Hadrian1

Do you like Thai food? Try different dishes and if you look on the internet, there are many places where you can learn to cook it and cheaply too. When I was in Thailand, I woke up every day and felt glad and priviliged to be in such an interesting place. It's so easy to meet Thais or Westerners or even the odd Korean or Japanese and other nationalities there. You have to make a bit of an effort though but less than in most places. I've lived in London and Brussels - neither comes close to BKK.

Don't listen to me.....but.....if I had to buy one of those then it would possilby be the Eur. Strngthening economy and interest rates are going up. It should get quite a big stronger v the dollar in the longer term.

The yen has got stronger over the last month. It must be a typo....

Regarding the OU......In the past, you had to be resident in the UK or if I remember correctly, be a member of the British armed services overseas. This was the case up until a 2001 and maybe later. I did however know of one guy who was completing his OU degree in Thailand without notifying the OU of his whereabouts. You had to attend certain seminars every year somewhere in the UK. Check to see what the situation is like now or maybe somebody here can help. The situation looks like it may have changed.....possibly due to the internet? I suppose video conferencing etc might allow a student to be resident anywhere in the world. I know that the OU degrees are highly thought of and their learning materials are very good.

This is a really interesting thread for me. I am considering opeing a Thai restaurant in the UK. There isn't one withing 30 miles of my desired location. Could any of you guys give me any sort of suggestions regarding the ideal menu (for westerners mainly) and maybe type of decor? People around here are very much into their Indian and Chinese food. I think they need another alternative. I would be greatfull for any feed-back.

If you are reasonably intelligent and like and are interested in people and of course, willing to put in the effort for preparation then you should be ok. Of course, it helps if you are not too introverted. Like all skills, it's something which can be learnt and you get better at with time. Some take to it more easily than others. But, like the above posters say, you should take a course beforehand and go from there.

I think that "minced" is Brit-speak for the North American "ground beef."

Thanks for that Peace. I know we have digressed a little from Thai havn't we.....but cooking is about experimenting and fusion isn't it. I am looking at the Larb presently as I love Chilli. It just seems an oriental version of it don't you think so? Thanks for the info on Cocoa. Cocoa really has made my Chillies that much better along with a few cloves of course.

OK....back to Thai. I am tempted to make a Larb sometime in the future. That recipee on Thaifoodtongiht asks for ground beef. I seem to be only able to get minced around here. Is there a great difference or are they different names for the same? Can I use beef mince to make the Larb or should I do something to the mince?

I try to drink a couple of glasses of water before going to bed. The only problem with this is if you are really out of it, you'll forgett. Have some water next to the bed so you can sip it once you wake up. One of the best remedies I find, and I have nursed hangover regularly over the last 20 years (sad) is a nice hot shower. I don't know why, but it really does help. Hair of the dog does help, but in my case it's then often a case of just postponing the hangover until the next day. With the Hair of the dog, you have to be disciplined and not get carried away.

the classic mexican dish 'pavo en mole' uses 5 different types of chiles and chocolate for the mole sauce...

I will look into this one. I have read that the cocoa is the 'secret' recipee for this one.

eegafay,

Interesting videos on Thai cooking. Cheers.

This weeks chili ingredients:

Made about 15 litres of chili.

I have made many Chillies and not too long ago I heard of one which uses Cocoa powder. I believe Mexican chefs have been using it for centuries. My 2lbs mince recipe requires 2 tablespoons of Cocoa powder. The recipee also requires some celery. I didn't have any of this so I put in some celery salt. It really does add something to it. I add a few whole cloves too. Best chillie I have ever made.

get a regular mortgage but check the conditions should you choose to let. My RBOS mortgage charged a one off 50 pound fee in order to let the property but the low rate remained unchanged. I have also been renting with no problem through an agent and don't pay tax on rental income.

Thats a fantastic deal, if you have had a mortgage with the same company for a considerable amount of time this is very possible. I dont think that you could do this straight of the bat after getting a mortgage however. I may be wong.

Blake7 may i ask if your mortgage is in the UK and if so who with.

I'm also interested how you avoid paying tax on rental income if you are letting through an agent. (good for you that you do)

Thanks.

Lacoste.

