts?

In my experience, AMD is much better performance for the same money in the low-mid range. If I were shopping for your situation, I'd be looking for a basic everything-integrated micro-ATX motherboard that has socket AM2+/AM2 support and a Phenom triple or quad-core processor. A whole system would be just: CPU, motherboard, RAM, disks, case and power supply. The motherboard would have on-board graphics, SATA controller, ethernet, USB, etc. I've had luck finding boards with DVI output for attaching my LCD. Almost all such boards will still have a PCIe graphics slot in case you later want to install a faster graphics adapter. The main trade-off with micro-ATX is fewer PCI slots, but who needs them in a low-budget system?

Even when shopping for parts locally in Bangkok, I've found it extremely useful to use the "power search" function on www.newegg.com (USA reseller) to do research on available boards and features. Browse to motherboards/AMD CPU support/power search; then you can select different motherboard features and do a search to see how many results come back. There are so many parts on the market, I'd be lost without this sort of data. Of course, availability may differ, but it helps to have a short list of desired parts.

If there are budget issues, you could consider a socket AM2 board (without AM2+ support), as the Phenom works in both. The downside is you would be stuck with DDR2 memory speeds for the life of the system, whereas you could install DDR3 with the AM2+ bus support. Of course, DDR2 is cheaper, so that may be sufficient for this system... it seems to me you should be able to get a system with Phenom quad-core, 2-4 GB of RAM, micro-ATX board, case+PSU, and one or two SATA disks for your budget.

Given the types of load you are describing, several modest cores will give you more system throughput than a higher-clocked dual core. You're the perfect customer for lots of cores, really. I think most people recommend installing the 64-bit variant of LInux these days, as the "compatibility" support for running a smattering of 32-bit applications has improved, and the base system will be faster. This 32-bit issue only matters if you need to run 3rd-party binaries rather than the pre-built programs from the Linux distrbution.

By self-selected, I meant a statistical bias in the groups reporting here versus on the male-oriented thread that started this discussion. Do the typical western men and women in Thailand come from (statistically/demographically) different social backgrounds back in the west? Perhaps the originating social circumstances which "create" female expats/wanderers are different than those for their male counterparts?

My experiences are often counter to what I see reported on these forums by other men. It makes me feel sometimes that I am from a different "west" and sometimes visiting a different "Thailand" entirely! But, other times there is a lot of commonality...

This may sound like a stupid question, but do you scratch it?

I've had a relative with sores that the dermatologist could not explain. They took biopsies and such, thinking it was an infection, and finally cured it with anti-anxiety medications... it was in fact some unknown original trigger that was then made into a chronic rash and wound from relentless scratching. My relative did not really acknowledge that they were scratching themselves like that and causing the damage! It really needed to be forced "hands off" to have time to heal.

I hope my reply isn't off topic...

...when they introduce me to someone, "This is my friend, she lives in THAILAND!!" And yes when they find out that I am married to a Thai they are very intrigued...

That's usually been my experience as a guy going back to the US, among family and coworkers/business contacts. Nobody has abruptly mentioned the sex stereotypes though I've had a few suspicious pauses when the topic is accidentally introduced among strangers, for example when I am asked for ID and all I have is a passport (or Thai drivers license). The most direct nudge-nudge, wink-wink comments I've heard were from men en route to Thailand who falsely assumed I was going for the same reasons they were going.

I am curious to see how this thread goes as far as any women reporting experiences of the sex stereotyping. Is it possible that those reporting so far are self-selected to have contact with a different demographic in the west, compared to many of the men who suffer the heavy stereotyping?

My opinion of my hometown area of California dropped a peg over Christmas, when my wife went to the supermarket with my father for some last minute shopping, and they apparently encountered some hate-filled older woman who stunned my father with her weird accusations and curses towards my wife. It made me realize how different the academic/research/hi-tech circles I live in are versus general middle class suburbia. I am used to being the provincial, untraveled person in the group, rather than the most worldly one...

