spongeworthy

Worth driving? Yes. Worth owning? No. BMW and Benz are cars to be leased, as after the warranty period ends, the inevitable maintenance and repairs will end up costing you more than the car is worth. Lease one for a couple of years if the deals here make sense and hand over the keys when the lease is up and you've likely gotten the thrill of owning a slow Thai BMW out of your system. Personally, I wouldn't bother with the 2.0 BMWs they sell here as I don't see the point. If I want a fun and fast car, a 2.0 really isn't doing it for me (do the Thai BMWs play vroom vroom noises over the audio system like they started doing back west?). If I'm looking for a luxurious ride, Mercedes is light years ahead of BMW.

I left Bangkok a few of months ago, and from my condo it was easy to see that 99% of condos in that area were at 5% occupancy, with a few approaching 10%. The condo I vacated is still sitting empty 2+ months later and it was basically on the highest available floor. The expats have not returned and the tourists are not shopping at supermarkets. I get a kick out of seeing youtube videos with the agents talking about how things are picking up fast and you better grab a place now while there are still deals because prices are going up... that was 6 - 8 months ago. ???? That and the complete lack of businesses catering to farang on Soi 5 leaves you with an empty Foodland.

Funny but I wouldn't recommend it as this is called false imprisonment / illegal detention. Lock anyone in anywhere for 5 seconds and you're looking at being locked in a prison cell for up to 5 years.

Your friend will likely have to go to the office at least once as they need to take a photo and fingerprint (or is the fingerprint only used for the exam?). But yes, an agent has offered me what your friend is looking for. I went with the more legit option as it was cheaper and I wasn't worried I'd fail the tests. The exams are a bit of a joke and another person there passed the riding test without even taking it, simply because the proctor was otherwise occupied or didn't want to deal with the guy.

With standard use I wouldn't worry about the drive lifespan due to usage. Most likely failure will be a hardware failure from a defect. I have TLC drives running 7+ years now in 24/7 environments and they're still going strong (these are consumer level Samsung Evo 2.5" SATA drives). BUT, when SSDs get full, they do get slower. Once you're at 80% or so you'll probably notice a difference in speed. This is where the external drive can come in handy. If you're storing large files such as videos on the external drive, you'll keep your internal drive running at optimally. The life expectancy is based on what they want to warranty and calculated MTBF (mean time between failures) based on warranty claims and other data and testing. I have WD 3.5" enterprise SATA drives in backup servers going on 12 years running 24/7 and surviving multiple moves between data centers. A couple failed over the years due to heat, but if undisturbed and operating in < 30c temps, spinning drives can last a long time.

Something to keep in mind is that this is just a backup for the event that the on-premise drive fails or is otherwise "lost". If that were to happen at the same time that his cloud provider had some major failure and lost all of their multiple copies of the data, then I guess an on-premise storage solution would be a savior. But in my experience, even small business users can't be bothered to manage rotating drives or tapes on a regular basis. I just don't think a home user who is not a techy or generally OCD about backups will keep up with the routine and connect the drive daily/weekly to keep the backups updated. You certainly don't want to keep a backup drive online and connected 24/7 to protect from potential malware encrypting or deleting the backups. Wasabi is one I do use as a storage bucket for other backup systems, just haven't used their consumer product. They get a thumbs up from me in that the storage has always been fast (from US datacenters) and hasn't failed, but again, no idea what their consumer "PC backup" product is like.

It really boils down to how much data do you anticipate needing over the next few years, and whatever your comfortable spending. I wouldn't bother planning out 10 years for storage needs as the cost of storage drops quite quickly, especially SSDs as they're newer than HDDs and have more headroom for growth along with the overwhelming majority of R&D resources going into solid state. In 3 years you'll be picking up 4 - 8TB drives for 5k baht, so if you need more space in a few years there will be faster and larger storage options at half the price you'd pay for similar today. As for backups, cloud storage is relatively cheap and more secure than a lone drive in your house which can be either fail, be stolen, lost in a fire or flood, etc. Backblaze is $7/month for unlimited backup storage for 1 PC/Mac with discounts for purchasing 1 or 2 years in advance. I haven't used them myself, nor any other consumer level backup solutions, but there are quite a few to choose from.

