Valjean

What are some good retail showrooms for quality track lighting or low-voltage systems?

Earth Class Mail. Great scanning service so most of the time you don't pay to forward the actual mail. You have a PDF.

Couple fine points.

I think the OP is from the UK. If he or another person reading this is American, you can own 100% of a Thai company under the Treaty of Amity. Makes life a little simpler.

tombkk's remark re: tax evasion and tax avoidance is worth noting. If you have a Thai company expect audits and visits from the Thai government departments. They know all of this well, don't assume less.

If you want good quality, 400-600 thread count then I think it's Central, Siam or Emporium - they all have good selections. It's expensive, more than in the US for the same thing. Easy to spend 10K+

Check out sales for sure. Last time I was at Emporium there were lots of lines discounted.

Getting ready for some remodel work and want to put in some glass doors with wood frames - French door style more or less. Could be sliders or hinged, probably a transom across the top. Very standard, if I was in the US would order something like Anderson. In Bangkok are there stores with a good selection of quality doors?

Many thanks,

While I have both HK and TH companies I won't pretend to be an expert. But here's my two cents...

If you work in Thailand, you need a work permit. Obviously there are lots of internet freelancers doing otherwise, but that's the rule. I don't think a rep office gets around this but I could be wrong.

If you have both HK & TH companies there are rep offices or pricing transfer agreements between the companies but for the income derived from the work in Thailand you need to report and pay Thai taxes (both company and your salary). Given that you travel and do work outside of Thailand that helps you establish income from activities outside of Thailand. This needs to be setup right and some professional help would be worth the money.

HK is an advantage for taxes, no corp taxes if you're not doing business in HK. Another advantage is if you're paying non-Thai vendors it's easier from HK. There can be withholding and more paperwork if you pay from Thailand.

As someone noted your bar for a company + WP in Thailand is 2M THB (1M if married to Thai) and 4 Thai employees. Assuming you have the capital it sounds like your business might support that. One could be a maid, and admin. I'm not saying it's not overhead and I don't know your business. And you're at risk if you have people on the payroll who are just names, but if at the core there's a real business, and a few qualified people working, no one can complain if 1 of the 4 is your maid, or maybe one a college intern just to manage costs.

I think Ikea sells a type of memory foam style mattress, we'll just have to wait for them to open in BKK.

Question-I have always wondered about memory foam in high humid areas, did you have any issues ?

No issues. The memory foam is closed cell so moisture can't get in. For some people they make you feel hotter than a regular mattress, I don't notice that. They are different, not for everyone but I love mine. Best sleep, less stiffness.

Will be great when Ikea opens!

I want to buy another Tempur-Pedic mattress. I was just at Emporium and they were 120,000 THB, about double the US price. Ouch!

Where are the best deals if I want a Tempur-Pedic brand mattress?

Are there alternative memory foam mattresses that are just as good that are less?

Any ideas on import duties on a mattress? I'd be tempted to buy one and just put it on a boat and wait a month if there was a savings.

Thanks for any help.

I came here working for a multi-national. Not in some golden expat package, just found myself single, had traveled the world for business and wanted to live in Thailand. The life here fits me fine. After a few years I decided to stay and have my own business.

Many of my expat friends are just the same, they either work for companies in middle-type management, making nice salaries but not in all-company-paid expat style. They get paid in baht, probably a bit less than they’d make in the west, but balanced for cost of living it works out fine. Others like me own their own businesses and are just like hard working entrepreneurs everywhere, just here. These are all people who were successful in their west life, perhaps there was an inflection point, divorce in my case, that makes one think it’s a good time for a change, but none of my friends were running from failure.

I have 10 under 30 year old expats working for me. There’s a vibrant community of young people who want international experience here. Bangkok’s fun for a young person, a modest salary gives them a comfortable and interesting lifestyle. Things are tough in the US for college grads, they go home and come back happy to have this opportunity. Some will be here a year, some might be up to 5 years, and perhaps 1 or 2 might end up settling down here. They are not failures, they are the best and the brightest who want to get out, work hard, be successful and see the world.

My bottom line is there are a lot of hard working, successful expats here. I meet them because that’s my circle here – business. They came for different reasons. Thailand is attractive to stay for different reasons. I find them an interesting and stimulating group of people.

We've been happy with Rasami - our 6 year old is in his 3rd year there. http://www.rasami.ac.th In the classes the do creative things and there are after school programs also.

Not 100% sure but I think the actual employee requirement is 5,000 in social security tax or payroll whatever tax it is. That's what you report to the government and if I'm not mistaken what you would show for payroll proof.

The expat is a salary of $50,000 per month minimum.

You need 2M THB in paid in capitalization for each WP. 1M THB if you're married to a Thai.

The Revenue and Labor and other departments do show up sometimes unannounced. They do like to see the people working. There might be many good reasons why someone isn't in the office, but you could be asked.

