The Land of Smiles A Two Faced Paradise
I was responsible for introducing at least 10 people to the country of Thailand. Friends that I had, family members even, and people I met over the few years when Thailand was still just a holiday place for me. I would sing Thailand’s praises, agree with the moniker that it was the land of smiles, and talk about how I couldn’t wait to be able to retire to the country as soon as I possibly could. I thought that I was at one with Thailand, that we were on the same page. Yet, I made a few misguided decisions, and when everything went wrong for me, there was no one there to help put things right.
Thailand was a breath of fresh air. It was a country where you could feel at one with yourself, where you could meet people who shared the same dreams as you did to retire in the country. And we would talk at length about what we were doing with our lives to make this eventual dream a reality. Some of my closest friends today, I met when I was in Thailand. One of those closest friends, only one of them, still remains. Things happened to them, things changed, and most of them left due to financial issues. Any sane person would understand that these things happening because of doing things that, on the one hand, they thought were setting them up, on the other hand, they were making them crash down. And I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t see something like this as being plausible.
That’s when you’re only going to Thailand for a few weeks at a time, and when you’re having the time of your life. You don’t think that the people you’re spending time with when you’re there on holiday look at you the way you would later learn that they really do. I can’t believe I was one of those people who would walk around the girly bars and actually think that the girls shouting “handsome man” and “hello welcome” actually wanted to speak to me. I knew there were financial incentives for them to do this. I’m not saying that I thought I was an actual handsome man, but I thought there was some mutual respect there. I didn’t see it for what it was, because the problem was it was very difficult to see it for what it was when I went to Thailand originally, and I loved the attention that I got.
If you’ve been to Thailand, you can hear those words and how you picture it exactly. “Hello welcome,” kind of a high pitched, slightly mispronounced version of those words. But those words were like a call to action, an affirmation that finally I found a place where things that shouldn’t be real were actually real.
The reason I wanted to share my story is because I really respect the fact that there are people out there who are trying to warn others about what can happen in Thailand if you’re not careful. I used to think you were AI. I didn’t even bother listening to the stories on your channel because there are so many out there that are AI. But after listening to a few and understanding that these are real painted pictures of the country of Thailand pictures that I personally recognize I think I should share mine.
But the very idea that Thailand was a place where I was meant to feel at home, according to myself that’s a stupid idea in and of itself. But Thailand is as two faced as you can get, and I lost pretty much every last penny that I had ever worked for just for the feeling that I thought I was meant to get by being there. I think how I differ from the guys that have problems in Thailand is I only blame myself for what happened. While I do pin some of the blame on the country of Thailand for allowing this to happen in the first place, I only really blame myself.
How Thailand’s Land of Smiles Promise Began to Unravel
Just because you see something in one particular way, just because it appears that what you see is real, just because it appears that you feel it’s real, and just because other people say they’re living this life that appears to be real doesn’t mean that you should believe it.
The Expat Warning About Moving to a Thai Village
I believed when I was in Thailand first, speaking to an expat saying how moving from Pattaya up to his wife’s village his wife that he met in a bar who was different to everyone else I believed him when he said that was the best thing he ever did. I was only acting on the information about how he felt at that particular moment in time. He became a friend of mine, and we kept in touch when I wasn’t in the country. We shared a love of the sport of rugby. We just so happened to support the same team, and we were from the same area. And when you’re so far away from home, it’s always nice to have a conversation with someone who’s just like you.
He was 6 years older than I was, and this was my first time in Thailand. I was already 52, ready to retire, but not yet ready to retire. What I mean by that is I was ready feeling I’d worked enough, and it was time to settle down. Yet, I wasn’t ready because I wasn’t financially able to do so. When I met him in Pattaya 58 years old, living in Thailand for he said already 7 years he became a good friend. But he was sharing everything that made him come to the decision to move to Thailand in the first place. Everything he felt, I felt. Everything he saw wrong with where we were from, I saw wrong with where we were from. And the tales he told about his time in Thailand from when he went originally which was many years ago until he started living in the country, it was really exciting to listen to.
