Why Living in Thailand for 30 Years Was Not Enough
You will always come last in Thailand. You will always be an outsider looking in on the periphery of society. And it took me many years of living in Thailand to come to this understanding. In the West, we’re told to accept people into our countries for who they are. Different cultures, different ways of doing things, leading to a multicultural society.
I’m not saying that’s great, but when I moved to Thailand initially, it was my hope to quickly become ingrained in the country and become a part of it. But 30 years later, I came to the conclusion that I really must leave Thailand. I didn’t want to end my days in a country that I wasn’t a part of or that I didn’t have anything in common with, even though I spent more than half my life there.
The problem I feel is the West has its own ideas. However, we’re not prepared to force other countries such as Thailand to toe the line. Many things could be used to force Thailand to change the way it operates. But sadly, I know that’s never going to happen no matter how hard I try to dream it to be true.
I was always an optimist. In my earlier time in Thailand, I dreamed about becoming a permanent resident, even a citizen of the country. I knew so many other foreigners that had similar dreams to me. Yet only a very minute portion of people actually achieve this dream. You will always be looked at as a guest in Thailand. But how can you be a guest in a country you’ve spent more than half your life in? In Thailand, you can. And I think in Southeast Asia as a whole, it is quite similar.
And I wanted to get this out of the way because I know so many people are looking to move to Thailand who are coming from the West and who rightfully I think assume that Thailand will be just as easy as where they came from to get some level of security there. But it’s not true. 30 years in Thailand and I was still renewing my visa every single year. If I didn’t meet the requirements for whatever reason, I would have been forced to leave. 30 years as a guest, but I would still be a guest and I would still be living in Thailand if things didn’t go wrong.
Moving to Thailand as a Young Teacher
I moved to Thailand at a fairly young age. I was 23 and I moved there to teach. I was a fully qualified teacher and I got a good job, but it wasn’t paid an enormous amount of money at the time. It was the equivalent of $1,500 a month, which was enough to live in Thailand and enough to be able to go out frequently and enjoy everything that Thailand had available, but it wasn’t enough to be able to save for the future.
I did have a work permit and a visa based on my teaching job, and I hoped to be able to get permanent residence as soon as possible. Technically, it was my understanding that within 3 years of having my work permit and visa, I should be able to apply for the permanent visa. However, I found that even when I became eligible to apply, only on a few occasions, there were still so many barriers in the way of me being able to do that. endless bureaucracy, endless red tape, and a system designed to keep people out of Thailand in any way other than being a guest.
I’ve seen it spoken about on so many YouTube channels, guys saying how they wish they moved to a country that they could become a part of. I wanted to become part of Thailand. I just wanted to be Thai. I didn’t want to be an endless guest, but that’s what I became.
Marriage to a Thai Woman: No Difference at All
I met my wife, having been in Thailand for three years. She was also a teacher, working at the same school that I worked at. We dated for around a year, took things slowly, and when we finally did get married, I felt like I was one step closer to being welcomed as part of the country I loved. It was only logical, at least in my opinion. But now I had a wife in Thailand, it would make only sense that I should be able to get some kind of permanent situation because that’s going to benefit my wife as well who was Thai.
It made not one slight bit of difference. The only difference it did make was that I could change to an extension of stay based on marriage as opposed to work. And that was a little bit easier to do. But the problem was in the name, an extension of stay, not a permanent stay.
When we got married, we moved to a new place together. We thought it would be a good idea to start a clean slate and start living in a brand new place for this brand new marriage. I was still paid the same amount as I was before. I hadn’t had any raises yet, but my wife only made a small amount of money. Around 12,000 baht, hardly enough for her to do much of anything. Before she was married to me, she lived in a small studio with two other girls and they didn’t use the air conditioning and they scrimped and saved. The fact she was a school teacher and had to live in these conditions, I felt was quite disingenuous. Teachers should be treated better than that.
