bkk_mike

If he lives in the Philippines, he should be getting the full pension including the increases. If he hasn't been - he should start complaining loudly - that they don't know their own rules. Maybe they don't believe that he is living in the Philippines because he's using a UK bank account still. Probably should open a bank account there and get his pension paid into it (should be easy to do if he's living there on a retirement visa of some sort).

On 2. Whether you're married or not makes no difference. Your state pension dies with you. If you have a defined benefit pension from your company, or an annuity, then that can sometimes be set up to still pay a full or partial pension to a surviving spouse - so not being married means she could lose out in that circumstance - but not for the state pension. The bigger issue if you're not being married (depending on the value of your estate) is possibly inheritance taxes. If you've got enough assets (worldwide) to be liable. Possible example would be if you have a house in the UK that you're leaving to your kids, and you go over the inheritance tax threshold, not being married could mean that the executor asks for money from her based on the value of what you've left her. Where if you're married, it's tax exempt.

That makes absolutely no sense - as the US is one of the countries where a UK state pension isn't frozen. Are you sure she wasn't from Canada and changed planes in New York?

If you were living in Thailand and getting the winter fuel allowance... - I would stay quiet and not complain about it's disappearance. Also not really sure why you're blaming Labour for the decision to freeze the personal allowance as that was taken by the previous government. Now you could maybe blame Starmer and Reeves for saying they're going to stick to Tory spending limits, but not for things decided by the previous government.

The man who told you Brexit was a good idea - now never mentions it - because it's turned to <deleted>. And you still think he has "the answers"?

UK stopped signing new deals in 1981. So this one can literally be blamed on Thatcher. This is, of course, except where it was required as part of the EU (i.e. with other members of the EU - which is why your pension isn't frozen if you move to Spain - even though we never signed a reciprocal agreement with Spain under Franco). Maybe the group they should be approaching for a rule change is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. - Let your pension in one country be payable and not be frozen if you've retired to another country in the TPP. You'd get the Australian and New Zealand population on-board because they're affected both by British pensioners living there (often who retired there because their kids had moved there), and by their own countries' systems.

The pound is still well below where it was on the day before the vote. Brexit is costing the UK economy £100 billion a year (estimate from Bloomberg - they have no skin in the game on either side - that's just their estimate for the actual costs). Just one example of the way Brexit is pissing away money. The US investment banks had to transfer £2 trillion in financial assets out of the UK to capitalise their new EU-based legal entities. That, all by itself - taking into account nothing else caused by Brexit - is about £500m a week not reaching the Treasury. And you wonder why there's a black hole in the government finances.

There will be occasional proof of life checks, particularly as you get older. Just to be sure that they're not still paying a pension out to someone who's died. I remember there was a case in Japan where a newspaper called up to talk to a woman who was supposedly the oldest person in the district - just for a puff piece - and ended up finding out that they had died a decade earlier, but not been reported so that the relative who'd been looking after her could still get her pension money.

No - if you look at the Thailand-UK double taxation treaty... It's government pensions only.

The cost of Brexit to the UK is £2 billion a WEEK. That's why the UK doesn't have any money any more...

It's not for leaving the UK. There are places you can retire to where your UK pension isn't frozen. - Spain (in fact pretty much anywhere in Europe), the US, Jamaica, the Philippines, etc. The Philippines makes a lot of sense for Brits as an alternative to Thailand. You can pay to join their national universal healthcare scheme (which you can't do in Thailand), and your pension doesn't get frozen. Maybe you get a few more Typhoons and the food isn't as good, and how useful the universal healthcare is maybe an issue if you've retire to a place that's a long way from a state hospital, but if you're at a point where you are dependent on your state pension going up with inflation, it's probably the better bet than Thailand.

Technically, unless you're from the US or Hong Kong (tied to the USD), you don't care about the baht/dollar exchange rate. Only the exchange rate from your own currency.

Trying to weaken your currency (at least one that you have the printing rights for) makes you money in other currencies. That's why the figures showing the intervention increased currency reserves. Trying to keep a currency strong is where you spend money... The dollar weakened suddenly because they lowered interest rates by half a point instead of the expected quarter point. That and a whole boatload of uncertainty around the election.

You must have only seen really bad fakes. Most of the time a watch shop won't know whether it's a real one or a good fake until they open it up. And the really good fakes - until they start taking it apart...

When did Swift change sides? She has never endorsed Trump? She didn't endorse anyone in 2016 (but in a later story in the Guardian said she should have come out for Clinton), and she endorsed Biden in 2020 and has endorsed Harris now. Literally it seems to be whoever is not Trump... The only apparent endorsement of Trump by her is the AI generated fake that Trump posted on Truth Social.

I was wondering how someone doing "high end IT" got caught. Because most of that would be people logging in remotely to a company offshore... Figured it had to be someone doing it for a Thai company... Only to find installing CCTV cameras is apparently "high end IT" in Thailand...

The Thai wife lets him avoid the long immigration queue (on entry)...

Hate to annoy you, but most of my pension is in Hong Kong, and the DTA means Thailand can't touch it.

Thai tax year runs on the calendar year, so possibly. Although as this one needs a law change, I'd expect it to be 1/1/3026 (if ever). Remember we now have a Prime Minister whose father is well known for using the method of keeping money offshore to avoid tax...

Especially where the data you enter is literally the data from your passport. The same data that they'd scan currently when you enter...

The story is about electric BUSES. And a lot of the issues are the same as everywhere... Slow rolling out of charging where it's needed by the electrical utility company; starting the service with fewer buses than planned for; selfish gits using bus lanes when they shouldn't.

Got a mortgage no problem. Based on offshore income. Paid a higher rate because of the perceived higher risk from being paid in a currency other than Thai baht. Definitely helped that I work for a multinational, rather than some tiny company they had never heard of. Also helped that we were borrowing something like 1x salary, not some crazy multiple.

Luna 2000 series looks like it's LFP The home page on them says 100% DoD. (That is making an assumption that all Huawei Luna 2000s are LFP, maybe prior gen weren't... - but for house batteries, the extra volume for LFP is not really an issue - and they would normally be cheaper than regular lithium ion by capacity because they don't need any cobalt.)

Sorry, but booked with EVA directly - and they definitely charge for seat selection. So this must have changed...

Personally. The current amount is far enough above the monthly interest that you're actually paying down the debt even if you're only making minimum payments. That's better from the point of view of long term debt than in places like the UK where the minimum payments barely covers the interest.