How he met his own wife in a bar, how his wife wasn’t the same as all the other girls that worked in a bar, and how he built a house in her village. He showed me a picture of the house. He spent most of his time there and a bit in Pattaya, and I looked at him like he’d found the answer. He was so heavily invested in Thailand that he considered Thailand to be the place he would live for the rest of his life, and he thought his wife shared the same ideas that he did.
The reason I say that is because I kept in touch with him not regularly, but we might chat once a month just to catch up. And this is while I was back at home still working. And I saw him when I went the year after and a few years after that. When I finally moved to Thailand, he was about 2 months away from leaving, saying his wife gave him lots of problems, and he lost the house he built and most of his money, and he tried to warn me. The problem was I didn’t listen to those warnings. I just listened to what he used to tell me when I first met him because I wanted it ever so much to be true. I just thought he must have done something wrong to cause this to happen.
And this is so important to talk about I mean so important to talk about because we see bad things happening to guys that move to Thailand all the time. We hear about these things. We know what goes along with these things. Yet, for whatever reason that we come to, we convince ourselves that we’re doing something that little bit different, and it’s not going to happen to us. We believe ourselves and go down the same path that many guys go down and end up in a similar position by losing nearly everything we had.
I understand it when comments are harsh. I understand it when people get called all kinds of names under the sun because you should have known what the truth really was. And I believe that these comments are 100% deserved. I should have effing known. Maybe I did know, but I didn’t want to believe the truth because I wanted to believe that what I had was real. That’s all real, and it’s very upsetting to have to admit to the fact that I probably knew all along what was going to happen, but I did it anyway because at the time it felt so damn good.
Why the Bar Encounter Stayed With Him
Before I get into how my life was irreparably damaged in Thailand, I want to talk about a little thing that happened on my third trip which was the trip before my last trip. The time after was when I moved there. I was sat in a bar in Pattaya. I was really in my element, sipping a beer, thinking about what was to come that evening. We were still in the daytime, so I wasn’t in a bar to chat to any of the girls yet, but there’s a guy who just happened to walk in. I recognized his English accent, and because of that, I wanted to chat to him. I was always interested in saying hi to people just to see how they found themselves there.
He seemed to be a bit het up like he was angry with something. I was the exact opposite, in the place where I expected to be able to retire in only a few years’ time, the place where I expected to spend my whole retirement, and the stages of my life that I was looking forward to the most. This guy no idea how old he was, but I would guess around my age after we just had a bit of a chat, maybe referencing how gorgeous the waitress looked, but he said, “I can’t wait to leave the land of scams for the last time.” “I used to love this place,” he said, “but this is the last time I’m ever going to see it.”
I don’t know why you were saying that, so I tried to dig a bit deeper. He just said his girlfriend did leave him and took a lot of his money. He was married before, and he lost his house to that wife, and he just said he never seemed to be able to catch a break. He said he never managed to find anyone who wanted to be with him for him. Everyone just wanted what he had. And he said he didn’t meet his ex wife in a bar. His ex wife was a similar age to him, yet it made no difference.
I think I said to him something along the lines of, “There are good ones and bad ones,” thinking it was just a normal thing that anybody would say. But he took offense to that, like he was right at the end of his rope, just about to explode. And the way he looked at me, you could tell that he really hung up on the beliefs that he had. He just said, “They’re all the same. They want money from you. Aside from money, they want more money. And if you’ve already given them all your money, you better give them some gold as well.”
I tried to make light of it by laughing, but he just became red with rage, saying, “I’ve lost so much believing that. Yet, every time something has happened, it’s because of money, and the sooner you learn, the better.” I thought I better back off a bit, pay for my beer, and leave.
But why is it that guys don’t take advice from people who have been there and done it? You don’t need to take the advice on board completely. The thing was, I didn’t even acknowledge what he was saying as being possible. I just looked at him as being an idiot, and what happened to him probably happened to him because he was an idiot. I was still in the honeymoon phase of Thailand my third time there and I wasn’t about to let someone try to shatter the illusion of Thailand for me.