But when we added our salaries together, we found ourselves with an amount of money that for Thailand was a good wage. At the time, it was around 65,000 baht every month. And the exchange rate was more favorable then. Any Thai couple who was earning that amount of money would be on the road to property ownership, car ownership, and just a general middle-class existence. But this wasn’t open to us.
As a foreigner, you’re not allowed to own land in Thailand. You can own condominiums, freehold condominiums, so that’s okay. But in order to buy a condominium in Thailand, you have to transfer the money in from another country. What happens if you’re working in Thailand? You’d have to transfer the money out of Thailand and then back in again. But what happens if you want to get a mortgage? No can do as a foreigner. And then there’s talk of getting a mortgage in your wife’s name, which I’ve heard of people doing and how much easier it would be if I was just Thai. Or if now that I was married to a Thai, I had the ability to at the very least get a mortgage so I didn’t have to rent forever. We weren’t earning enough money to save money to buy somewhere to live. So we were stuck in that endless trap.
Her wage wasn’t enough in order to get a mortgage, and I wasn’t. I’d only been in Thailand at this point for not very long and I still had the idea in my mind that one day I would be able to get a proper visa to actually live in the country and maybe get citizenship and then I could have the same benefits that Thai people have. This is such an uneven playing field if you’re a foreigner in Thailand. Not only is it a lot harder to make money in Thailand, the fact that you’re a foreigner trying to do that means that you’re competing with people who are already 10 steps ahead of you.
I was married to a Thai, but when I expressed my opinions with her, she didn’t really seem to understand what it was like to live somewhere and not have any rights. I don’t believe that you should just be given rights on the drop of a hat. But if you’ve been married and have lived in a country for a certain number of years, regardless of the visa you’ve been on, there should be some international law that requires naturalization.
The First Attempt at Permanent Residence
I’d been in Thailand approximately four years, and that’s when I started to speak Thai fluently. I could read and write. And while that made me feel like I had a deeper connection to Thailand, it also made me feel uneasy that I’d spent so much time learning a language in a country I had no rights in. But I had everything in place after being married for a year and having all the correct documentation to be able to apply for permanent residence at last.
It took me months to get all the paperwork ready. And in Thailand, you can only apply one time per year, and it usually is in December. But in June of that year, I lost my job as a teacher, which meant I lost my work permit. I could still keep my extension of stay because that was based on my wife. But because I didn’t have a work permit anymore, and I didn’t find another job for another 5 months, when I did get that job again, I got a new work permit, and the three-year clock started again. That was my first of a few attempts to actually try to get what I thought I needed to be able to live in Thailand properly.
I never felt like I was living in Thailand. I felt like I was temporarily staying in Thailand. And that’s not the feeling that I wanted for the rest of my life. But I was still thinking at this point, you’ll get it eventually. Just hold on and be patient. wait. And even though it might be another three years before you can apply, it’s only three years and hopefully you’ll have it before you’re 30. The endless optimism of a fool.
A Warning for Retirees
If anyone is thinking about moving to Thailand to retire and you don’t need to work anymore, you’ve already got enough money to live on. You can come to Thailand, get a retirement visa that needs extending every year and you can live in Thailand. I think it’s important to put “live” in inverted commas. You can temporarily stay in Thailand as long as you continue to meet the requirements of your stay. If you’ve been retired there at the age of 50 and the retirement visa sorted out and 20 years later you’re still there and you have some kind of issue and you’re not able to renew your visa again, do you think that the last 20 years in Thailand would have any bearing whatsoever on their decision not to grant you with the visa? Not at all. You will be treated just like someone who has been in the country for a week and you’ll be forced to leave.
There is no looking at extenuating circumstances, no common sense, no gray areas where certain people who have spent so much time there can bend the rules slightly. No human rights, I think, is the best way to put it. If you are thinking about retiring to Thailand, I know some guys who are retired there and they love it and accept it for what it is, but it was never their dream to become part of the country. Many of the guys that moved there at my age all wanted to be part of the country. And I only know three people who actually got citizenship, but they’re still not treated like a Thai.