I don't know Ubuntu, but with Fedora it is easy to boot an install off of the HDD by creating a GRUB entry with the kernel and initrd.img from the network-based installer media (usually a small USB disk image file for writing to thumb drives called "bootdisk.img"). I've done this on some small laptops with no CD or floppy available. Just loopback mount the installer image and pull out the kernel and initrd files, consulting the syslinux or similar boot description if you need to remind yourself what the boot entry should contain. I do this routinely to reinstall an existing Linux host, and have never faced the problem of starting with a Windows host...

In your case, it might be easiest to pull the hard drive and initialize it via another machine or a USB housing? You could just format and image a full installation that you know has the right hardware support enabled, e.g. the right storage drivers in the initrd. You could try to adjust a full install for the machine's hardware using mkinitrd to add unusual modules... or, just initialize the HDD with GRUB and the install kernel+initrd and then boot the installer after you replace the drive in the original machine.

I don't think I can give a full grub tutorial, so you'd need to learn this part yourself... the easiest way would be to use a system installer to initialize the drive from another computer, e.g. perhaps mapping the entire drive as a virtual disk under VMware and booting the installer in the VMware guest to allow it to partition and initialize MBR etc.

On the other hand, do you know for sure how long you will be in one place? Much of the market is cyclic and buying makes sense if you will stay put for a full cycle or you can get lucky and enter on a down point in the market. Some people would say we're already at such a low, while others expect it to decline further before it starts recovering...

We bought a house a few years ago in the Bangkok area. Prior to that, we were renting a modest 2 BR condo and feeling that it was "expensive" at 20k/month. Part of our motive for moving to the house was to have more space and a garden.

Now, due to the economy and market changes, I could easily imagine we would lose 2M THB or more if we had to sell the house now. This equates to about 55k/month for the last three years that we could have spent on renting a nicer condo or house in a more convenient location than where we purchased, still allowing us to buy our house today for the same overall cash budget. Maybe it is a wash, since we do like our house. But maybe if we were untethered today, we would be considering different options based on the past few years of moving around and sampling more areas.

At our age (mid thirties), we aren't sure what the future will hold or when we might find it is time to move, whether in Thailand or internationally. Had I known the market situation, I probably would have waited and kept renting, to keep our options open. But if we would have gotten into the market ten years earlier, it would be a different story as we would be looking at gains rather than losses on the property, and therefore a comparable rent budget of zero for the intervening years.

I suppose this ought to be made into a pinned topic, as it seems to be repeating frequently in the past few years.

My impression is that when you actually pay lawyers to give a legal opinion they will NOT say that telecommuting is allowed without a work permit. They didn't when I paid them, and I've never heard of anyone else experiencing differently here. There is no law on the books nor other precedence to protect you, so the practicing lawyer will not put themself at risk by suggesting it. If you ask for a bullet-proof legal solution, you will hear what was recommended here: start a company and operate it properly.

There seem to be a lot of bar-stool advisers who will tell you it is OK, wink wink, nudge nudge. Several members here have had long drawn out episodes where they attempted to get some ruling or "official letter" from the department of labor to bless their telecommuting plans, but as far as we know, not one has succeeded there either. Even the Thai officials will only give bar stool advice to skip the work permit and tax, because they don't want to be bothered with this complicated corner case that requires thinking outside the standard forms and procedures. But none will put that advice into formal writing and stake their jobs on it... so the advice to stay under the radar surely applies if you choose this illegal approach. Nobody can give you a guarantee of your chances of staying out of trouble with this approach, so your guess is as good as any of ours...

It IS legitimate and possible to create a Thai company and get a work permit with only overseas revenue sources. I know because I have done it. However, all of the other issues and irritations with legal shareholder structures, Thai employees, accounting, restricted areas of business, and so on are still applicable regardless of where your revenue comes from. If you are physically present in Thailand and doing work, you still are subject to the same rules no matter where your clients are situated.