How the Bar Encounter Changed His View of Thailand
The thing was, though, at the time I didn’t see it as an illusion. I saw it as reality, because what is an illusion and what is reality? That’s one of those things that I don’t really think about, and I can’t quite understand. You have reality. To me, at the time, reality was what I saw, what I heard, and what I could do. But I was clinging onto the reality that I experienced when I met a girl in a bar. That was the reality because I wanted it to be real. Yet the reality of this guy talking about his personal experiences that wasn’t real reality. The problem was, I had it the wrong way around. It was an illusion all along. And I understand what many people will say. She worked in a bar. She was younger than you. But so what?
Needless to say, I didn’t take on board his advice. I didn’t listen to him. In fact, when I left, I just thought, “What an idiot.” I didn’t want to believe anything that could destroy the life that I picked. I wanted to be living it, and I didn’t want to destroy it. I was going to be able to retire there soon, and the thought of that retirement was so good. The thought of any alternate retirement was nowhere near as appealing. So, I hung on to how I wanted it to be or how I saw it because it wasn’t like I wanted it to be. It was how I saw it, and that was the only thing that mattered to me.
Retiring at 57 and Moving to Thailand
When I finally was able to retire four wonderful trips to Thailand but now I was going to Thailand for good. Just gone 57, and Thailand was calling me. I felt like I was going to Thailand with a very good understanding of the country, what I would need to do to be able to stay there, how much I would probably need to spend for somewhere to live. And also, I already knew what I liked to do and what I didn’t like to do in the country. I had my fair share of girlfriends on the trips that I was there, but I never decided to remain in touch or take things further because I didn’t want to be one of those guys who had a girl in Thailand that he still supported.
Although I didn’t know at the time that girls or at least many of them received support from more than one guy while still working in the bar at the same time. That wasn’t the reason why I didn’t want to do that. I just didn’t want to support a girl that I thought would actually be truthful when she said she would stop working. I got very close on my second trip this was to a great girl, and I wanted to take her home with me. If getting a visa for her to go to my home was a formality as opposed to a chore, I probably would have taken her with me. But I did talk with her and entertain the idea that perhaps she could go and live back up in her village, and I would send money until the time was right when I could move. Perhaps she can just wait.
I decided against this because I didn’t think she would lie and not actually do what we agreed upon, but because I just saw that as something that would mean it would take me longer to get to the point in time when I could actually live in Thailand. If I sent her a certain amount of money every month for 3 years or however long it took, plus other money that she might ask for, we could be talking about one not even two years of savings that I wouldn’t have, and therefore it would take me longer. So, that was my reasoning. I often wonder if I had committed to her and sent money to her, found out the truth that she was still working in the bar, that she did get support from other guys, perhaps my eyes would have been opened to the truth of Thailand, but I wouldn’t have done what I did. But there’s no point thinking about things with a “what if” mentality.
Arriving in Thailand as someone who had no intention to ever return home was the best feeling in the world. That’s one thing I can promise you, and there is that feeling that I still hold onto and will never disagree with. The feeling of arriving in Thailand as someone who is there to stay, opposed to someone who is there to fly back in a few weeks’ time, is the best feeling you will ever feel. It’s almost like you’ve spent your entire life picking at a lock the lock that means that the door to the life that you want to live can never be opened because it’s in your way. But all of a sudden, you manage to just catch it perfectly, and the lock opens, and the door to your real life finally swings open in front of you, and it’s finally time to start kicking back, relaxing, and having a good time. That’s a feeling I still hold onto as being one of the best feelings that I’ve ever felt. Yet to go from such high highs to even lower lows it makes the lows even worse than they should be.
Finding a Long Term Home in Pattaya
Pattaya was my place. I’d spent countless hours looking at the sorts of places I could rent online before I even arrived in the country. Nowhere near as much information as today online, but still, there was a lot to look at. There seemed to be such an abundance of choices. All the prices were clear, and I remember thinking I’m going to have no issue finding somewhere to live. I called an agent after I spent about a week in a hotel, told them what I was looking for, and that I’d actually seen one of their listings online. I was told that that one wasn’t available anymore, and they took me to look at ones that were a little bit more expensive and a little bit worse than the ones I saw.