After losing out on the chance to apply for permanent residence at this point, I put it to the back of my mind and I just got on with living. And that’s the big problem about Thailand. the country itself, how things work, how you can do certain things that you would never be able to do back home, how the ability to get off a speeding fine by paying a tiny amount of money is available to everyone as opposed to the ultra-rich in the West. Lots of things were good about Thailand, but I never felt like I had the full benefit of what Thailand gave to its citizens because I wasn’t a citizen.
Do I think it’s right that people can become citizens of my country easier than people can become citizens of Thailand? No. It’s obvious for anyone with even a modicum of common sense that it’s the wrong way round. If you become a citizen of a Western country, all of a sudden you have rights to social welfare through health care in most Western countries. But if you become a citizen of Thailand, you don’t get anything of value from the government. you’re not eligible for anything of value. So technically, in theory, it should be easier to become Thai than it should be to become American, for example.
The Mortgage Rejection
We had finally saved up enough money to buy a car. But the chance of getting on the property ladder was still a very long way away. We did try to apply for a mortgage in my wife’s name using her salary and my salary. We tried that with a few banks and we were approved. But the problem was they wanted us to pay a 50% down payment. No Thai couple would have to pay such a high down payment. Some of them paid 0% down and we’re renting every month and just throwing the money away. This is part of our future and it’s being thrown away because we’re not a Thai couple. This negatively affects the Thai person in the relationship as well because they can’t do in their own country what other people in their country can do when they’re married to a foreigner. So, it’s really not fair.
When I found my new job, I was working in a different part of the city. So, I took the car to work and my wife went on the motorcycle because it was a lot closer for her to get to work. In the evenings, we’d go out for great street food and a few drinks. And there were lots of fantastic markets all over Bangkok that you could really go and enjoy yourself. When you wanted Western food, that was available and it was affordable. If you wanted a wild night out, that was available and affordable. And that’s the thing and the fact about Thailand. It’s so good in so many ways. And that’s why people cling on to Thailand even though it’s not in their best interest to do so.
I need to stress that I had not come to these conclusions at this moment in time I’m currently writing about. This was approximately 5 years into being in Thailand and it was only after being there for close to 30 that the penny finally dropped.
The Singapore Trip and the Re-Entry Permit Disaster
Me and my wife decided to go on an overseas trip for the first time together. We’d saved up some money to pay for a great one-week vacation and we went to Singapore. We flew from Bangkok to Singapore and had a really enjoyable time. Singapore was so different to Thailand. This was still many years ago and it wasn’t yet as crazy expensive as it is now. And it was still possible to be able to move there with less stringent requirements than they have today.
I toyed with the idea of trying to get a teaching position in Singapore. I did see some available. If I could have my time again, I would have taken that route because that would have been a chance for me to actually become a part of Singapore now, at least a permanent resident. But the reason I’m talking about this vacation is that when it came to an end, it meant we had to return to Thailand. So, we fly back and go through immigration. And I checked to make sure they gave me the correct stamp. But I looked at it and it was a 30-day visa exempt entry. So, I go back and tell him I’ve got a visa based on being married to a Thai. And I showed the immigration officer the visa. You know re-entry permit? He said, “I didn’t know what that was.”
This was long before YouTube, long before there was readily available information, and I hadn’t been out of Thailand since I was there, apart from this one time. A re-entry permit is something that you need in order to be able to come back into Thailand on the same visa. I had a non-immigrant visa in Thailand and I extended it based on being married to a Thai, but I left the country and I didn’t know I needed this re-entry permit. Why is it not included as part of the visa extension? I had no idea.
When I was told that I didn’t have this re-entry permit, I just thought it would be an easy fix. There will be someone who saw common sense somewhere and said, “Oh, we understand it’s an honest mistake. Here’s your visa.” You’ve got to be joking. There is no leeway here. You don’t have your re-entry permit. You have to start your visa process all over again. I looked at the immigration officer like, “How dare you treat me like this?” But no matter what you say, that’s just part of Thailand. There’s no exceptions, no kindness, no goodness of their own heart.