6. Proprioception

also known as the sense that most people misunderstand and misinterpret

I guess I'm making this my little cause...

Mobi (and others): the mask isn't fun but it is your life saver! One of the biggest problems with sleep apnea patients is a denial of how serious it is, because the effects accumulate over years rather than killing you the next morning. It's rather like alcohol chronically damaging a liver in that way...

My father is getting a lot of benefit from his CPAP machine, in spite of echoing many of the complaints and "it just won't work for me" statements on this thread. It takes some practice and patience to learn to accommodate this permanent change in your life, but it has very practical and positive benefits.

Mobi even described how the mask at the sleep clinic allowed him to sleep the rest of the night without further incident. To then rule out the treatment after the home trial doesn't make sense. Push them and ask why the mask at the clinic worked and this one did not! Maybe it is ill-fitting, or the various pressure settings are wrong.

My dad also has prostate problems along with his diabetes and apnea. He complained about getting "hooked back up" after night trips to the bathroom, but then he also started to notice that he didn't make as many trips once he started getting regular and healthy sleep. He still has problems some nights, for example when he throws his arm across his face in the night and pushes the mask sideways to break the seal. My mother can usually nudge him back into working order if this happens, since the mask starts making a lot more noise when air leaks around the sides...

-Yes, well lI will be working in the office also. I will be managing, basically directing the team. But again, my paycheck is in america, no money is ever a Thai income, so in reality I am not working for anyone here, I am working for my company in America. This still requires a work permit, seems strange to me? I am not working for a Thai company..

This seems a clear cut case where a work permit is required by law. It does not matter who you "work for" or how the payment is processed but "where you work". Unlike some of the telecommuter scenarios where people advise just letting it slide and not drawing attention, I think actually going into an office and managing Thai staff would put you at undue risk. Anyone (e.g. someone who decides they don't like you) could notify the authorities and have you arrested, fined, deported, etc. People are caught doing this in construction, bars, restaurants, and offices every year, if you can believe statistics and news items posted here in the past.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any way for you to get a work permit to work here for a foreign (US based) employer. That is why I suggested that incorporation is a reasonable route. Form a company to do this outsourcing, make yourself an employee with work permit, and send contract fees each month from the US company to the Thai company to pay your salary as well as the other employees you would manage. It is up to you whether you keep being an employee of the US company as well (for other worldwide work you do and/or benefits package), but legally you need a work permit to cover the work activities you perform while in Thailand such as managing this office. This work permit would require a legitimate Thai company structure and position for you to undertake this work with "reasonable" compensation by local standards.

You probably need to talk to someone like Sunbelt for legal advice about your specific business area, both to gauge exact startup costs and to understand any specific rules which might apply in your case. The details are important to satisfy all the various rules for the labor department etc.

If I read correctly, you are here via a non-O marriage visa. You can make your wife a 51% shareholder in the company to satisfy the Thai majority control requirements for a regular Thai company, or go the Amity-treaty route perhaps... I did the former as I have zero concerns entrusting the business to her (in fact, I wouldn't be able to manage the day to day operations without her as my Thai language skills are very poor). You would still need some other shareholders besides the two of you, but they could each hold "1 share" which could be as small as you like, e.g. 1%, 0.1%!

In the end, is it really worth setting up? does it have to be done? or should I just be a contractor based setup, they pay their own taxes, insurance, basically they contracting for american company who is contacting them from overseas?

I think it is necessary if you want to be present in and manage the office yourself without serious legal risks. If you were content to be a non-acting, absent shareholder and let someone else be paid to manage things, then you would have many more options as far as how the workers are employed.

I asked this a few years ago and gave up. Since then, I have seen several around Pantip on different floors but never inquired as to pricing or models.

I decided that I didn't really need the smaller case and I now stick with a mini or mid-tower with a micro-ATX motherboard. Those are selling in enough volume to get some pretty reasonable prices here, whereas I am afraid most of the lower volume stuff is highly marked up compared to what I was accustomed to paying in the US.