It’s not hard to find somewhere to live in Pattaya, not at all. But the thing I found was that most of the listings that you see online aren’t available, or the price is different, and these listings are just used to get people to call the agent, and then they’ll try to fob off other places on you. Sometimes only marginally different, but sometimes the difference is huge. So, I decided to just completely forget the idea of using an agent and spend time walking around, going into condo buildings, and if they had anyone there to help me have a look, I would look. But more often than not, they just said, “Call an agent.” So, I would move on.
The beauty of it, though, was I was retired. I didn’t need to find a place quickly because I was retired and didn’t have other things to do that were more pressing and important. So, because I spent my time and looked for somewhere perfect, I was able to get a really good price on a very high floor unit in Jomtien for only 9,000 baht. And as soon as I moved in, that’s when I felt like I was actually living in Thailand as opposed to just visiting.
My retirement got off to an amazing start. I had my pension my private pension, that is which gave me £1,200 a month, and I had my savings invested, which at the time gave me another £1,200 a month. I didn’t have a lot of savings, but the interest rates were good, and £2,400 every single month in Thailand when I moved there was a lot of money. And I could live like I was on holiday there every single day and still have money left over. I moved to Thailand in early 2008. I was getting about 5 or 6% interest, which gave me my £1,200 a month. Yet what was to come was a huge reduction in rates to the point where I was getting next to nothing, and also a reduction in the value of my currency, which meant that my living conditions changed overnight. But I’ll get to that quite soon.
I spent a good 3 months, though, since I arrived, just living like I was on holiday because I had enough money to do that. But I was always on the lookout for someone who I felt would add to my life in Thailand and also help me to reduce my alcohol intake. I was never a big drinker at home, but I was a huge drinker when I was in Thailand. Drinking in Thailand kind of just went together a party atmosphere type of place. And for those 3 months, I was drinking heavily. I probably drank more in those 3 months than I had during the first 30 years of my life, and I was starting to feel it a bit. And after this excessive alcohol intake, I wanted to cut back, step back, and calm down.
Meeting the Thai Woman Who Changed His Retirement
When I met the girl that would help me transition away from living like I was on holiday to living like I was actually living there, I didn’t want to move slowly. I wanted to jump on the opportunity because I’d never felt this way about any girl in Thailand before. She was 34 years old, which to me meant that she’d already lived her 20s. She’d already had her wild party times, and as many people might know in Thailand, when a girl gets to her mid 30s and starts to get slightly older from there, she tends to age quite a lot quicker than perhaps girls do in their earlier stages of life. I saw this as a big positive because it should mean that she’s ready to calm down and just be a great wife instead of a girl that works in a bar. And yes, I thought she was different.
She was everything I was looking for. She seemed to be quite smart, very flirtatious, very open minded, and I appreciated the way that she treated me. I felt that she treated me like a king not because I felt that was who I was, but because I thought she really appreciated the fact that she no longer worked in a bar. She no longer had to live that life. She could now be someone’s girlfriend and maybe future wife. I think that’s the thing that I got very wrong to start with.
I did love her, and I was willing to take on the responsibility of supporting her when she moved in, and I did agree to give her a small allowance, though, so that she could send that back to her family who looked after her child. It was only 12,000 baht. It was affordable, and I was spending a lot less now that I wasn’t going out all the time, and it felt like a fair amount of money to give her. The thing was, though, I thought she really appreciated that. That’s where I got my enjoyment of the relationship from. Of course, I enjoyed being with her, going out together, staying in together, and everything that went along with being in a relationship. I enjoyed it all. But the thing I enjoyed the most was thinking and feeling like she really appreciated the fact that she was with me. I thought she loved me. Maybe not in the traditional sense of what love means, but I thought she loved the fact that I had elevated her station in life, and because of that would never even think about doing anything that wasn’t to both our benefits.
Well, I know that this was a very inaccurate assumption that I made. I know I was wrong. I still can’t understand why that wasn’t actually the case. I can’t understand why somebody who worked like that wouldn’t be eternally grateful to someone that loved them, that cared about them deeply, and someone who helped them to no longer have to do that. I really can’t understand why they don’t feel a lifetime of debt to this person who has helped them.
