grin

In the US most ATM cards double up as DCs and as mentioned earlier on this thread DCs have less protection than CCs at least in the US. As I never use this feature of any of my DCs my solution is to set the DC limit on all of my ATM cards to zero.

One other thing to be aware of for US cards is that if you do not pay off your CC every month and carry a balance then your payment is usually applied to the lowest interest items first. I.e. you usually have different rates for purchases, cash advances, and balance transfers.

This really comes into effect with the promotional zero APR balance transfers that usually have a 3% fee. For example if you want to pay off a balance transfer over a year or 18 months you are better off paying off all of your purchases before doing the balance transfer and then not using the CC for purchases until you have the balance transfer paid off.

I bought a car this way as the 3% fee was lower than the interest on the loans offered by car dealers in Thailand plus I knew I could easily pay it off in 18 months. Also this seemed better than liquidating any equities with more earning potential.

Grin

Anyone know of a US credit union that has credit cards with no foreign transaction fees?

Grin

Like mentioned in above posts Pentagon Federal Credit Union (a.k.a., PenFed)

And there is only a one time fee of $15 to join Voices for America's Troops which qualifies you for membership in PenFed.

Tip is much appreciated.

Grin

The solution is simple - it just takes a few minutes longer. Just go into the bank with your passport & foreign credit/debit card & ask for a cash advance on your credit card. The trick is that the sum being requested must be higher than the ATM's usual maximum advance (THB 20,000?).

The bank does the paperwork, gets the authorisation, copies your passport (which you also sign) and the bank give you the cash. Best thing is that there's no fees! Not a single Baht & you get personalised service as part if the deal

I dont think getting an advance against your credit card is the deal you make it sound like. Most cash advances against your credit card start the interest rate charge ticking from day 1, so no grace period to pay off the credit card balance. So, you are borrowing money at the CC interest rate, until you pay it back, with no grace period. And we all know interest rates on CC's are ridiculously high.

So, unless you have something different than the norm, dont think this approach is as good as it sounds.

Correct. I have read this so many times, but nobody was ever able to prove one could use his DEBIT card for a cash advance at the counter.

For a CREDIT card, there will ALWAYS be interest running and a cash advance charge, even when using "invitation only" credit cards having $,1000 yearly fee.

I have a Visa card from a credit union that has no cash advance fee. However, it still has the disadvantage of having the Visa foreign transaction fee.

Anyone know of a US credit union that has credit cards with no foreign transaction fees?

Grin

Chiang Mai Land Road doesn't really fit the description in the article. When going from the airport to the night bazaar area there is a shortcut that I've been taken on by taxis. They turn left off of Mahidol Road by the B2 Airport Hotel, then go to the right of the hotel and up a couple of blocks and turn right on a long road that eventually merges with Chang Klan Road right before the night bazaar. I could possibly see this road with its bars being described as in the article. In the evening it is not really well lit and might seem a bit seedy.

However, the article is definitely bogus no matter how you look at it.

Grin

Called the first number mentioned in the thread yesterday afternoon. Installer showed up at 9:00 this morning and was done by 11:00. Got the dish located where I wanted it and ran the cable through the plastic covering for an AC line so no cable is visible from the street. And since the cable was run into the attic next to the AC line no new holes had to be drilled.

Great picture quality here in Padaet with no degradation during the slight rain we had.

In the last hour I surfed all of the channels and found 29 with English. I'm not much of a TV watcher except for maybe sports but if I ever get bored I could probably find something to watch. All in all CTH seems like a pretty good deal.

- Grin

Hi, can you tell me the phone number that you used? Also what was the total cost for installation, satellite receiver and payment options.

Thanks

The number I called was the first mentioned in this thread. It's not in my phone history anymore.

However, I did scan the invoice we received and paid about a week later at 7-Eleven.

We paid 1000 Baht cash for the installation and the invoice was for 3723.86 Baht.

That was for 2 months service at 961.93 Baht per month plus 1800 Baht deposit.

Grin

Thanks for the heads up on the further devaluation of UA's miles. Guess it's time to start making reservations.

Grin

There are a number of mail services that will let you upload documents and they will be printed and mailed within 24 hours in the US.

Most of these are oriented towards bulk mail and businesses but I have sent individual letters with click2mail.com. If I remember correctly it only cost about $1.50.

Some even allow you to email the documents to them with a special subject line once you have an account set up with a prepaid balance.

I would guess these businesses would keep your mail secure when uploaded. Some of them can be found here:

https://www.usps.com/send/create-mail-and-postage.htm

Grin

At the current rate of upgrades for Quicken for Mac the EOL for support of the current version will be at least 10 years from now.

Grin

I sure wasn't planning on letting the miles expire. Even using 120K miles for biz class to Asia on Star Alliance I have enough for 6 RTs.

