OldAsiaHand

There's no reason to become suspicious automatically here, at least no more than you are with the rest of everyday life in Thailand. We had approaches to do photo shoots and television commercials a number of times when our youngest son was very small, but just didn't want to do it. This really isn't unusual.

In the UK, properties like this are held under leases, secured in law and precedence.

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To quote some nitwit I read somewhere on this board, "And what relevance has that got to Thailand?"

Jeez, Khun Jean, you see what you've done? You ask a simple enough question and you start getting dumb legal advice from belligerent, uneducated folks who can't even write English decently.

Good Lord.

Well written and thoughtful. While I certainly don't agree with everything you say, it's good to hear at least one intelligent voice getting through the nitwit prattle that usually overwhelms this forum.

Look, there really isn't anything weird about what Khun Jean is talking about. It's more or less the same structure as the co-op form which is used for virtually every building in New York as well as a goodly number of buildings in San Francisco, Paris, London et al. There's probably a hundred years of solid legal history behind such a structure and hundreds of billions of dollars of property held in that form whether you guys understand it or not.

What you're thinking of here really isn't all that novel. There are certainly similar structures in common use in a number of places, even if not in Thailand.

At the heart of everything, however, it seems to me that there is a pretty straight-up local land development deal here, regardless of how it is structured. My view is that you need a law firm that is international, but with a solid local base as well. Send me a PM, if you like, and I'll recommend somebody.

You're working the problem the right way and asking all the right questions, but these are issues on which you really must get advice from a law firm with appropriate experience. You did not say exactly where on Samui the land is located, but regardless, there is most likely a significant amount of money at stake here, far too much to reply on the kind of free advice you will get on this forum. Don't try to do this the Thai way. Do yourself a favor and find a good law firm and get the deal done right.

Personally, I'm quite interested to hear in your "decades of experience" even if I may say so you do have a rather immodest user name... I'm also wary that these might be rather jaded people who've taken some hard knocks, maybe not been that successful in all respects themselves, and this colors their "advice".

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Well, now....

Since I'm both disgustingly old, dag burn it, and I've been around here for nearly thirty years now, I'd say my user name was quite literal rather than 'immodest' as you suggest.

And I certainly don't intend to spend a lot of time arguing with your warning that I might be some sort of a cynical failure whose advise is colored by my own lack of success. Sometimes I think I've enjoyed more purely financial rewards here than anyone should ever be allowed anywhere and not a single day goes back that I don't marvel at my extraordinary good fortune. As a matter of fact, and here perhaps I say too much, if you live in Thailand now you would probably recognize my name, but what does that really matter?

All I mean to say is this. The simplistic rot that gets thrown out on this board from time to time by some of the nitwits who post here really annoys me. Occasionally, when I have nothing better to do, I pipe up with what I think is a more realistic and -- dare I say it? -- sophisticated point of view, one that is rooted in the nearly three decades I have spent here.

If my experience is helpful to somebody, I'm pleased. If it's not, just skim right over it. I'll never know the difference, and even if I did, I really wouldn't care very much.

In the lease I have written, if there is non payment of rent, he has 30 days to leave and the amount is deducted from the deposit. Any damages are deducted from the deposit as well. If a lease is written well and he refuses to leave according to the agreement after the 30 days, I can have the police remove him.

It's not too complicated really.

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Oh, I see that. And I'd really love to be there to hear you explain to the Thai police how they have to enforce what you've written in your nice simple little lease.

Look, you don't seem at all interested in the experience of those of us who've been here and dealing wsith these things for decades and that's fine. On the other hand, you might just want to give a moment or two's thought to the possibility, however remote, that your judgment with respect to how things work here isn't nearly as well founded as you apparently think it is. If you don't, good luck to you. But when you decide to sell that apartment that has 'gone up in value already,' I would be willing to bet you'll have a bit of a surprise coming.

If they don't pay, kick them out. It's not like the west where there is an involved process to evict a tennant.

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Absolutely wrong.

It's effectively impossible to get people out of (or off) property here by legal means, even squatters. The standard method used by Thais to accomplish the trick is to hire thugs to beat the occupiers up and trash their property (remember Chuwit's property on Sukhumvit?), but as a foreigner, I would certainly think a very long time before going that route.

Two thoughts.....

First, just do the math and you'll forget the whole idea. If you include realistic allowances for vacancies, commissions, maintenance et al, you will find that the cash flow yield from rentals is poor, seldom more than 5% unless you are very, very lucky.