I disagree entirely with the term “savior mentality.” I wasn’t saving her. I was just helping her, and I was elevating her station in life. Let’s be honest here. That’s what I was doing. And I can’t understand why instead of doing everything that she did, which I will get to I can’t understand why she didn’t make her whole life’s mission to repay what she had received from me. I’m not talking about in a financial sense. I’m just talking about repaying with love, kindness, respect, and an understanding of both our positions in the relationship. I was the financial breadwinner. I paid for everything. Therefore, the only thing I want in return is to be appreciated and taken care of in other ways. The only thing I didn’t want was to be talked down upon, shouted at, demanded from.
And while some people might disagree with the notion that I was scammed, I will say scammed because that’s what it feels like. I understand many people would disagree with me, but I just thought it was an exchange of value where love was involved from both sides. The value I can provide and the value that she can provide. But the problem was I gave 99.99% of the value. She took the value away from me. It didn’t give me anything even close to equal value in return. And it’s really upset and angry about this because the sad thing is that it lasted for quite a long time, this relationship.
The Early Romance and Island Holidays
In the early days, life was everything I thought my retirement was going to be. In early 2008, we went away for 2 weeks to an incredible island in a five star hotel, delicious seafood on the beach. And to be able to share that experience with someone that I was falling for it was special. Life became an adventure, wondering what we were going to get up to on any day of the week because there were no plans. There didn’t need to be any plans. And if one day I woke up and decided I wanted to go to Bangkok for a few days, that’s exactly what we would do. I felt like I was getting closer and closer to her the longer we stayed together. I was thinking about proposing and asking her to marry me, but I hadn’t come around to that yet. And this was after we’d been together for quite a while.
I was hit so hard though by the 2008 financial crisis. The reduction of interest rates meant 50% of my income nearly dried up. So, no longer was I on £2,400 a month. I was on £1,200 a month. And the savings I had they weren’t working for me like I always expected they would. I felt like that was a really big sucker punch. Never really had any negative opinions about my own country until this moment because from when I was young, I was told to save and save and save and sacrifice, think about retirement. And I had thought about it. Yet it felt like everything that I was told had been ripped away from me because the fact they basically started reducing the interest rates and it got to zero I didn’t even think that was going to be a possibility.
The reduction of interest rates also meant a reduction of the value of the currency, which meant that while I’m getting half the amount of pounds as I was before, what pounds I had left wasn’t getting the same amount of baht as before anyway. And that was a bit of a wake up call. I felt completely let down and betrayed by my own country for allowing that to happen. It felt like it was a betrayal because life had started to be so good for the first time ever, really. It was never bad before, but never exciting. But now it went from being perfect to “what am I going to do now?”
I had about £240,000. I didn’t know anything about investing. I didn’t know anything about dividends. I just wanted to get 5% interest in the bank, and I was good. But I couldn’t get that anymore, and I knew I needed to replace this income somehow because I was still giving my girlfriend, who I thought I was going to spend my whole life with, 12,000 baht a month. Yet there were a lot more pounds that it took to get that. And she wasn’t compromising, but I was. I should have seen it.
When I said to her, “I’m going to have to give you a bit less, maybe 8,000 a month instead for the time being until we can sort something out.” When she said, “That’s not possible. You not love me.” Instead of seeing that for what it was and quickly breaking off the relationship, I caved in and continued to give her the same amount. Yet I was the one that was losing money and not having as much as before. Yet she wanted the same and didn’t want to take a hit. How I didn’t see that for what it was, I don’t know, but I didn’t. I continued to plow headfirst into this relationship because I loved her, and I did believe that she loved me. And I just thought it was perhaps because English wasn’t her first language that she might have said it in a way that to me came across as being very, very cruel and an awful thing to say. But she didn’t really mean it that way. That’s what I managed to convince myself, anyway.
After a few weeks or months of coming to terms with what had happened, it was very rapid, and it did take time to come to terms with. I just thought that the best thing to do would be to send all my money into Thailand because I feared that the exchange rate would continue to get worse over time, which it did. So, that was a good move. I would like to think that I knew what was coming and that I was clever for doing that, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t want to leave my money in a savings account if it didn’t give me any interest, which it was meant to do.