I have stop being so lazy and look into what my FIs offer. Hopefully I won't need any free wires if I'm able to make use of this cash advance option.

Kasikorn has a flat $10 fee for incoming wires, on my account at least. Fees vary for US sending bank based on account class, from waived to $35. Looks like Schwab charges $15, but I've never used them for wires.

I looked up a previous transfer and the Visa/MC vs Kasikorn buy rate look to be substantial. 0.877% difference. At the $15k daily limit that's $131 better than SWIFT (and no $45 SWIFT fee). I really have to test this out.

A bit hard to calculate historically as the Visa rate seems to lag MC by a day... maybe a browser date+time issue. Also is this the avg rate for the day? The high rate? Low rate? Rate at a specific time of the day? XE shows me a chart with the varying rates throughout the day.

I received the TT rate posted on this Kasikorn page (a slight bit higher actually as they don't post the rate beyond 1 Satang). Kasikorns listed TT rate falls in line with the XE rate, which is why I'm surprised that Visa and MC offer better. https://www.kasikornbank.com/en/rate/pages/foreign-exchange.aspx Is there someplace to check the current Visa and MC network rates? That would make this easier as I wouldn't have to test at a bank.

Mentioned in the last 10 or so posts. Schwab and Cap One are the 2 I have with no foreign transaction fees.

Is this referring to the Telegraphic Transfer network as opposed to SWIFT? The rate I last got at Kasikorn from a SWIFT transfer was basically the XE rate. Visa and MC offer better rates than that?

What is a TT rate?

Ahh, if they're using the network rate that could be a significant hit. I'll have to test it out for a few hundred at whichever local Kasikorn offers this. Actually I'll try both Capital One and Schwab cards to see if there's any difference in the network rate.

15k USD per day with no SWIFT fees? I'll have to test this on my next trip to the bank and check the rate. If the exchange rate is the same as an incoming wire then this would mean $0 in fees. Sounds almost too good to be true...

Ah, good to know the Capital One card offers that and there's a way to get money out of the account without an ATM fee. With Schwab, is there any benefit to doing the teller debit vs ATM route, other than not having to check the statement to see that they refunded the ATM fee?

That makes sense. I assumed tellers were using the cash advance option to make the withdrawal. So when going to a local bank, one must ask a teller for an electronic debit?

No, I'm referring to a debit card as debit cards also offer the "cash advance" feature which is what people are using at bank tellers here in Thailand to avoid ATM fees, which appears to be what you have done, but with a Schwab card - and those tend to no have typical fees (I'd have to read the card agreement again to see what it states about cash advances). I may have missed some definitive answer on the topic in this thread, but from looking online it appears many banks can and do charge a 3-5% transaction fee when doing a cash advance on a debit card, the same as they do with their credit cards. I may have to just test this myself with a few ATM/Debit cards at a local bank here to see which banks may charge a fee and what rate the local bank gives me. This could prove useful in some situations.

Foreign transaction fees and cash advance fees are two different things.

I have a "travel" MasterCard that doesn't charge foreign transaction fees but I'm pretty sure my bank would still charge me a cash advance fee, though I've never needed to use a credit card for a cash advance.

So your bank didn't charge you a 3-5% cash advance fee with a debit card, or are you saying it was the best option even with whatever fee they happened to charge?

I also have a Schwab card and have used it occasionally due to the ATM fee refunds (though the exchange rates are still taking a hit). The conversation you responded to was about taking a "cash advance" at a bank teller which is is not the same as an ATM withdrawal or a debit card purchase. I was asking what fee the bank charges for a cash advance on a debit card. I wouldn't be surprised if Schwab doesn't charge a fee, but other banks may.

If you are looking for the best rate, have a Thai bank account, and want to transfer enough to get by for 6+ months with a cushion for emergencies, the best rate is a simple wire transfer. From what I can tell when sending USD my bank sends the exact amount and the local bank converts at the current rate with a small fee. I'm getting the current rate found on XE minus a small fee from the Thai bank for the incoming transfer. When transferring enough I'm looking at 0.1% or less in fees from both sides, and with the best exchange rate you can get.