I have been calculatin'

[smotherb]

41 minutes ago, Lacessit said:

Like hell.

"if possible" was the word. It becomes less possible the longer the rate drop lasts. I prefer to invest my money and play the rate change game

[britishrepublican]

12 hours ago, theguyfromanotherforum said:

I guess I'm the only one. Yay!

You're not. The British pound has went from 73 to 43 baht over the last ten years. It was as low as 38 at times.

[theguyfromanotherforum]

2 hours ago, NoBrainer said:

Looks to me like you missed the boat. Should have changed that 200K into baht when you got here, rather than holding the Dollars while they declined.

 

 

 

That's a no brainer.

[ericthai]

I recall back in jan 98 the baht it 53 to the USD I figured no way will it go higher so I exchanged $5000 USD, the next few days it went up to 56.   I think mid to late 97 / early 98 was about the best time for exchanges. Most of the hotels, restaurants didn't change prices yet and still at the 25b to USD 

 

[khunPer]

12 hours ago, theguyfromanotherforum said:

Ok, it seems I exaggerated a little, but still almost 2 million baht "loss".

I know folk that have lost a lot more in LoS...

[Mark1066]

3 hours ago, EnlightenedAtheist said:

Well, if you cherry pick, I can too.

 

But Mr Kobsit predicted the baht would reverse the trend in May in light of a repatriation-driven dividend. 

Mr Kobsit said the local currency will be more volatile throughout the year amid both local and international uncertainties. 

Please credit and share this article with others using this link:https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/finance/1415239/bot-to-keep-a-lid-on-baht-interventions. View our policies at http://goo.gl/9HgTd and http://goo.gl/ou6Ip. © Post Publishing PCL. All rights reserved.

That is referring to a reversal of the upward trend expected between now and May, not a reversal of the trend that has been in place for the last 12-15 years.

[swissie]

28 minutes ago, Mark1066 said:

That is referring to a reversal of the upward trend expected between now and May, not a reversal of the trend that has been in place for the last 12-15 years.

Right on!

For the time being, the BOT comes under increased pressure by Thailands Export Industry/Tourist Industry "To do something against the strong Bht". This may put a temporary lid on the Bht.
But let's face it folks, as the Economic-Gap between the so called Mature Economies and Thailand is likely to narrow further in the future, the Bht is bound to reflect this fact.
In a few years, the Bht may have gained another 25-30% over most "hard-currencies" on a permanent basis.
As unpleasant as this might be, such calculations should be part of any retirement plans concerning Thailand.
There was I time, when I considered Thailand "cheap". These days it's more like just "good value for the money"(still).
Cheers.
BTW: There was a time when Spain was "cheap", some of us remember.
  

[Petchou]

If you got 31 bahts few years ago for a loonie,. You can still convert your bahts into Canadian dollars and it takes only 25 bahts to get a loonie.   Actually, you are richer if you convert to Canadian dollars.  

[alex8912]

4 hours ago, britishrepublican said:

You're not. The British pound has went from 73 to 43 baht over the last ten years. It was as low as 38 at times.

Wow.  So some British are truly addicted to Thailand. 

[Mark1066]

2 minutes ago, alex8912 said:

Wow.  So some British are truly addicted to Thailand. 

What do you mean? You're not making any sense....

[alex8912]

1 minute ago, Mark1066 said:

What do you mean? You're not making any sense....

Yes I am. If your currency was halved as the above states many would move on to another place and actually some did. Get it??

[Mark1066]

17 minutes ago, alex8912 said:

Yes I am. If your currency was halved as the above states many would move on to another place and actually some did. Get it??

The GBP devalued against most currencies after the credit crunch so the only way to get round the issue for people on a static income from the UK would have been to go home. In other words, staying here probably indicated a reluctance to return to the UK, not an addiction to Thailand. Do you get it???

[alex8912]

9 minutes ago, Mark1066 said:

The GBP devalued against most currencies after the credit crunch so the only way to get round the issue for people on a static income from the UK would have been to go home. In other words, staying here probably indicated a reluctance to return to the UK, not an addiction to Thailand. Do you get it???

No.  If you don't realize ( with a z) that many British are addicted to Thailand and TVF then you are probably one of them. If it becomes 27 baht to the pound  tomorrow Swampy won't be swamped.  

[Lacessit]

8 hours ago, smotherb said:

"if possible" was the word. It becomes less possible the longer the rate drop lasts. I prefer to invest my money and play the rate change game

I was referring to your "short time" word play, and the claim it was inadvertent.

[Farang99]

16 hours ago, joebrown said:

You're unlilkely to get any sympathy from a UK pensioner like me. When I came here in 2004 1 GBP = 70Bht. Since then my State Pension has been frozen and the exchange rate is now 43/44Bht. That's a 37% loss of income, so you've really got off quite lightly!