I've also become a little disenfranchised as I realized that Shuttle never intends to provide maintenance parts or upgrades, so you are stuck replacing an entire barebones system any time the mainboard fails or becomes obsolete. I also eventually encountered power/heat load problems with a system I was using as a remote server with multiple hard drives stuffed into it, so I would hate to see how much worse that would have been here in the tropics versus the temperate climate where it lives!

But, I recall seeing one in the Jedi shop on the ground floor recently, and also several in a shop on one of the center aisles upstairs (physically above IT City either one or two floors up... I cannot think how else to describe that part of the building).

The real question, I think, is whether you want the limited liability structure for managing the employees and operations. Also, whether you intend to actually "manage" them yourself while in Thailand (not clear from your posts). If the latter, you need a work permit and a company would be the easiest way. If you will truly be hands-off and just want to outsource, then of course you could leave it up to a Thai to provide the outsourcing services however they see fit, whether sole-proprietorship, partnership, or corporation.

It doesn't cost that much to incorporate and run a small Thai company with legitimate Thai employees. The ongoing costs would be some mixture of VAT on the service payments from abroad (if applicable), income tax on employee salaries, social security tax, and accounting and auditing fees for the company. Not to mention other operating costs like facilities, utilities, etc. which ought to be similar regardless of the company structure.

You can capitalize a small company and operate it with close to zero net profits, for example by paying dividends back to the shareholders or by employing the shareholders as directors etc. You just need to have a set of company objectives which are consistent with the way you will operate.

I just wanted to add: if it were VAT they were talking about, it is true that it is a percentage of the invoiced amount and not related to expenses or profit. But, the Thai VAT rate as far as I know is 7% and nothing would make it reach 15%, and as I mentioned in my previous post there are situations where no VAT is due.

No matter what, something seems confused in what your accountant is communicating.

I looked into this very seriously and in the end it scared me off. One must have 4 full time Thai nationals as employees even if you don't need even one (this may be related to getting a work permit). ...

Yes, the employees are the main (and non-trivial) overhead I mentioned. Paying salaries and taxes for mostly redundant staff is annoying, but can be quantified... if you're trying to telecommute and charging western-scale service fees, the costs of local staff are not as prohibitive as if you were trying to run a local business that had to survive on lower local fee scales too. Certainly they can be compared to tax levels you might see operating in some western countries, as a percentage of gross receipts. If you're going to have to slice of X% anyway, does it matter to you whether it goes to one country's tax department or another, or to a lucky employee who won the "salary for holding down a chair" lottery?

Still waiting for people to tell us what they do when they get a new credit card (after the old one expires) of the kind that requires you to call from your US phone number of record to auto validate, and you call from Thailand. No takers? How do you handle this?

For the past four years, I've been traveling in and out of the US roughly 4-6 times per year, so I've just let cards and other mail pile up until my next trip. I've never experienced a situation where I couldn't activate a card from whatever phone I used to call them, whether my Thai mobile, or a random office phone borrowed during a trip. In some cases, they route me to a live person to ask me more authenticating questions before completing the activation. A few times, I've even bothered to activate them from my family member's home which has the actual address and phone number of record on the accounts.

I do benefit from the fact that any unsolicited calls to the number on the accounts will be handled by my relatives, who selectively inform the caller that I am out of the country and take contact information and suggest that the caller contact me directly via my email address (which is also registered with the account).

Is it possible that the accountant is talking about VAT on service fees?

It is true that VAT is collected on the gross receipts and not net profits, and if your receipts were subject to VAT and the foreign payer is not participating in (and splitting) the VAT collection as for a normal Thai-Thai exchange of service, then you would have to withhold all of it.

But, foreign sourced service fees are not subject to VAT unless the work product will be connected to Thailand. Examples I've heard include "design work" that is sent back overseas for consumption (design service not subject to VAT) and "design work" sent overseas for manufacturing and then the products imported for sale in Thailand (design service subject to VAT).

