Lacessit

You may be right, people will shell out money on the most ridiculous things. Including gold sneakers, bibles, and NFT cards.

In rural areas, kids are free labor. In the cities, they are an extra burden. With the ongoing mechanisation of agriculture, not hard to see where population is trending in the West, compared to Africa and South America.

How convenient, you forgot Taylor Swift. Sarah Palin? I'd rather stick my d!ck in a rat trap.

Er - yaba (methamphetamine) is a significant problem in northern and northeastern Thailand.

IMO the OP needs to cultivate a wombat mentality. Political and religious beliefs become irrelevant then.

It's a measure of the Thai addiction to sugar Thailand cannot grow enough of its own. Mitrpol, the country's biggest sugar producer, has bought a controlling interest in four Australian sugar mills.

Had to Google it. You seem to be quite familiar with the app. So you've never had your @rse chewed by one of your bosses for goofing off with the mop?

You just can't be polite when someone disagrees with you. You also respond to factual posts with nothing but abuse. It's called argument ad hominem. The tax thing is way overblown. based on my own situation. I won't be paying taxes here for at least ten years. IMO many other retirees will find their situation is similar. My experience with Thai government hospitals has been better than I could expect in Australia. If you don't like it here, go back to whatever country you came from. I for one won't miss you at all.

IIRC the 600K in deductions was posted on another thread, and included married to a Thai. Possibly it's over-optimistic. I am tax exempt for 250K. My living expenses per year average about 650K. I have been too conservative in my own calculations. My pre-2024 savings with the allowance will last ten years. Meantime, pension and investment income accumulate in an Australian bank.

OP, you seem to have missed the fact the Russian and Chinese demographics are collapsing. Russia because there are only 87 men to 100 women, China due to the one child policy. Population growth is occurring in countries with sizeable Roman Catholic and Muslim populations. Those religions are probably going to frown on OnlyFans as therapy. Maybe a better solution is burning down churches and mosques.

It's not 60K in tax exemptions, it's 600K. For a single person over 70, IIRC it is about 300k. The first 150k of transfers is tax exempt. I have no idea where you got the 60K figure from.

The roads in Chiang Rai are fine. There is a very good government hospital, three or four private hospitals. Three shopping malls, a large day market. Perhaps you are living in the wrong part of Thailand. You use the term leftist as approbrium. Here's a news flash - leftist governments in Australia brought in universal healthcare, subsidized medicines, the Fair Work Commission, and the Austraiian Consumer and Competition Commission. It's nothing like the dog-eat-dog cluster###k that America has, where its citizens are conditioned from birth to regard "left" as inherently evil.

IMO you may not have the numbers right. Assuming, of course, you are transferring post 2023 income, and not savings. Over 70, married to a Thai, 600K baht of transferred money is tax exempt. If you transfer 800K per year, 200K is taxable at 15%. That's 30K baht/year, 2500 baht/month.

I still remember playing golf with three Thai guys. We all had caddies. Two of them looked very alike. So I asked which one was the younger sister, nong sow in Thai. Nong sow is also slang for the vagina. The guys and the caddies broke up laughing.

I've seen photos of your Thai wife, and your British wife. Less said about your British wife, the better. I can confirm your Thai wife was a stunner when you met her.

A quite sour OP. IMO the whole tax thing is overblown nonsense. I can have about 500K baht in exemptions, or choose to transfer pre-2024 savings for 5-6 years. Right wingers ( whingers? ) posting on this thread seem to think they have a patent on logic, intelligence and rationality. Leftists are woke and dumb. Patents expire in 15 years. It's going to be a lot faster than that in politics.

Thailand is not Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket. There's a lot more to it than those three tourist traps. In Australia, houses one could buy for about $400K are now about $1 million. Rents have skyrocketed. In Thailand, rent costs and house/condo prices have barely moved in 15 years. While imported food is expensive, local foodstuffs are cheap by Western standards A kilo of mangoes here costs the same as a single mango in Oz. If one puts in the effort, learning to speak and understand Thai gets anyone a lot further than insisting on English only. Even though I probably butcher the tones, most Thais can understand me. When I was researching where to retire to, I looked at Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Thailand. Thailand won quite easily, IMO it still does. I'm not going anywhere else.

What I find interesting about his forthcoming second term is how many Trump voters he will throw under a bus, now that they have served their purpose.

Figure of speech, perhaps you are unfamiliar with the expression.

Mine cost 55 K baht per implant. That was with best quality Swiss bone graft material. Implants take 1-2 months for a decent job. Any dentist doing implants within 1-2 weeks will have a failure rate of 40-50%. False teeth are cheaper, but sometimes become ill-fitting due to receding gums. If the OP has enough teeth left, a partial denture is another option.

Some of us still like to chew @rses like yours.

The future for many Thai women is quite bleak. When they turn 30, many Thai men consider they are too old. In their 40's and 50's, all they can look forward to is the munificent age pension of 600 baht/month when they turn 60. So when a foreigner comes along either making a lot more than they do, or getting a pension which is 4-5 times what they can earn, it must look like manna from heaven. Of course, there are the predators, those who use their beauty to suck money until their quarry is dry. OTOH, there are plenty of women who just want support, and they don't care if the potential partner looks as ugly as a hatful of camel bums. IMO the good relationships happen when Thai women are willing to work hard to maintain them. Not so with Western women, who are buttressed by entitlement, and family law.

I was looking at the hose. A normal garden hose, a fire-fighting hose like the one I used to have is twice the diameter of that hose, and can throw water 80-100 feet, In any Australian bushfire involving property, the first thing the fire department does is cut power to the whole area, to protect fire crews from electrocution from downed power lines. That's why an independent pump and water supply is essential for anyone wanting to protect their property. I noticed he did have a pool, where he could take refuge. A hero, yes. Lucky, also.

Terms of imprisonment for arson in Australia range from a few months to life imprisonment. We have Total Fire Ban days. The mere act of lighting a fire on those days has on-the-spot fines of $2000. Court fines are $5000. Cause property damage, even steeper fines, or prison. Lightning is the most common cause of Australian bushfires.

Thank you. I don't disagree with your stance. However, I would say it is the function of governments to ensure people have good information. The CSIRO in Australia is our leading scientific organization. It does a lot of cutting edge work, including fire research. One of the studies it produced after Ash Wednesday said when people stayed behind to fight fires, they were 90% successful in defending their property. The study did have quite a few caveats in terms of preparedness, house construction, and fire-fighting methods. As regular as clockwork, leftist governments increase CSIRO's budget. When right wing governments get in, they set about slashing CSIRO's funding. It's currently in the right-wing opposition's bad books. Said opposition are taking a policy of small-size nuclear power plants to the next election. CSIRO have given the policy a raspberry. Nuclear power is the most expensive form of electricity on the planet, solar and wind are the cheapest. Australia has plenty of both. Who will win, facts or policy?