how do you eanr your money out there pedro
I hear you can live like a king for comparatively small amounts
I day trade & I have a company in the financial industry - all the sales coming in through the web. So I could really be anywhere.
In terms of living like a king for a small amount. That sort of depends on your definition of living like a king.
The more home comforts you want, the more expensive it is. So you can have a bottle of Singha for 35 Baht (80p-ish) or a bottle of Fullers ESB for 150-250 Baht £3-5 quid.
You can live in a £75 baht a month room but you will be pretty far from luxury. For a luxury 3 bed condo, you'd be looking at £2,000 + a month (you could easily spend 10 grand a month on a pad). The last place we rented was a 1 bed at £1,000 a month for 180 sq meters/1900 sq feet. For a capital city that's pretty cheap. If you went to Pattaya, you could halve that and have a really nice place.
Thai food is cheap and plentiful and you get amazing food at the supermarkets very cheap. I don't eat much western food, so I do save there. You can eat a decent mean for less than 1 quid.
Property is cheap - my 3 bed house cost about £180k and is 5 min walk to the train station that goes into town but far enough out of town to be good for cycling & walks. So cheap property but it's swings & roundabouts 'cause my car cost over £70k and it's really nothing special
- so it seems that you get a deal in one thing but you pay it back elsewhere.
Medical care is cheap - even if you use international hospitals. We have insurance but the amounts are so small that we usually don't bother claiming.
Schools are expensive - for an international school, it will cost £7,800 per year, per child for a British curriculum school and that is NOT the high end. The alternative is sending them to a Thai school and having them come out complete muppets.
Petrol is fairly cheap at about 63p per liter for 95 octane with 10% ethanol.
We overpay our maid who comes 3 times a week and cleans the house top to bottom, does some babysitting and runs errands for us. She gets £150 a month. It's still pretty cheap.
If living like a king is being a single guy, living in Pattaya in a £500 a month (decent) appartment, eating well, screwing a 3-4 hookers a week, going to the gym, taking gear, sitting by the pool - yeah - that is very cheap.
But raising a family, living in Bangkok - it's expensive but the standard of living is way above the UK overall I believe. It's very subjective though and it's not for everyone.
Kids really do fuck everything up...