And I had to now leave the country again to get another non-immigrant visa. Then I would be able to extend it again. I would have to start the process all over again. Even though I already had the visa, this would mean immigration officers would come round to where we lived and checked it out. They couldn’t look on the fact that we’d just done that not long ago. That would be too easy. The fact it was a new application meant we had to start all over again. It also meant that I’d lost another year and it’s going to be another 3 years before I would have the chance to apply for permanent residence.
I just wrote it off as being a non-issue. A quick trip to Laos for a non-immigrant visa and two months later I can extend it because I’m married. Never mind. I’m having a great time in Bangkok. I’m having a great time in Thailand. So, I’m overlooking this huge red flag about Thailand that keeps rearing its ugly head at every single corner I turn. You’re not welcome in Thailand. We don’t want you here. You’re just a guest. You can come to the country, but that’s it. You can’t come to our country and do what you want, though. You better understand that.
On the flip side to that, the actual normal Thai people are so friendly and so kind and some of the nicest people you will have the pleasure of interacting with. The people are so kind and friendly and accommodating, always willing to help when they can. But the rules and regulations set by the government are disgusting. So, that is another kick in the teeth.
Living in the Moment: A Replacement for Progress
I did get my new non-immigrant visa and extension done, and I’m still loving being in Thailand. It’s such a wonderful place, and at this point, I’m making a little bit more money than I was previously. And we were able to travel around Thailand. Every other weekend, we’d go somewhere different. One weekend, we may go to Chiang Mai in the north, another weekend, we may go to Phuket in the south, and we’re just enjoying ourselves. But if I think about it, it’s not what I actually wanted to do. This was a replacement for the fact I wasn’t able to get a mortgage to buy a condo in my own name, the condo I was looking for.
I could have put down 10% even in my wife’s name. But no, they wanted bigger deposits. And I’m not moving forward with my life because I can’t because I’m in Thailand and it’s set up and run in a way that gives me no chance to succeed. So, I find myself just living in the moment, which is a very Thai thing to do because I’m not able to do things in a way that Thai people were able to do. And that was just one of the things that was very difficult to come to terms with.
We started talking about having children, but my wife never got pregnant. I think we can take that as actually being lucky. If you have children in Thailand that are Thai citizens and you’re a foreigner, do you think that gives you any extra rights? No. None whatsoever. The fact that you now have to look after a Thai wife and a Thai child and you’re a foreigner, it only makes sense for the benefit of the Thai people in your family that you’re eligible to at least to have something to compete on a level field. But that would be too easy.
Another Job Loss, Another Setback
But I’ve been in Thailand for ages at this point and we’re trying to have children for a few years and I’m just there and I’m enjoying myself because I still have this thought in my mind that one day, one day, no matter how far away it is, I will get what I should already have. And then I lose a job again. At this point, my wife has stopped working at that school and she moved to a different one where she was earning more money. But the school where I was working at had some big problem. It was even in the news, but let’s leave it at that. So, I couldn’t work there anymore. And you know what that meant? No more work permit for a few months. Starting again from scratch, waiting for another 3 years of work permit. That was the first time I was actually angry. And I’m thinking to myself, maybe I’m never going to get what I want. I can’t be responsible for my own work permit in Thailand. My work permit is solely responsible of the employer. And then if they cease your employment, you have to start again through no fault of your own.
One big benefit though of working at a job for a few years in Thailand and they get rid of you through no fault of your own, they do have to give you a big severance payment. Because of that, we now had enough money to put a down payment on a condo, a one-bedroom new condo. This was approximately around 2005. and I’ve been in Thailand around 11 to 13 years at this point. I could be off by a few years. My memory doesn’t serve me well. It was in my wife’s name, the condo, and we had to pay a 40% down, but we had it. And the next years were going to be about trained to pay off the entirety of the mortgage as quickly as we could, then rent out the condo and buy another one. That’s what I wanted to do.