The Island Holiday Before the Problems Began
So, now in 2009, I had all my money in Thailand. And I’m spending bits of this, but I’m looking for somewhere to park this money that can give me back my income. I didn’t tell my girlfriend at the time that I had all my money in Thailand now. While I loved her and thought that she shared the feelings for me, I wasn’t yet ready to trust her with this knowledge. I spent a lot of time going to a number of the banks asking what financial products were available that might see me being able to get a return close to 5%, but there was nothing. I think the best I found was about 1.4% at the time, which was nowhere near enough. I wish I’d found out about Cambodia because if I did, I would have understood that there you could open high interest savings accounts in US dollars, which would have been perfect. But I didn’t know at the time, so there’s no point saying what if.
We stayed together throughout the whole of 2009. I’m always on the lookout for things to invest in. I’ve had to increase what I’m giving her to 15,000 baht now because she says that things in Thailand are more expensive. I saw it, but she should have just been happy with 12, but she wasn’t. But I wanted to make her happy. If I think about what I was actually doing, I just wanted to continue the illusion that we were a happy couple. But I didn’t know it was an illusion, as I said. I thought it was real.
I’m probably spending about £500 a month out of my principal, which didn’t alarm me, but that was still going to be £6,000 a year. How many years are left? And while I probably could have continued doing that indefinitely because it would have added up to a lot of years. Although I’m spending £500 a month out of this, it wasn’t able to cover anything more than the very basics of living. This is nowhere close to how I was living when I first arrived in Thailand as a retiree not even that long ago. So, it’s not like I could have done this and enjoyed the rest of my retirement in peace. This was breadline, and if I wanted to go back to living how I was before this happened, I would have needed to be spending maybe £1,600 a month out of my principal, and that would have gone before I did.
In terms of relativity though, I am quite happy. I just feel like I want to go away for the weekend sometime, but we don’t. I feel like I want to go to an island for a few weeks, but we don’t. And instead of going out regularly, we’re going out marginally, and she’s going out more than I am with friends. One place I did put my foot down was to say I’m not giving you extra money to go out because I want to go out, and I’m saving money, so I can’t do that. But she went out, and her friends paid for her. At least, that’s what she said. I am still really happy with her though.
It was at the end of 2009 going on early 2010 when I asked her to marry me. I felt like she was the best girl I’d ever met, and I wanted to make this relationship even more real. I mean, more than it was. Sadly, I was one of those people who agreed to give her family some money about £5,000. So, it wasn’t a fortune, but it was still an amount of money that my wife should have said to her parents, “It’s far better if we have this than you because if you have it, you’re removing our ability to live.” But she didn’t say that because she didn’t think like that. I was of the mind and will always be of the mind that it wasn’t my job to improve her family’s life. It wasn’t my job to make them not poor. They should have just been happy that she wasn’t and suffered in silence. But they weren’t really suffering because it wasn’t like they were poor like many people think of when they think of the word poor. They always have food to eat. They always had alcohol around. They weren’t poor like many people think of when they think of the word poor. We’re not talking about sub Saharan Africa here. Thailand isn’t that poor. And while they might not have anything, it’s not like they can’t survive. In fact, they live quite nice lives. At least they seem to do, and they’re always happy.
Ever since the interest rates were reduced, I’ve been waiting for them to come back, thinking maybe I’ll send my money back home, but it never happened. It happened eventually, but we’re talking about the passing of countless years. I couldn’t put my life on hold waiting for a sense of normality to come back to the financial markets. So, while I’m very happy in my relationship and think my relationship is what I think it is, by the end of 2010, that’s when I decided that I can’t continue spending this money just to live, especially considering it’s not exactly the life I want to be living anyway. So, we need to do something.
