Before moving to Thailand I was living a fairly luxurious lifestyle in Hawaii....big house, condo,girlfriends, lots of toys! and went through huge amounts of money while working myself to death in process. I am living my modest lifestyle by choice, not necessity.

I know people living fairly comfy on even less than me and have good friends who go through 100K/month easily.....My experience has been that there are 3 more expensive areas that can inflate your monthly outgo......1. Girls 2. Bars 3. Health

What a great post . . . just chock full of info.

Thanks, traveldog

I'm retired US Navy and i would be able to survive quite well on my retirement (1,300 USD) as well as the sale of my house which in today's market would net me about 50,000 USD and whatever my 401k would be in 3 or 4 years from now (I estimate about 50,000 USD)

Mike

if you keep away from the sweeties and the honey bugs you can live as cheap as chips have a great retirement best thing you can ever do chock dee

One thing for sure is not to burn your bridges in your home country, and definitely not to assume that you will want to live happily ever after in LOS.

It is also worth playing some disaster scenarios over, to work out how you would cope?

Not just debilitating illness, or decrepit old age, but also making a powerful enemy, or running afoul of the immigration people for some reason.

The old saying says that "the grass is always greener...." The truth is that we can see the advantages of living in another country from afar.....the disadvantages only become truly apparent when we live amongst them.

Anyway, you sound like a person with a lot of commonsense. Good luck. And find a good woman. No point being in Thailand otherwise.

All excellent advice from Wamberal. I live here now but did not burn bridges and retain the ability to return 'home' at any time.

If you're going the lump-sum investment route, there's no need to bring money to Thailand beyond that needed for capital purchases and to keep immigration happy.

I recommend using an offshore bank - it's secure, discreet and also zero-tax. As others have mentioned one runs the risk of the Baht strengthening, but that could just as easily go the other way, possibly catastrophically so.

One thing, which you probably know already, is that if you do bring a lot of cash here, be sure your Thai bank issues the correct 'Foreign Form' (usually known under the old name of Thoo-thoo-sahm), which permits the repatriation of funds, possibly many years in the future. Guard the original document well!

Oh and use anyone except Bangkok Bank - they are not known locally as the 'Dinosaur Bank' for nothing That's only my personal view of course, but is based on eight year's experience of Thai banking services... SCB is good.

Take care and good luck.