Royal Bank of Scotland - I had it for about two years before I let the property.

When I rent through an agent I filled in a form saying I agreed to be paid rent without tax. I then filled in a form from Tax office (can't remember which one) sent it back to them and then in a couple of weeks got a reply that I did not need to pay tax on rental income.

Any idea why you weren't required to pay tax on your rental income? Do you think it was because your income fell beneath the UK tax threshold? Would be really useful if this is the case - I'm buggered if I want to give 22% to the taxman if I don't have to!

Also, why tell the mortgage company? I plan to keep paying the mortgage by direct debit, so why tell them? It's a legal requirement, I think, but how will they ever know?

well I am a non uk resident and get all money paid into an offshore account. Therefore no tax to pay. I think i put something in the tax form about the rental income saying that I expect to pay such and such over the year in maintainance etc (not that I have) which brought to amount down further. I had a financial chappy help me out with it all. Sorry I can't be of more help.

So you are paying tax.....but, like I said earlier, you are able to claim back certain things against your tax liabiltiy eg renting agent fees, wear and tear, you are even able to put your interest payments on the mortgage against the tax bill and claim for it. What you are saying seems to me like you are paying tax, but are able to lower the tax bill - maybe even making it negligible, by caliming things back againts it. These are the things you are able to put against the tax bill: Repairs and Mintenance; Financial fees ie interest on mortgage; Professional fees - ie renting agent, accountant; Council Tax if you pay it and not the tenant; Isurance;Stationery;Service charges - if it's a leasehold flat. There are more..... Effectively, you pay very little or even no tax if you play the game correctly.

get a regular mortgage but check the conditions should you choose to let. My RBOS mortgage charged a one off 50 pound fee in order to let the property but the low rate remained unchanged. I have also been renting with no problem through an agent and don't pay tax on rental income.

BTW, I think you are optinistic thinking you can earn 100k as a primary teacher. My kiddies primary teacher here in an international school gets 50K....

I don't know how you can get away without paying tax on rental income unless you are doing it 'illegaly'. The 50k per month is way too low for a Primary Teacher at an international school. The better schools will pay over 100k per month for techers recruited from abroad. Locally employed would I imagine be on 65k plus. I get those figures from when I worked at an international school in BKK and I left in 2001. It might be a little different if your children's teacher is EFL only or if she is Filippino or some similar situation. Many shcool use any get out clause possible.....

Tell, the mortgage company NOTHING, If you have a tennant in the property they will put you on a higher rate of interest. Also if you tell them that this is your plan before they have released the funds to you there is a good chance they wil tell you where to go.

Get the mortgage and pay it for a while, then try and get a tennant in before you move. An ideal situation would be that you could afford to pay the mortgage while you are abroad with out having a tennant, It's not an ideal situation to be reliant on a tennant.

Also make sure you get some good insurance and be carefull who you let to. A letting agent is not a bad idea.

We have several properties in the UK, all let out through a company, Three of these have no mortgage but the apartment in LOndon and cottage in the Lake district do. If there was nobody in any off them it would not be a problem financialy, though it would be a worry for other issues.

I think I agree with that and more or less agrees with what I said before. The only thing though, you have to infrom the insurance co if you are renting it out. Imagine the stink if the place burnt down and they found out that you weren't living there but some tenant. That could be a get out clause for them.

Here's an article I read today about the housing market in the UK. So, as I said in an earlier post, I don't thin anybody should rush to buy......but then that is my opinion,

"There were a number of uncharacteristically downbeat pieces on the property market spread across the weekend press.

Since the beginning of the year, the pundits have been itching to proclaim the return of the boom, with prices in London apparently leading the way. So why the sudden change in tone? Well, after this month’s “shock” rise in interest rates, the estate agents are getting edgy.

“If we keep saying that house prices are rising, the Bank of England might hike rates even further,” they imagine to themselves. “And that could - gasp - damage the market.”

To our minds, it is nothing less than rank self-delusion for property pundits to imagine that the rash of half-baked little surveys they churn out will make any difference to the mindset of the Bank’s interest-rate setting committee - which is after all, meant to be targeting inflation, rather than house prices.