Due to award restrictions I doubt that I will use that many in time so I will have to take one short haul UA flight right before March, 2015.

So it looks like I will be flying here free about twice a year for around the next 3 years.

I really won't miss UA that much as I've been stuck in Economy Plus most of the time since the merger.

Also when UA changed to the 180 degree reclining seats in biz class they severely reduced the number of biz class seats and that didn't help upgrades at all.

Grin

Here we used fishing line between eye hooks close to where the birds were landing. You can't see it and neither can the birds. A couple of encounters and they never came back.

In the US we used the spikes from Home Depot. They are plastic strips with spikes in a V pattern along the length. We used liquid nails to glue them down on the tile roof edges. The pigeons just moved to the neighbors house behind us. A few weeks later the guy behind us came by asking where we got the spikes. A bunch of neighbors there have the fake owls up on their roofs but not sure if they work.

Grin

Yep, MM is practically worthless now unless it gets you into a special security line. Same for any of their FF tiers.

Website is still showing UA837 in May. Guess they will let you book and later move you over to ANA for the NRT-BKK leg. Nice trick.

Grin

I was a 1K flyer with UA for many years up to the merger. After that I only flew UA on SFO-NRT-BKK due to change in upgrades.

Without this route I won't be flying UA anymore so all of my miles will expire. I guess I will have to use them up on other Star Alliance flights.

Also two more RTs from SFO-BKK and I would have been a million miler on UA, guess I'll never make it now, what a waste.

Grin

The main reason I use credit cards is that those transactions are tracked and can be imported. I try to only use cash for items I don't care about tracking. If I have to pay cash for something I want to track I make sure I get a receipt. I use a separate account to enter all of my cash transactions and I find I have less than 5 per year on average. All of these cash transactions occur in Thailand, never in other countries.

Grin

I have an interesting vantage point. My stepdaughter is in her 20's and we know most of her friends. So we are talking about a group of about 15 women in their 20's, all with college degrees from a well established university, none from a poor background and none from a rich background as far as I can tell. In fact we have known some of these women from before they were college age and we have met a number of their parents and families.

During their college years most of them were dating guys their own age, mostly fellow students. Some were still dating their boyfriends from before college. The interesting thing was that 3 of these women were mia nois during their college years. The sponsors (not sure what else to call them) of these 3 women were 20 to 40 years older. One of these 3 also had a boyfriend her age on the side. Other than this one they all seemed to be in monogamous relationships with guys of similar ages.

All of these women started professional careers after college even the few who married early. None of the women who were mia nois stayed with their sponsors. Most of these women have dated or married Thai men close to their own age. Only one of this entire group ever dated a westerner when they were younger.

Now a number of years later and things have changed quite a bit. Over half of the marriages have ended in divorce. Very few are with their original partner. Only 2 women out of this group have any children. Most of them are dating or married to Thai men but no more than 5 years apart in age. Another woman is now dating a westerner but again he's no more than 5 years older. The exception which is most interesting is that 4 of these women are now dating or married to Thai men in their 40's.

How do we know all of this? We have hosted a number of dinner parties where our daughter has invited some of her friends. Most of the conversation during these dinners are about their boyfriends and gossip about the boyfriends of the women who are not present. These days there is a bit of joking about the women with older partners but it not only seems to be accepted but to me some of these women seem to be a bit jealous of the women with older partners.

Is this a trend? (referring to another TV thread) I admit this is a small sample of people but this group of women seems to be gravitating towards older men. The strange thing to me is that the men are all in their 40's. None are in their 30's or 50's. Is there some significance to the specific age range of these men? As these women mature are they becoming more pragmatic or wiser or what? Or does their gain in maturity make them more attractive to these older men? My wife and I have had several conversations about this. What is going on here?

We have met 3 of these men and they seem like nice guys to me and based on seeing these couples together all of them seem to be in love. However, these relationships do also seem to on solid ground. None of these relationships seem to be on rocky ground compared to the relationships these women had when they were younger.

Anyone else have a window into to Thai culture like this? Do you see anything similar? What sense do you make of this?

Grin

I visited Central Festival yesterday. Overall the mall looked good with the new movie theaters, and the upscale grocery store on the bottom floor. However, parking appeared to be a problem. I saw a lot of vehicles parked behind other vehicles that would require you to push them out of the way to pull out. If parking looks this way on a Wednesday, the weekends must really be bad. :-(

I'm not sure the parking is that bad. I cruised up a few levels just to check things out and the upper levels were nearly empty. I think the double parkers were just too lazy to go up more levels or just didn't realize they could go up more levels.

If you look at the Central Festival map the parking is about 30% of the area of each floor except for the 5th. Maybe on a super crowded holiday it might get more difficult to park.

Grin

Not used to being the head of a large government department?

Prefer you to sell the business?