I had submerged wisdom teeth that were growing forwards instead of up, so I had them out surgically when I was about 20 years old. They had to cut holes in the gums and jaw to get down to them before they could get to the part where they smash them into rubble and remove them.

I opted for an intravenous demerol treatment that more or less slows you down and prevents you from remembering, while still leaving you conscious enough to interact with the doctor and avoid hazards like choking and not breathing while they are busy in your mouth. They gave me laughing gas to make me less concerned about the I.V. needle going in, then valium via the I.V. to make me less concerned about the demerol trip, and then the demerol itself via I.V. I highly recommend this for anyone who is concerned they might punch out the surgeon during a fully-awake treatment.

I tend to be resistant to the local injected pain-killers and such (I seem to metabolize them very quickly), and sure enough I still have memories of waking up mid-procedure and trying to grimace against the clamps holding my mouth open. It didn't take long for them to realize I needed a second dose of the demerol and all of the oral shots because the pain had dumped me back into consciousness...

I'm pretty sure I've made statements such as the original poster's here too. Specifically, that everything here in Thailand seems like a bad hot dog with a slightly different color or flavor additive.

I've come to realize the main problem is that I knew where to find things in the US and I don't know that here. The US is full of terrible food, but also has amazing "ethnic" foods everywhere when you know where to go. We would never go to the supermarket for kielbasa, but rather to the small Polish deli where they were hand-made. Similarly, we got hand-made Italian sausage from our favorite deli and not a supermarket selling factory-packed junk. My grandmother would bring a satchel of her local deli's sausage from the midwest when she visited us in California.

I miss a powerful Italian sausage that just permeates your being with anise (licorice) and garlic flavors. I am not sure if it was authentic Italian or "Italian-American" but it was good! I also miss linguica, a peppery and vinegary Portuguese sausage that reminds me a bit of Isaan sausages.

I've just realized, almost everything I've said above also applies to beer in the US, except the anise and garlic part.

I sometimes ask myself if I should switch to CentOS instead of Fedora, just to get off the bleeding edge for my servers. However, I find that on the balance, I still want the latest stuff on my laptop, and Fedora is very good for that. Over the years, I've been learning to tolerate the default Fedora configs so I have fewer and fewer post-install steps to tweak the system the way I require it (along with imaging over my home directory space). I've been optionally adding the livna or atrpms repositories on some systems (the former for general media-playing functons, and the latter particularly when I want an easy MythTV install). Since I have to tread water with Fedora for one machine, it is easier to keep upgrading all hosts rather than to start having to manage two different distributions and release cycles.

I've been running Fedora since version 3, if I remember correctly, after many years of Red Hat. I have a small personal server I've upgraded online from Fedora 4 all the way to Fedora 8 over the years (using yum). I just remotely updated my last Fedora 7 straggler to Fedora 8 last week, in preparation for the next cycle, where I start to have a mixture of Fedora 8 and 9...

On the whole, I think Fedora is making nice progress as a product and a community and I see no reason to abandon it, unless I wanted to stabilize and freeze a server with low maintenance, in which case I see CentOS as essentially a stabilized, long-term Fedora branch. The only non-Fedora systems I still play with are OpenWRT for my internet connection! Truth be told, I wish there were Fedora builds for those platforms too, in which case I'd go the effort to get routers with disk or a larger flash memory area!