There's a lot of paperwork in the process. From picture of your offices, maps, signs on your door, financial statements, etc. etc.. Seems to me it must be 50 pages of paper. All of this needs to make sense and add up. They will ask for more if it doesn't. Maybe a list of all your customers and invoices for instance.

You can lose money but there might be issues if your capitalization falls under the 2M THB. Not sure, guessing. So your loses would need to be covered by additional capital infusion. Not sure if there's any time limit on how long you can lose money, but most businesses do in the first years so that's expected.

For personal I've used Bangkok Bank, K-Bank, UOB and SCB

For business I've used K-Bank, UOB and SCB

Bangkok Bank has been good and reliable. They have a NYC US bank that you can transfer via the US routing system, a money saver.

• UOB completely sucks. Moved all accounts to SCB.
  
• SCB I was very unhappy with. Could have been the branch. I think they had a policy about not smiling and being helpful. Moved all accounts to K-Bank.
  
• K-Bank is my business bank now and primary personal account. LOVE K-Bank. Fantastic service, great attitude. If I walk in a young woman is there to great me in her k-green, if I want she'll fill out my deposit/withdraw slip and make sure I get to the right window. It's really a bit over the top service for something I can do but if she's cute... Online banking is good. They have my business!
  

Every time I change banks, all my employees have to move if they don't have an account because payroll is direct deposit. Everyone likes K-Bank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVfkP1FQKHc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

If a picture is worth a thousand words a video makes this perfectly clear. Can wait to try this out tonight! Hopefully without being slapped across the face! Thanks for bringing this to our attention and to Chonburiram.

เล่นเสียว Len siaw is ok as is ao siaw (sieow?). You may look up sieow and see "a sharp pain" but it can mean "to tingle".I think of ao sieow as more as I'm horny "have tingle". Kissing someone's neck or ear could cause sieow.

The other somewhat polite slang is to "do homework" การบ้าน gaan bâan. When my wife was studying hard I could say "I was helping with homework" with friends and that could get giggles.

also "fun" Len เล่น is understood in the right context, as it would be in English. "Did you have fun?"

Michael Doyle

Practical Guide to Thailand Business Law 3rd Edition

Practical Guide to Business Law in Emerging Countries in Asia

www.asiabooks.com or amazon.com

Good guy if you want your company setup right. Partner at Seri Manop & Doyle Ltd.

As an employeer in Thailand who hires mostly recent college graduates, expat and Thai, I have a little different view point. And in my prior life working for a multi-national and interviewing and hiring MBAs from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and the rest because at that time we could get the cream of the crop.

The right degree from the right school will open doors. Especially with HR departments in big, top tier, companies. If that's your path, consider your choices. Aside form the elite I've a different view...

The critical skill for your working career won't be any subject you learned in school. It will be the ability to learn and re-learn and learn more. It's a different world and it's changing every day. For me an American who graduated from a Thai university would tell me that this is a person who took chances, who had the courage to do something different, and who was open to different experiences. It would suggest to me someone open to learning and new ideas. In other words a good hire. In a Flat World this would get my attention. "What the hell was he doing going to school in Thailand??" would make me interested to meet you.

I've hired and fired a both Harvard MBA and a hand-picked by HR Stanford undergrad superstar. Perhaps they weren't drilled in rote learning but they couldn't DO anything. They could talk a good talk, but no clue how to make things happen in the real world. That opened my eyes quite wide as to the value of an elite education.

The most important consideration is what would make you most happy. What in your heart do you really want to do? Follow your north star and don't let anyone hand you cheap advice otherwise. 30 years from now I promise you what college you went to won't turn out to be as pivotal in life as choosing to do the things you have passion for and have love in the doing.

If you nurture yourself, do things you love, and develop an ability to learn, adapt and grow that is the skill that will serve you well. When you interview with a prospective employeer it wil shine very brightly indeed. In addition to a job you'll have the pleasure of a life well lived. Follow your heart.

Pronto Marketing is a fast growing company that manages online marketing for hundreds of companies around the world in English markets. We have a fun working environment in Bangkok, with a young and growing team of 22. We have an immediate opening for a Client Services Lead.

In this position you will be working directly with clients on the production and updates to their websites primarily via our support desk system. This is an intense job requiring the ability to decipher sometime confusing Client requests, to get wayward clients back on track and drive process forward across the production team. You need to be disciplined, focused, and driven for results.

To top it off you need take special pride in the way you communicate with and delight our clients. You need to be their super hero. We’re fanatically focused on Client satisfaction and as a front-line position you bear a deep responsibility to ensure that our clients day in and day have an extraordinary service experience that builds strong relationships.

Fluency in English required. First-rate writing and communications skills are an absolute must.