There still weren’t that many condos in Bangkok. That’s a lie. There were a lot, but compared to today, there were only a small fraction of what we see now. I was expecting to be able to find another job quickly, but it took 6 months of not earning any money to find another job as a teacher. There were lots of jobs available, but I’m talking about decent paying jobs at reputable places. Not that the last place I worked at ended up being reputable, but it started out that way. I didn’t want a lowly paid job that paid me simply because I was a foreigner. I wanted a respectable teaching job because that’s what I was qualified to do.
When I got the job and got the work permit again, I’m still thinking that maybe this time, maybe this time things will finally go my way. Over a decade in Thailand and you know, it’s about time I had something to show for it. That didn’t happen. The job lasted for two years and it ended and I was fed up with being somewhere that I desperately wanted to be, but not under the circumstances I wanted to be in.
Working Remotely: A New Chapter Without a Work Permit
Up to 2010 at this point and I didn’t feel like teaching anymore. I’d done it for a long time and had nothing to show for it apart from memories of a good time in Thailand. But I had a friend who had a tech business back home that he was starting up and he offered me a job remotely. I was working remotely before it became something that many people did. But I didn’t have a work permit anymore. So it wouldn’t matter if I lived in Thailand for the next billion years. It wouldn’t lead to anything because I would still have to renew my visa every single year.
Have I talked about the 90-day reports yet? I know I haven’t, but I’m going to do that now. As a foreigner in Thailand, if you don’t already know, every single 90 days, you have to report yourself to immigration in what can only be described as a process to make foreigners understand that they’re nothing more than foreigners. I started to do it online a couple of years before I left Thailand, but reporting to immigration every 90 days and queuing up and generally feeling degraded was just one of those things you had to do. I might be coming across that I don’t like Thailand. That’s the huge problem. I absolutely love Thailand, everything about it, apart from the immigration system.
I am living in a different country now, a country that’s got a lot of favorable immigration things. And I’m on my way to citizenship. But Thailand is a country that I’d much rather be in at this moment. Everything about Thailand is better than where I am. But I wasn’t prepared to stay in a country that saw me as a guest.
It’s like when you’re walking around any area that is tourist heavy in Thailand. All the touts are going to look at you like you’re a tourist. You might have been born in Thailand to foreign parents and never left Thailand your whole life. But because you look how you look, they’re going to treat you as a tourist and as a guest. And I’d say I was 15 years into Thailand when the first thoughts of leaving started to appear.
Paying Off the Condo and Losing the View
But my remote job lasted for the next eight years. I was paid slightly more than I was when I was teaching and that could mean I could work from home. My wife went to work and came back and our married life was great. Our evenings together were fantastic. Our weekends away were some of the most fun I’d had, but I’m starting to feel like I need to do something about the fact that I’m somewhere that doesn’t really want me. But I didn’t do anything about it. I just accepted it for what it was and still clung to the hope that one day I would be accepted into the country of Thailand.
Speaking perfect Thai made no difference. And at some points of my life, I even regretted learning the language. Speaking the language of a people that seem to hate you is the biggest degradation of them all. During those eight years, we managed to pay off the mortgage on our condo. That was a big thing for us. One of the problems was the huge building boom in Bangkok that was happening and the amazing view we had of the city of Bangkok out of our condo suddenly became a condo right next door. Sitting on the balcony in the evenings was no longer an enjoyable experience like it used to be.
And that’s something else about Thailand. People can generally build what they want where they want without any regards for anybody else who lives around them. Now, there are rules and regulations if you’re building a huge condominium in downtown Bangkok. But if you’re living out in the sticks or on the outskirts of a city, just because you have a house on your land, there’s nothing to stop the guy who owns the land next door opening up a garbage dump. Quite literally, nothing to stop him doing that. So, that’s something that is a negative about Thailand. I didn’t see this as being a huge negative. It was just part of Thailand and some of the things that you have to accept to be in Thailand. I was prepared to accept this. I was prepared to accept we’d lost our amazing view of Bangkok. But the fact I was still a guest was wearing on me all throughout my time working remotely.