DangerWillRobinson.jpg

Probably left out a comma:

jobs she wasn't used to, being the head of a large government department

They were still called modems. They were the original modems. They just used an acoustic coupler interface.

In the beginning these modems were huge. When the first Cat modem came out it was a big hit for its small size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT

Then of course Hayes came out with their cheaper modems and the rest is history.

If two modems look alike would they be called doppler gangers?

Grin

In general there is plenty of parking. There are 5 levels from G to 4. The higher you go the more available parking.

It takes several spirals just to go up or down one level so be patient. Many of the Exit signs are pointing in the wrong direction so beware.

When we parked on level 2 previously the lighting was not working yet so we had to park in the dark

The parking is parallel to the length of the mall so you never have to walk far to get into the mall itself.

Grin

There was a typo in my earlier post about Daiso.

The standard price is 65 Baht not 55 Baht.

Grin

Opening hours:

Mon-Thu

11:00 to to 21:30

Fri

11:00 to 22:00

Sat-Sun and Holidays

10:00 to 22:00

I think Naam has me beat but here's a description of my system which I have been working on for about 20 years. I use Quicken for Mac along with a bunch of external scripts.

I just use a separate Quicken data file for each currency. I run a shell script that runs a bunch of other scripts to bring all of the foreign account data into my USD data file.

I use Applescript to run Quicken to open up each of my foreign currency files and export all of the data for the previous period to QIF files. I use perl scripts to convert these to to QIF files for either brokerage accounts or money market accounts depending on the situation.

I use iMacros and Firefox to download a period's worth of exchange rates from oanda.com into csv files. I use perl scripts to convert these to QIF files which look like security price data. I use Applescript to run Quicken to import all of the brokerage account and money market account files and security price files into the USD data file.

Essentially all of the data exported from my foreign files gets imported as securities with the price being the exchange rate. I have to make up stock symbols for each foreign account for everything to work. Withdrawals and deposits just become buys and sells. I put more detail into the memo fields for each transaction to differentiate them from just withdrawals and deposits.

For example in my USD data file I have a THB brokerage account. Each of my Thai accounts from the THB data file gets converted to a particular fake stock with buys and sells for each transaction. So a particular stock in my THB brokerage account might be called BBL-Savings. So with just a look at my THB brokerage account I can see all of my THB accounts and the values in USD for any particular date.

A bit convoluted but a major step up from the double entry bookkeeping system I used for about 15 years before that which consisted of shell, sed, and awk scripts working on text files.

Grin

^^ Muji stationary that I mentioned is just a few aisles in Muji store in the Central Department Store section.

Thanks, I probably walked right past it. - Grin

Finally made it to Central Festival. Definitely a huge mall. Cruised through the Food Hall and saw a lot of American food that I've never seen in a Rimping. Pretty good selection in the butcher section. Even saw fruit and vegetables I've never seen in a Thai fresh market.

My wife was more impressed with Daiso than anything else and ended up buying stuff she has been trying to find for quite a while. For those not familiar with Daiso it is like a Japanese dollar store with a bunch of low end household items where most everything is the same price. AT 55 Baht it is not quite as cheap as the Daiso stores in the SF Bay Area where most items are $1.50.

I've eaten in a Yayoi before in Hua Hin and the food was quite good for the price. A step up from Gekko Garden prices and quality (no disrespect intended, Rudi). It seemed fairly authentic for Japanese chain food (not fast food) and I have spent a bit of time in Japan on business.

The B2S store is much bigger than the one in Robinson's at Airport Plaza but other than travel books the English section is not much better. By the way my wife says that B2S stands for Books to Stationary.

Actually what I'd like to see in Chiang Mai is a Kinokuniya bookstore.

Looked for the Muji stationary which was mentioned earlier in the thread but couldn't find it. I didn't see it on the map either. I did see a Muji section in the men's clothing area in the Central department store. I've only been to the Muji store in Roppongi but I think it's all the same company.

Would much appreciate it if someone could tell me where the Muji stationary is.

Grin

Called the first number mentioned in the thread yesterday afternoon. Installer showed up at 9:00 this morning and was done by 11:00. Got the dish located where I wanted it and ran the cable through the plastic covering for an AC line so no cable is visible from the street. And since the cable was run into the attic next to the AC line no new holes had to be drilled.

Great picture quality here in Padaet with no degradation during the slight rain we had.

In the last hour I surfed all of the channels and found 29 with English. I'm not much of a TV watcher except for maybe sports but if I ever get bored I could probably find something to watch. All in all CTH seems like a pretty good deal.

- Grin

This has been a long running thread. Now that the CTH programming guide has been fixed I guess I should try it out.

Anyone had it installed recently? How long did it take?

Any consensus on the best place to call for the install? I'm located in Padaet if it helps.

Thanks - Grin