But still, you can rarely accuse an estate agent of thinking far beyond their next sale. And surprise, surprise, just as we said would happen last week, the data on the property market has taken a sudden downturn…

Recently-listed property website Rightmove reports that asking prices for houses fell by 1.6% in August, with the annual rate of asking price inflation eased to 9% from 10.6% in July. Director Miles Shipside said “Prices are now cooling off and require no further intervention from the Bank of England.”

We’re sure that Mervyn King will be glad of Mr Shipside’s advice. There may even be a section in the minutes of next month’s meeting where Mr King turns to one of his colleagues and says: “What with inflation running rampant, and consumers up past their eyeballs in debt, I was going to vote for a rate rise. But thankfully, Miles Shipside reminded me that the property bubble might pop if I did. So a 0.5% cut it is.”

Rightmove’s index is at best, a measure of estate agent confidence. It’s taken solely from the asking prices of houses that are new on the market that month. So any houses that have had their price reduced since going on the market are not included.

A far superior asking price survey, from Home.co.uk, covers both new properties and those that have been on the market for some time. According to Home, asking prices fell 0.6% this month, and are down 2.2% for the year as a whole – a markedly different picture to Rightmove.

The truth is, the pundits are right to be worried. One of the more bearish columns came from The Daily Telegraph’s Edmund Conway. “I’m starting to get a little worried about house prices,” he said. “I still don’t think prices will crash, but there’s something in the air that makes me nervous.”

Perhaps Mr Conway had been reading his own newspaper. The personal finance pages contained a ‘financial makeover’ page, running through the balance sheet of a PE teacher and her husband.

The two were in their late twenties, recently married, and had bought a house together. They had a £205,000 two-year fixed-rate mortgage at 4.69%, costing them £890 a month. The trouble is, it was interest-only.

“Once the fixed-rate period is up next year, we would like to try to switch the mortgage to a repayment basis, so that we are paying back some of the capital too.”

Looking at the figures, the experts estimated that if they make the move, with interest rates rising, a 5.5% fixed rate capital repayment mortgage would cost them £1,310 a month. That’s an extra £420 a month they have to find.

If you assume they’re both basic rate taxpayers, that means that to maintain their current standard of living, they will have to earn about an extra £7,600 each year just to pay the mortgage.

That’s by no means impossible for two people at the earlier stages of their careers. But as most of us are aware, one thing that tends to follow marriage is children. And children are expensive and they also have the potential to take a lot of time out of a woman’s working life.

It’s stories like these that are really worrying. This is an ordinary, working couple on slightly-above average earnings – there’s nothing to suggest that they are less financially savvy than the rest of the population. And yet they have taken out an interest-only mortgage, with no plan for paying off the capital, assuming they will be able to make up the slack at some point in the future.

If this is the kind of situation that the average ‘sensible’ couple is getting themselves into, then we should be worried about the housing market. It’s clear that for most people there is no give in the system – if personal disasters strike, or jobs are lost, or interest rates rise much further, their finances will not be able to take it.

We imagine that this is the “something in the air” that’s making The Telegraph’s Mr Conway nervous."

And this isn't just a localised thing...ie UK. The same is happening in the states. Global interest rates are believed to be on the way up...

I don't see where the problem is regarding care of the apartment. You should use an agent to do this unless your father enjoys doing such things. I don't think (although not sure ) you'll be exempt from paying rental income tax even though living abroad so the agent's fees would be off set against tax. Also, wear and tare may be offset against tax.

I purchased a property in 2002. It was a mess needing new carpets and painting the whole lot. It came to very little really as I did it all alone except for a couple of jobs such putting in a new fuse box and putting in a new bath tub and carpeting. I also furnished the whole place. Carpets were bought for a few hundred pounds from a place which sold off-cuts. I bought furniture at local auctions and from looking in local newspapers. When I rented it out for a time, I was surprised to hear the agent say that it would be better to let it unfurnished as this usually gets you a 'better class' of tentant. Who would have thought?

PS

It is one of the best things I did ie to buy my own place but the important thing is not to overstretch yourself financially. I wish if I had done it years earlier but there we are. I don't know the situation in Scotland as I live in Wales but I would imagine it's a similar situation to other areas within the UK but maybe lagging the London area. I will stick to my guns about the future direction of prices.....but of course, I don't own a crystal ball. Best wishes to you and I see from this forum that you are taking your future seriously and planning accordingly. I respect that and wish you well.