Wait a minute, you think 'foreign income' means 'baht'??? I get paid in USD, not Thai baht and it is direct deposited into my US Bank. Since I do not get paid Thai baht, I have no earned income for Thailand. Otherwise I would have to pay Thai taxes. I have a reliable CPA that has been doing my taxes for me each year since I have moved overseas. She has signed on the dotted line just as I have and is willing to 'go to bat' with me if I ever would happen to be audited. She has been doing taxes for over 30 years and for many expats so I am sure she is fully aware of the tax laws. By the way, 'foreign earned income' refers to any monies (US or foreign) made while working outside of the USA. Mind you there are other restrictions that must be met before you can use the foreign income form.. (i.e. residing outside the USA for 330 or more of the year)

I'm afraid this may go off the deep end and repeat previous threads, but I'll try explaining my thinking once... I think I've explained myself carefully below after several edits and "previews" so in the interest of thread continuity I will not reply further on this tangential topic. Feel free to agree or disagree, but at least you can read what you're disagreeing with.

No, I do not think the unit of currency or the payment locations have anything to do with the "foreign-earned" designation. By the same measure that US dollars into a US account are not US-earned in this hypothetical scenario, they are instead Thai-earned solely because the earner was in Thailand while performing the work! In my opinion, you cannot perform the test such that your income is "nowhere-earned".

The problem for telecommuting expats here in Thailand is that the Thai revenue authorities do not seem to want to be bothered to tax Thai-earned income that is not paid by Thai employers to Thai employees with Tax IDs who do all the proper filings and estimated payments. There is no self-reporting mechanism like there is in the US for people with US-earned income from foreign employers. However, the actual Thai laws about working in Thailand do not excuse this situation... the tax and labor bureaucracies are simply not setup to support it.

Now, the question is: do US citizens as expats in Thailand purger themselves if they claim the foreign-earned income exclusion while also not paying Thai tax on those earnings? Also: is it legal for them to have Thai-earned income that is not being reported to the Thai authorities and taxed by local rules (and without holding a work permit)?

Some of us, who you may choose to brand as conservative or naive, feel that this is an illegal and unethical scenario on both counts. The only solution I could find to address all of these issues to my own satisfaction was to accept the overhead in creating a Thai company, getting a work permit and Tax ID, structuring my work via sub-contract and paying my Thai income taxes and claiming my exclusion with the IRS. It would have been much cheaper for me to be a virtual US employee with US-earned income, and "stay under the radar" here in Thailand. But after getting expensive legal advice from several sources, I did not feel comfortable taking that risk, nor did the US company that was purchasing my work. Your mileage may vary.

I would agree with the comment that it may be illegal to avoid taxes in both countries. This is tied up in the same endless debate we have here about telecommuter status, but the US foreign-earned income exclusion only applies to (wait for it)... foreign-earned income. You are making a declaration to the IRS with form 2555 that you have not told the other country (or countries) that your earnings are not subject to their tax. So, to have excluded income by IRS standards would require that the income be taxed in another country, in my opinion. I would not want to risk an audit situation or back-taxes if I fell in the gray area!

Due to our experiences with disappearing mail in Bangkok, I use a family member's home address as a permanent address for US-based financial correspondence, but when I speak to the bank staff I tell them I am living abroad but using this for reliable mail forwarding. They have been pleased with this, as they really only want a mail destination where they can legally deliver notices related to accounts etc. I've also found that my banks are happy with high-quality scan/print copies of documents and signature pages, so I can get my family to scan forms and upload them for me, and I can scan and download a signed copy and print at their house, to be popped in local mail to banks. This helps get fast turnaround times on some forms of paperwork...

I got a Thai driver's license when I moved here, so I use my passport number in lieu of a driver's license when opening new US accounts etc. I've even opened online accounts just specifying "US Passport 12345..." in the field where they want a driver's license number. If possible, I select "other" ID type on forms and enter the same information.

On the advice of a tax-preparer, I also use my US permanent address in the address block on my tax returns, but I use my real Thai address on my form 2555 copy, and claim the bona-fide residence test since my first full year here. I filed a state return once for the first year abroad, when I severed my residence and had to pay partial-year residence taxes.

The one thing that annoys is the FVAP rule: I have to keep registering to vote via my last residence address in California, rather than being able to consolidate all addresses and use my permanent address. I don't like the fact that some random voter-related mailings might wind up going to that address and into the hands of strangers.