The Divorce: Losing Everything After 30 Years
2017 was the worst year for me. My wife and I were not getting along like we used to. I think the fact that we always wanted children but never had them really took a toll on my wife and in a way I feel like she blamed me. We were together for a long time but we decided it wasn’t going to work out. I’m still doing my remote work but we got divorced. I wasn’t thinking clearly at this point but of course because I got divorced that meant that I was no longer eligible to get an extension of stay based on being married to a Thai. I wasn’t working with a work permit in Thailand because I did remote work. And all of a sudden, after being in Thailand for nearly three decades, give or take three years or so, I found myself without any right to stay in the country.
All those years counted for nothing. And unless I could get a different visa, I would have to leave. I thought back to my naive dreams when I first got to Thailand of being a citizen of the country or at the very least a permanent resident. And there I was with no right to even be in the country at this point because I was divorced. There were other visa options available to me, but none of them would give me any benefit for the future. I would have been able to get a retirement visa because at this point I was over 50. But you can’t get a work permit on that visa and that’s not what I wanted to do.
I didn’t have much to show for my time in Thailand. The only thing I really had to show apart from our condo which we did sell after we got divorced and share it 50/50. The only thing I had to show were wonderful memories of times spent in Thailand. Memories are great, but they don’t pay your bills. At this point, I find myself in my early 50s, recently divorced from a wife I spent over two decades with, no right to stay in the country that I’ve spent more than half my life in, not enough money to retire yet, and the biggest regrets you could imagine.
After we sold the condo and added that together with my other small amount of savings, I had about $100,000, and that was it. I knew I didn’t want to leave Thailand, but moving somewhere where I will be treated better became the only thing that was important to me.
Starting Over in Ecuador
Where to go was a question I got asking myself. Ecuador is where I went. I looked at some other countries, but that one at the time had a very cheap investment visa, and I had enough money to get it, so I got it. And I’m still living there now, and I’m still doing online work in my late 50s. I’m managing to save more money here and it’s my hope at 65 to permanently retire and already be a citizen of Ecuador at that point.
The sad thing is I know so many people who have been through similar things to me in Thailand. Some of the guys are still there and just put up with the fact that they’re nothing in Thailand. Some of the guys don’t even care and accept it for what it is. But they are usually the guys who have a load of money and who don’t want to be a part of Thailand because they travel all over the world and go to different places and Thailand is just their home base. But I wanted to be a part of Thailand. I love Thailand and the vast majority of things about it.
I wasn’t hoping that all of a sudden the rule would change and every Tom, Dick, and Harry can become a citizen of Thailand. But it didn’t make sense to me how after all those years, all those years being married to a Thai, all those years spent in the country, none of that counted for anything.
The Final Conclusion
And that’s how I got to my conclusion. Thailand is very good at what it does. It attracts you in. It sucks you in. It takes what it can from you. And it doesn’t give you anything in return. You’re always under the illusion that you’re welcome, that you’re a valued member of the community, but you’re not. Thailand doesn’t think of you as anything other than a foreigner.
Thailand played the game so incredibly well. It saw how we did things in the West, and it wanted everything that the West had to give. Modern technology, healthcare, the internet, cars, air conditioning, microwaves, televisions, phones, cell phones, and the list goes on and on and on. Thailand is happy to take all the Western inventions and use them for their own benefit. It’s happy to let Western people into the country of Thailand and spend their entire lives there. But it’s not happy to let you become part of society.
I know I must stress that it does happen. Some people are able to become Thai, but it’s only a very small portion of people. And as I’ve shared about my experience, I wanted to apply for permanent residence on so many occasions. But situations that came up, work situations that meant I no longer have a work permit or I was working remotely, therefore didn’t have a work permit, meant that I was physically unable to apply. The time spent in the country counts for nothing.
And all I want is my time again because I would have never gone to Thailand. But if I did go to Thailand and I did have my time again, I’d have probably done the same things because Thailand is great. And that is the problem. Thailand is perfect in every way. It dangles the cherry in front of you and says, “Come and get it.” But you can never get it. You’ll never be Thai. You’ll always be an outsider. And if you can’t accept that, do not go to Thailand.