Because most of our clients are in the US and Canada you have to expect frequent off-hours checking on status with them. It’s typically not on an emergency, on-call basis, rather just knowing when you can save a day and delight a customer by checking a support ticket in the evening to move things along.

A keen eye for detail and quality is essential. You’ll have the final responsibility for quality control on the work our clients see. It takes patience and persistence to get things right. You should have both in strong measure.

You need to be a consummate team player and know how to work with a cross-cultural team. We’re a completely flat organization. Your ability to earn respect and at the same time have good relationship with your team members is a critical success factor in getting things done. Intense is good. Intensely fun is better.

Web technical skills are a plus, but not required. But you must have the desire and smarts to get a working knowledge of HTML, CSS, WordPress and related technologies - fast. While in most cases you won’t be doing coding work, you will be coordinating with a production team and need to have a good understanding of their work. This can be learned on the job but you need to have a keen interest in technology and the internet to drive you.

Strong process aptitude is essential – we scale when we get the process right. You need to be organized and disciplined about your work. You need to be ready to work hard, and work long hours. This is a fast growing start-up so it can be intense at times.

College Degree Required. We are looking for someone with 1-5 years working experience in a customer-facing or client management role. We are not looking to hire a senior person or manager for this role. We're happy to train and develop a less experienced person who has the drive and aptitude.

PM me with your CV if interested.

I guess this might depend on where you are, Bangkok being more, but the BOI numbers are way too low. We're Bangkok based.

For instance just got good programmer, expert Java, some web, and other languages. 44,000 / month and she got 13th month plus another 1 month bonus based on performance. And she turning out to be quite strong. I had a decent, not great, PHP programmer for 60,000. Sub-30 you're looking for someone much more junior.

You're better off to pay more and try to get the best. There's good talent here, you need to find and attract them.

We should use some support help getting our new Mac Minis working well on our Windows Network with Active Directory. Any recommendations of service companies? Can be Thai or Expat. Or if you do this PM me.

thanks

I'm doing the BOI process now. Working with a very experienced and qualified BOI consulting company. Total cost 110,000 THB. We'd not done, or approved, but for my time this looks like money well spent. Great company, really driving the process and helping us. Know BOI inside and out.

PM me if you want the contact info.

If you are applying to Thai-Thai companies; Thai owned and focused on the Thai market, then most likely you need to be fluent in Thai. Tourism or teaching an exception.

If you are applying to a Thai company, expat owned focused on the multinational or foreign markets, then your English is of course important. But for this type company (I own one) you need a Work Permit. That requires me to have 2M THB in capital and 4 Thais for each Word Permit. We place regular ads in JobsDB which specify Thai National because I know I don't have the headroom for another Word Permit or I think for this skill set a Thai will be good and the best value. If a non-Thai sends me a resume for a job that was posted that specified Thai National, most times I don't respond. Read the ad carefully, I put that in for a reason. If an applicant looks very interesting I might say "can't now, why not send me an email in 6 months, maybe then".

I have hired an expat from a resume sent to me when I wasn't specifically looking for an expat. Lighting does strike. But that's a true exception to the rule. It might be a numbers game, quit worrying about responses and just keep sending resumes - and trying all the other angles suggested here. It's a numbers game - assuming you're an attractive candidate.

Good Luck

My regular IT guy is rock solid but no Mac experience

Networking Macs and Windows (Active Directory) shouldn't be that difficult. A google search should yield plenty of results on how to achieve this.

http://www.howtomac.co.uk/?p=119

http://weblog.bignerdranch.com/?p=6&page=1

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=54704

Thanks for the info, I'll see if this helps him. He doesn't speak/read English but still some of this is clear looking at the instructions.

My regular IT guy is rock solid but no Mac experience. We're going to end up with 8 Macs of 20 computers on our network and we need help getting them configured so they can access the file shares, printers and other network resources. Running Windows Server 2008 with Active Directory.

Anyone know of anyone who is experienced getting mixed PC & Mac networks setup and working?

So many...

One that comes to mind is Som Tom Bankok on Soi Ari 3. Issan food but really a cut above most. For a something like a simple moo yaang the meat is excellent. The lap moo taut (fried meat balls) are great. Really everything is tasty.

I'm a big fan of Gin Lom Chom Saphan on Samsen 3. I always get the steamed sea bass in lime, chilies and garlic. The greens with garlic and shrimp is excellent - it's such a basic dish but they have the touch. And great atmosphere as well.

It's the essentially same as setting up any Thai limited company except if you're American you can own 100% of the shares. You are correct there need to be 3 shareholders, but the 2 can just have a very small amount and an be 100% American. Very standard company structure, for Americans anyway. Once established to the best of my knowledge my company operates like any other Thai company - taxes, registration, work permits, etc. nothing special.

Google it and I'm sure you'll find plenty of info.