bkk_mike

A lot of the nurses and doctors in Thailand can't leave. Being a doctor is one of the things where the government will actually subsidise students to study abroad (you never wondered why the doctors all have good English), but as part of that agreement, they have to practice in Thailand (usually in a government hospital - at least part of the time). They do have the option of paying the government back, with interest, if they leave before their time is up. But most don't. By the time the clock is run down, they'll have families and status in the local hospitals, etc. It's also the case that, around the time that they're no longer required to stay, they may get quite a large pay rise.

UK can't be a banana republic - because you can't grow bananas in the UK (without a heated greenhouse).

Maybe a banner ad on the page where you check how much pension you're going to receive stating that if you retire abroad (depending on the country), your pension won't go up in line with inflation each year. People who watch Emmerdale or Coronation Street aren't exactly the demographic that intend to leave the country.

So you wanted to have veterans get Legionnaires disease, rather than the asylum seekers. Bibby Stockholm was converted into accommodation to house the homeless in 1992. Do you think, given it's intended usage, that no expense was spared in the method of construction? I think it far more likely that every expense was spared. And the barge wasn't new when it was converted into accommodation.

Your pension reverts back to your old frozen pension when you leave the UK again. It doesn't reset to the new level. You have to keep spending 183 days in the UK each year (or some other country where the pension isn't frozen) to stop it falling back to the original frozen amount.

It's not exactly advertised that if you retire to certain countries your state pension will be frozen. But the problem is only likely to get worse as the people who used to retire to Spain for more sunshine and a lower cost of living, especially those with too little income to get a Spanish retirement visa, start to look further afield for a place where they can live with more sunshine, and a lower cost of living than the UK. I know it's going to happen to me (when I get too old to do the 183 days a year in the UK and decide to stop flying back and forth). But I'm not even retired yet, and a state pension is not going to be my only source of income.

Depends how much you earned... I left the UK because I was fed up paying £4K a month in tax and NI contributions.

The "let's commit pension fraud" option. Unless you do as I intend to do - which is use the UK address for just over 6 months of the year (in the summer), and the Thai address for the rest of the year (skipping the UK winter). Avoids the new Thai tax changes (admittedly a lot of my work pension is in Hong Kong, so is exempt from all that anyway), and means you still get the annual increase in the state pension, and access to the NHS when there.

What is it with the continual complaining about the spending on asylum seekers. The asylum seeker spending is taken straight out of the foreign aid budget. (The people that actually pay for the cost of asylum seekers are the people in the countries where we would have spent the foreign aid money.) Anyway, the amount spent on asylum seekers is due to the slow processing of claims for asylum (because granted and given the right to work, or disallowed and no longer entitled to stay in the country - either way, you stop paying to house them as asylum seekers).

Yes - but that's not a rule, it's at the discretion of the individual GP. i.e. You're OK as long as that particular GP is still working. Once he retires...

£49 a DAY? And you believe that? On what right wing nutcase website did you see something that ridiculous.

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...