When the Romantic Dream Started to Change
I didn’t want to get a job. For a start, I couldn’t get a job other than being a teacher, and there was no way I was going to do something like that. So, the only thing that came to me was to open a business. I didn’t take a step back to think that I’d never run a business in my life before, and even if I had, I would still have convinced myself anyway that it was the best thing to do, because there was no other choice. That’s the thing I think’s very important to say. There was no other choice for me. I knew nothing about investing. I’d seen the stock market go up and down, and knowing me, I’d have invested at the wrong time and had a few years of losing money. I didn’t know anything about it, and I wasn’t getting what I thought I was going to get, which was interest. So, the only option was to either get a job, which I couldn’t do, or start a business. I chose to start a business.
And I chose to tell my wife that I wanted to start a business, because I believe that having someone who was from there, who spoke the language, who was educated there, and who was brought up there, would have a deep understanding of how things worked in the country that she was from. I would come to learn not very long after that I knew more about how things worked in Thailand than she did, and I didn’t even speak the language or know much of anything. But, she was so basic and not saying that to be derogatory but she was so simple minded. Yeah, I didn’t see the fact that she didn’t know how to do anything in terms of the legal side of things in the country. I didn’t see that as being all the answers that I needed, that by this being the case, then surely she’s not going to know anything about actually starting a business and making money. I chose to separate the two facts, though. Okay, she doesn’t know how the legal side of it was, but she’s got all these ideas with business that can make money. So, I’ll choose to believe that she knows what she’s talking about. I chose to take business advice from my wife, because she’s so flamboyant and excited when she’s talking about these things, and I took this sense of excitement as a sense of knowledge that she knew what she was talking about, not that it was just some idea that she thought might be good.
Opening a Pattaya Bar With His Wife
Into 2011, she’d already convinced me that the best thing to do would be for us to open a bar in Pattaya. I’m not going to lie and say that didn’t sound like it would be the most fun business in the world being able to drink in your own bar, being able to make money by having your own bar in this amazing city. Of course it appealed to me. She was the one though that brought this up. She was the one that talked about how when she worked in a bar, how much money other people were making who owned the bars, and she was throwing around huge figures, and I didn’t really think to see if they were actually real or not. I just believed her, because why would she lie? She said the bar where she worked, the owner of that made 300,000 baht a month. And while that was a very big bar in a very central location, and we wouldn’t be able to afford something like that, even if we did that to a small fraction of that and replace what I lost in interest, that would have been enough as it was anyway.
Once we decided it was time to start looking for a place to open, Walking Street was off because everything seemed so expensive there. Soi 6 would have been fun, but at the time I didn’t find anywhere that was available. And a few of the other places that I liked were also options. I’m not going to say where this bar was located, because I don’t want to give anything away that could actually identify me, but we found this great little place that was for sale. It looked great, it seemed great, and they already had all the girls working there, and it was already a going concern.
Because I was retired, I didn’t want to go through the hassle of starting a company and getting a work permit, because I already had my retirement visa, which was good enough. And there was one less job to do. I did a lot of research and found a lawyer myself. I didn’t want anyone to introduce me to a lawyer, but I wanted to make sure that what we were buying was actually what we were buying. I wanted to make sure that everything that was talked about was true and not fabricated, and everything did seem like it fit into place well.
My wife was very excited about the prospect of having this bar. She said she would be able to work behind the bar, and she would look after the girls that worked there. I would be able to just take a seat in the background and hopefully enjoy the profits that it would bring. After coming to a decision that everything was completely above board, I invested 3 million baht to buy the bar and take over the lease, which had just been renewed for another 3 years. That 3 million did include everything that was inside the bar. They had a number of TVs, pool tables, and while it didn’t total 3 million’s worth of value, there was still value there, so I thought it was a good price. Because I didn’t need to get a work permit, that meant that the girls didn’t need any kind of proper contracts, which made it easier, because I didn’t need to employ anyone to get the work permit. And the bar before actually belonged to a Thai person, and we opened. I mean, it never closed, but we took it over, and it was a going concern, and it seemed to be working as you would hope.