Second, while in most sensible countries you can count on a capital gain from the sale of the property eventually to boost that yield to a respectable level, that's not the case here. Selling what Thais insist on calling 'used property' is a very dicey affair. While I realize that some people manage to sell residential property sucessfully, on the whole, the residential maket here is fairly illiquid, nothing at all like in the US or Europe.

When you buy residential property here you have to accept that you may never be able to sell it again. Why do you think there is so much residential property for rent? Because Thais generally don't even try to sell apartments or homes they are moving out of. They just put them up for rent.

....yet you continue to grace them with your presence....Why torture yourselves by staying?

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First, it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that a great many foreigners are in Thailand, not because they love the whole idea of living in a Third World country, but because they MUST be here for one reason or another.

Second, speaking for myself, I'm pretty sick of these I-am-more-Thai-than-you-because-I'm-so-frigging-tolerant-it-hurts-my-butt threads. If you are so anxious to express the greatness of your humanity by claiming tolerance and brotherhood even with the half-witted ways Thais frequently behave, please give at least a thought to extending the same degree of tolerance and brotherhood toward your fellow foreigners who are stuck here when they'd rather be somewhere else. In other words, get off your high horse and give everyone a break, mate, not just the race you're in love with today.

.....the people posting on this forum start to make sense.

You appear to have started a truly remarkable thread here. Even by the standards of this board, you have collected a really stunning pile of rubbish in response to a simple question.

Just for the heck of it, here's a simple answer.

FDIC insurance isn't applicable to accounts held by US banks outside the US. The reasons are both variable and complicated, but as a principle, that's the answer to your question.

A freaking BMW-6series is 4mil, in the state i can get it for half the price and enouf left over to buy another honda

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If you can actually buy a 6 series for 4 million, you better grab it fast. I think the real price is well over twice that.

As a rule of thumb, import duties raise the price of cars here to about three times what they cost in the States. If they're actually assembled here (Cherokee, some Merc, some BMW's etc), that becomes more like 'merely' two and a half times US price. And at $90K in the US, the Thai price for a 6 series would be about $270 K here, or somewhere over B10 million. Look at the price of 911's as a yard stick of comparison. They're about B12-14 million.

Oh God, here we go with the old I-am-more-Thai-than-thou routine again.

I'm awfuly glad you guys with the soul of a Thai appreciated the local kid's book so much, but I thought it was such labored, self-important, mediocre writing that I couldn't manage to get through more than ten pages of it. Maybe after another couple of decades here, I too will develop an adequate appreciation of the third rate.

Incidentally, for those of you who get such a chuckle out of sneering at the 'dribble' written by expats who happen to be living in Thailand, could you remind me exactly how many books each of you has had the intellectual discipline and sheer courage to write and offer to the public?

One thing to be very careful about...

In Singapore, banks frequently charge fees on outbound wires that are based on a minimum fee plus a percentage of the wire amount, not the flat amount that is normal almost everywhere else in the world. The percentage is very small, of course, but if you are wiring a large amount, it can still add up in a hurry and total twenty or more times the normal fee. You can negotiate your way out of it when you set up an account if you plan to be an active customer, but you had better do that in advance, not after your wire is sent and you find a charge of S$200 or so on your statement for the wire. Singaporeans tend to get pretty rigid after they have already taken the money out of your account.

I don't have a WP, I have a non imm O cause of my son.  Can anyone tell me if I can import duty free?  Or point me in the right direction to find out?  Cheers

I know it sounds like a simple question, but no one is going to be able to give you a straight answer to it. I'm in a similar position and have been dealing with the issue on and off for the last ten years.

The English-language version of the customs regulations seems to say that you need EITHER a work permit or a one year non-immigrant visa to import household goods duty free. On the other hand, it also lists a work permit as one of the required documents you must produce to clear your household goods. I'm told the Thai-language version of the regulations is even more ambigious, although I don't see how.

Customs naturally has very little interest in clarifying any of this. It is the ambiguity of the regulations, of course, which supports Thai customs' long standing practice of extorting foreigners who are not well connected.

My best advice is to try and snag a sympathetic customs agent when you clear your goods, show your visa, and explain that you are here leagally to care for your child and are 'retired' so it is not necessary for you to have a work permit. Naturally that won't prevent you from paying a bribe anyway to get your things, but at least it ought to keep the amount down.

The English language newspapers here all seem to think we are not aware what is going on around us.

On the whole, most foreigners here aren't. Just read this board..........

I recently sent a visa application from Sapian to the Thai consulate in Houston. I called FedEx, DHL and UPS to comare prices. FedEx was the cheapest at US$25.

But, when I went to send the documents I found out that FedEx was going to charge me $87 for the return trip: Houston to Saipan.

No one has been able to explain why one way costs over three times as much as the other.