That is so true. I came here in 1997 and for a few weeks (after the Asian bank crash) the £ was getting 90 THB. Then it stabilised around 70, and has slowly slid to 50, but since the Brexit vote  it has gone down even further. Effectively my money is now worth barely half what it once was.

[mogandave]

Two years ago I could buy Apple for $90/share.

Now I have to pay $190 a share!!

My money is now worth half as much as it was just two years ago!



Sent from my iPhone using Thaivisa Connect

[Mark1066]

7 hours ago, alex8912 said:

No.  If you don't realize ( with a z) that many British are addicted to Thailand and TVF then you are probably one of them. If it becomes 27 baht to the pound  tomorrow Swampy won't be swamped.  

I have a family here and a flexible income so addiction has nothing to do with it. I know most Americans aren't as stupid as you, so we’ll leave it there.

[denby45]

17 hours ago, CanuckThai said:

I agree with keeping funds in Canada, and keeping a minimum Baht float.   The best solution I've found for myself, has been opening a Thai and Canadian  "E currency" trading account.  You can fund your "E currency" account when you want, online from your Canadian bank, then send yourself an amount of "Ecoin",  sell it, deposit funds into your Thai bank account.  At this point, you actually make money transferring CDN bought Ecoin, to Thai.Bx.  Example: buy $1000 worth of bitcoin, send it to your "ewallet" here, sell it, deposit approx 26500 Baht into your thai bank account.  The whole process is very quick (usually less than an hour to have funds in your thai account, from time of purchase of ecoin in Canada).

I am interested in your strategy but would love to know how you manage to avoid the obscene fees for changing Fiat to crypto. You are looking at approx 8% loss for a full turnaround. Around 4% at each end. 

 

 

Den

[DUNROAMIN]

Morale of the story. Keep your money and assets out of Thailand. Only keep enough here to live on and the odd emergency. For every over priced condo you buy, there are 100 new ones built every month.  All the popular areas in Thailand have been saturated with new condos to the point where a condo more than 5-10 years old has lost ground. Thai real estate does not work the same as your home country. Thais don't like to buy second hand, only new, so most second hand condos are purchased by foreigners.

My thoughts. Take it or leave it.

[Mark1066]

2 minutes ago, DUNROAMIN said:

Morale of the story. Keep your money and assets out of Thailand. Only keep enough here to live on and the odd emergency. For every over priced condo you buy, there are 100 new ones built every month.  All the popular areas in Thailand have been saturated with new condos to the point where a condo more than 5-10 years old has lost ground. Thai real estate does not work the same as your home country. Thais don't like to buy second hand, only new, so most second hand condos are purchased by foreigners.

My thoughts. Take it or leave it.

How is that the moral of the story? Most foreigners who have lived here for more than a decade would be considerably better off in terms of their home currencies if they had transferred all their money and assets into Thailand when they first arrived.

[mogandave]

How is that the moral of the story? Most foreigners who have lived here for more than a decade would be considerably better off in terms of their home currencies if they had transferred all their money and assets into Thailand when they first arrived.

You’re letting facts and arithmetic get in the way of a good bash...

[amykat]

2 hours ago, Mark1066 said:

How is that the moral of the story? Most foreigners who have lived here for more than a decade would be considerably better off in terms of their home currencies if they had transferred all their money and assets into Thailand when they first arrived.

Well theoretically that can be correct but with many caveats.  1) If you have a lot of assets, what would you have invested in while here?  For me, that would not have been better.  2) Would your money have been safe and would you have lost it through some kind of fraud or whatever?  3) If you never want to leave here.  4) Depending on WHEN you wanted to leave here and take the money out and IF you can get the money back out.

 

For me, I only bought a relatively insignificant house and I realized that I might one day walk away from it.  I didn't like that idea but I was willing to live with it.  I hated renting, it cost me a lot because of what I wanted, and I kept moving over and over again.  I just now sold my house, for a low price in a quick and easy way with no effort at all, I did not even list it or clean it up yet.  But due to the exchange rate working in my favor I have lost some money, but very little and only really because I fixed my house up over the years in massive ways.  However if I apply that loss over the more than 11 years I lived here, I could not have rented a tiny room.  It is hard to say exactly, there is some loss of income I am attempting to account for also and various exchange rates the years ...I am not just accounting for the price difference.

 

But had timing been different, that would not be the case at all, this is just two moments in time we are measuring.  And some people can't sell their house for other reasons and various weird things happen here that you need to think about  ...it is not comparing apples and apples like should I invest in the US or UK ...it is comparing apples and zebras.