I think you want to know if there will be a problem with you puchasing a property in the uk and then moving abroad. I told a mortgage advisor this and I was refused a mortgage with Barlcays. I think the reason that she gave me was that they didn't do Buy-to-let mortgages at the time. This is 2002. I then went to a financial advisor who typed some figures into a computer ie my earnings - I had a pretty crap job after returning from abroad, my deposit etc. She came up with a mortgage with Nat West. I still had intetntions of going abroad again and I felt a little worried so I told the bank manager at Nat West. He said that there would be no problem at all. It's a case of you get the mortgage on the basis of your current job and savings.....who knows what the future brings? I dont' think you need to tell him/her that you will not be living there or indeed, might not be livning there in the near or medium term. If it was a second home, it would be different. But my mangaer did stress that the one thing that you must do is to inform the insurance people that you are not living there and that someone else is. Insurance might be marginally more expensive.

If you do rent out and move abroad, any fees from a renting agent can be put against the rental income tax you incur. If you decide to stay, you can still rent a room out under the 'rent a room scheme' which allows you to do so and not incur any tax liability for any rental income below a certain lever - around £4,000 I think.

Other things you should consider is not only exchange rate but the interest rate. They are on their way up and are basically at an almost abnormally low level. You can of course, lock yourself in a fixed as opposed to a variable mortgage. The last thing I would say is, but this is only my opinion, that house prices are going to come down if not nomally, then in real terms. So I don't think there is a need to panic. Good luck.

PS Early payment is another thing you need to check with your advisor, some incur penalites.

I felt sorry for you that nobody had added a serious reply. What have you against teaching? Your written English is good with a few mistakes - I have seen some native speakers make many more. You also have French to offer which might provide you with some work. What do you want? You are afterall wanting to study for 3 days a week and teaching English would allow you the flexibility to do this. Earn, learn and experience.....and only 23! The world is your oyster as could be said.

Thai cooking uses a balance of flavors, and adding a little bit of sugar seems to bring out the other flavors. Sugar also cuts acidity, in things like Som Tom that use lime juice. I always use a bit of sugar -a tablespoon or two to a pot- in my chili con carne to bring out the flavors and to cut the acidity of the tomatoes.

My favorite kind of fried rice is not Thai but Filipino, and is called Garlic fried rice. Lots of garlic and onions, no egg or meat in the fried rice. Served with a couple of eggs and fried Thai sausage slices it makes an aroi maak semi-Western, semi-Asian breakfast.

How about writing the recipe down? A slight digression. You mentioned Chili Con Carne. I found a recipee which says to put some Cocoa powder into it. It's the best Chilli I have ever made and I have tried quite a few.......

MSG is a flavour enhancer, like salt I suppose but, stronger. Asians seem to slap it in anything and everything though. Like salt, too much makes the taste bad and is not good for you.

Too much MSG makes you well thirsty too, I watch out for this in any restaurant as my first experience of it was in Cyprus. Around 5 pints of Coke, my stomach was pretty <deleted>, the ex wasn't best pleased either....

redrus

The moral of the story is....don't drink 5 pints of coke in one sitting!

Where did you get that? I mean that it's poisonus..... I remember when I was in Thailand some westerner not wanting food with msg in it. I didn't know why. Anway, I recently read that it isn't harmful. And it does add to the dish or make it jummier as was said. I add a little sugar too....

You guys forgott one thing.....add a little msg - about half a teaspoon. It really does make a difference.

Tunisian in Thailand - I'd say forget it, find another country. She'd find it very very hard.

Why?

well I hope her english is better than yours.

do a search on all the native speaker threads here. old old topic

Havn't you heard of capitals at the beginning of sentences? I hope you aren't and English teacher?

People in glass houses..........

When I lived there...which is going back around 5 years, there were a lot as one would imagine in the tourist areas. Also, the Hard Rock cafe usually had a few either resident or passing through. But really the place to meet them was on the islands like Samui. Why don't you return to your own contry (I gather you are western) where such a dilemma will not arise?