Never again FedEx....

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Yeah, my experience is exactly the same, albeit on a larger scale. The price for a Standard Fed Ex 25 kg box from Bangkok to the US is something like THB5000. The identical 25 kg box shipped from the US to Thailand is USD285 (plus, of course, extortion from Thai Customs and the cute little fees the local FedEx office tires to stick you with).

And as for 'raising ###### with FedEx in the US,' I'd be grateful for any tips you guys might have on exactly how to get to someone there who might respond positively. I tried working through the usual telephone numbers in the US for customer service on two separate occasions and was twice told to call the Thai office. I explained that what I was complaining about was the corruption and extortion practiced by the Thai office, but the nice ladies in customer service in the US were unmoved. 'Call your local office,' they repeated over and over to me on both occasions.

The bribe necessary to secure one of the available nominations from most board members has been reliably cited to me as two million baht.

Very interesting Oldasiahand.

I thought it would be around 1 million.

Thanks

neeranam

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My source was a member thinking of running for the board several years ago and looking at it as a money-making proposition. Perhaps he exaggerated. Or perhaps not. Either way, I declined to pay anything and therefore have no personal negotiating experience on the precise amount it would actually take to buy a nomination.

Sorry, but the edit button seems to have disappeared on me.....

What I meant to say was that customs can (and does, if you draw a black bean) classify books as 'printed matter' (which, I suppose, they are) and that throws them into a tariff class that is pretty hefty. Something like 35% of whatever they claim the original cost of the books was, not the present value, but of course that is just a starting point for negotiations.

I've never known of anything like this happening with couriered documents and books addressed to Thai names, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to see this as probably yet another farang tax. Or maybe Customs just figures they're safer extorting foreigners since we're less likely to be connected and able to bite back in any meaningful way.

You might well be right. American banks have had a lot of new know-your-client requirements imposed on them post 9/11 by the Patriot Act and are very sensitive to complying with them. If you're not standing in front of a bank officer for them to see your ID and look you over, I suspect they might very well impose some restrictions.

I've been using Federal Express to send various personal material from the US to Thailand for years. It's always been a bit of a game of Russian roulette, since Thai customs has always grabbed a fair number of parcels and extorted a bride in return for their release, but recently the situation has gotten far, far worse. What is also new is that Federal Express now absolutely refuses to make any effort at all on the shipper's behalf with respect to the siezed parcels. They just present a bill for the 'duty' and threaten to destroy or return the package if you don't pay.

Recently I had to pay just over B2500 to get an envelop of personal mail and unpaid bills released to me, and a month before that I was nailed with 'duty' of B5500 on some legal documents sent from New York. Only in the last few days I've had a shipment of about thirty books from my library in the US that I asked our housekeeper to send to me held up with a demand for a as-yet undefined five-figure payoff to get them delivered.

Federal Express in Thailand is either seriously inept or marginallly corrupt or, more likely, both. Given the recent increase in the extortion ratio from, say, one out of ten shipments to more like one out of two, the possiblity does occur to me that their local folks have found a way to cut themselves in on the action.

My advice? Use the postal service. Every now and then you parcel will be stolen, but it's cheaper than paying the birbes to FedEx and Customs and, in my view, far less annoying.

You were lucky it arrived.. However I understand books are import duty free..

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Wrong. There are very substantial duties on books coming into Thailand, and even if there weren't, you'd frequently pay anyway.

Customs here is utterly and completely corrupt. They simply pick out a number of packages coming into the country and refuse to release them until they extoprt a bribe from you. The size of the bribe is directly proportional to who you know.

I imported about a hundred and fifty books a year or so ago and was slapped with a bill for over B42,000 in duty (yes, you read that right). When I had a highly placed friend in government call customs about the matter, it was explained to him that the duty bill had contained a typing error. The duty, you see, was actually supposed to have been B42.

Good luck, and welcome to Thailand.

The membership is almost entirely very old line folks who've been members for decades and younger members who have literally inherited their memberships. For quite a few years, the only route to full memberships that has been open to the newly arrived is through one of the two nominations that each board member is entitled to make every year. Some board members are honorable, I assume, but it is well known that many are anything but. The bribe necessary to secure one of the available nominations from most board members has been reliably cited to me as two million baht.

There is a year-to-year fee for the temporary use of the club facilities that many companies pay on behalf of a senior executive. A couple of years ago I seem to remember that the fee was something like B10,000 per month, but it may well be more than that now. The catch is that you get nothing for it other than the right to to there and pay for what you use. The monthly deal accrues no membership rights and can be summarily terminated or the conditions changed by the club at their whim.