[Mark1066]

23 minutes ago, amykat said:

Well theoretically that can be correct but with many caveats.  1) If you have a lot of assets, what would you have invested in while here?  For me, that would not have been better.  2) Would your money have been safe and would you have lost it through some kind of fraud or whatever?  3) If you never want to leave here.  4) Depending on WHEN you wanted to leave here and take the money out and IF you can get the money back out.

 

For me, I only bought a relatively insignificant house and I realized that I might one day walk away from it.  I didn't like that idea but I was willing to live with it.  I hated renting, it cost me a lot because of what I wanted, and I kept moving over and over again.  I just now sold my house, for a low price in a quick and easy way with no effort at all, I did not even list it or clean it up yet.  But due to the exchange rate working in my favor I have lost some money, but very little and only really because I fixed my house up over the years in massive ways.  However if I apply that loss over the more than 11 years I lived here, I could not have rented a tiny room.  It is hard to say exactly, there is some loss of income I am attempting to account for also and various exchange rates the years ...I am not just accounting for the price difference.

 

But had timing been different, that would not be the case at all, this is just two moments in time we are measuring.  And some people can't sell their house for other reasons and various weird things happen here that you need to think about  ...it is not comparing apples and apples like should I invest in the US or UK ...it is comparing apples and zebras.

I'm not talking about two single points in time, I'm talking about many points in time. And I am not saying that every single person who has moved here in the last 15 years would have got the timing just right but I believe it's safe to say that many would be better off now, even if all they'd invested in was a deposit account with a local bank. Yet the forum sees a steady stream of posts from people who think they are giving sage advice when they repeat the hackneyed old phrase, "Never bring more to Thailand than you're willing to lose". The fact that thousands of expats have seen the value of their nest eggs back home erode precisely because they followed this advice seems to elude those dispensing their investment wisdom through these pages.

 

As an example, I have lost count of the number of times I have read a post on this forum from somebody who says they would never buy a condo here because they could be thrown out at any time and lose everything. However, I have not seen one single post from somebody who has actually bought a condo in Thailand, subsequently been thrown out of the country and lost their entire investment. Perhaps it has happened to someone but I've seen no evidence of it.

 

Speaking as a UK citizen, I could pick almost any time in the last 10 years to illustrate my point, except April 2013. If you happened to have moved to Thailand in April 2013 from the UK, it is conceivable that you could be 0.2% worse off in terms of the GBP/THB exchange rate movement between then and now. Pick any other month in the last ten years and you would be better off, in many cases far better off.

 

I'm not saying investing in this country is easy or foolproof, I am just questioning what seems to be something of a consensus on this forum regarding opinions on where to keep your liquid and other assets.

[amykat]

My statement about 2 points in time, was about my situation and my house sale. 

 

But you seem to be thinking in terms of only currency rates and risk and picking a historical period that is beneficial to your argument.  In fact on this forum, we are probably giving advice to newbies, right?  Those people who might be moving here now or thinking about it in the future and that historical period of currency exchange rates already happened.  Do you know that it will repeat itself?

 

But there is more to financial planning than only that.  Currency risk is just one aspect to living as an expat.  Because you have currency risk you might have to be even more cautious in your planning.  More cautious would not normally include "going all in."

 

But due to the legal situation here on so many different levels, considering currency risk as your main problem is probably myopic thinking.  But that might depend also on your situation and how simple or complex it is. If you are someone who just has a pension payment to receive and a small savings to purchase vehicles and a few things in life before you die, that can be relatively simple to manage and then currency risk might be your biggest problem.

[amykat]

Your comment about foreigner's seeing their savings erode back home, is also just a moment in time, and in terms of baht.  That can change in a relative instant back to being good again.  There were foreigners here during the Asian financial crisis who were "all in" and lost everything.  I know a few.  And there were some who were not and benefited. 

 

This thinking of yours is called "recency bias".  You think your recent experience is what will keep happening.  It might be true, but it is not necessarily true.

[britishrepublican]

7 hours ago, mogandave said:

Two years ago I could buy Apple for $90/share.

Now I have to pay $190 a share!!

My money is now worth half as much as it was just two years ago!



Sent from my iPhone using Thaivisa Connect

Your logic is flawed. 

[StreetCowboy]

2 minutes ago, britishrepublican said:

Your logic is flawed. 

Only a fool looks for logic in the hearts of men

[britishrepublican]

5 hours ago, denby45 said:

I am interested in your strategy but would love to know how you manage to avoid the obscene fees for changing Fiat to crypto. You are looking at approx 8% loss for a full turnaround. Around 4% at each end. 

 

 

Den

Those percentages you're using are way off. There is no cheaper way to move money than using crypto.

[britishrepublican]

1 minute ago, StreetCowboy said:

Only a fool looks for logic in the hearts of men

You can't even see it.

[StreetCowboy]

1 minute ago, britishrepublican said:

You can't even see it.

Maybe it's like the luminiferous aether