I can remember the first day that we were open with us more accurate with my wife as the new owner and people are coming in as normal. I’m sat there not as the bar owner, but just as a guy there, and to see people drinking drinks, talking to the girls, and money coming in it was really exciting. In the first month we did make a profit, similar to the profits that were shared with us when we were going through the stage of acquiring the bar. And finally, it felt like we could get back our income, which at the time felt like it had been stolen from me by my country for allowing the interest rates to remove people’s life’s work. Right now, we’re making enough money every month to live quite close to how we used to live. Yeah, because we own a bar, it’s not like passive income, and my wife is there constantly, and I’m there most of the time as well, because I wanted to keep an eye on things. The best part of it though was that what I had left wasn’t going down anymore. I probably had £120,000 left, and that was sat in a fixed deposit account in Thailand for a very marginal amount of interest, but it was there, and it was security.
The Costly Bar Renovation Mistake
After the bar had been open for a few years, things seemed to be going well, but that’s when I made my first big mistake. I mean, opening it and trusting my wife that was the first big mistake. Well, getting married and actually being with her and giving money to her that was the first big mistake, but this one was going to be a lot bigger. My wife had spoken to me at length and discussed the possibility of completely renovating the bar, saying if we renovated it and put money into it, more people would come in, and we could also slightly raise our prices, and therefore we should be able to make more money. She said she wanted to spend about 2 million baht to renovate it, and I said I would be open to doing this as long as we could get another 3 year lease, but the lease wasn’t up for renewal yet. We contacted the landlord and asked if we could arrange that up front, and they said yes, so we did. Same rent as we paid before, which was good, and I agreed to renovate the bar.
Somehow, I agreed to renovate the bar. I was expecting a quick job a week at most but we were closed for 3 months as the renovation took place. And somehow my wife went over budget to 2.5 million baht, and granted it was amazing, but because we were closed, I’d lost more money in the meantime, and that had come out of my savings. And I lost the interest on the fixed deposit, because I took money out of it before it came to a close. So, I’m probably sitting on closer to £60,000 now, which was a big hit to take, but I was looking forward to what was to come with the bar.
People started coming in, but yeah, because the prices had gone up and we were slightly more expensive than the other bars in the area, but our bar was a lot better. But, people didn’t care they just wanted cheap. So, mostly for the first 6 months of being reopened, I suggested changing the prices back to what they were, but she refused. I was still continuously eating into my savings. The thing was, after 6 months she wanted to increase the prices even more, so as she put it, to get back what we lost by not having as many customers as before.
I’ve heard this talked about countless times by guys I’ve spoken to in Thailand, how the Thai mentality is so different to ours. Such as you’re selling a second hand car, you set your price, it doesn’t sell for 6 months, so okay, I’ll increase the price instead. We tend to do things the exact opposite of that. If something doesn’t sell, that means the price is too high, so you reduce the price, but she suggested increasing the prices in the bar to make up for lost time. That was the first time we had a huge fallout, a shouting match in the bar, which luckily it was empty at the time with no customers inside, but there were girls there that were working, and they were all sniggering as she was talking to them in Thai, like I don’t know what I’m talking about, but she wanted to increase the prices in a bar that people weren’t going in as much, because she’d already increased the prices. If you can wrap your head around how insane that is, then there’s no helping you. That’s her. There’s no helping her.
If I could go back and say what I should have said, I should have said things were going okay before, you put the price up, then people are going in less. If you put them up again, it’s going to be even less, but I didn’t. I just started to get angry with her. She’s angry, so I just tell her to do what she wants. I suppose I’m equally as stupid for not forcing it and telling her how to do things properly. I couldn’t be bothered to argue with her though anymore, so that’s why I said to her, “Do what you want,” and I stormed out. So, she did put the prices up a bit even more. A few months later, she’s wondering why nobody’s going in, and I’m losing money. I’m giving her money still, and she’s taking money out of the bar as well on top of what I’m giving to her.
And the thing I struggled with the most was how she thought her getting more while I lost more made sense. Stupidity, selfishness, and just greed, I think, because when she finally agreed to put the prices back down and see what happened, at this point lots of the girls had stopped working there, because there weren’t as many customers coming in. I mean, there were still customers, but not enough. She didn’t apologize when things slowly started to pick up again. She just said I was lucky. I’m willing to admit when I was wrong about something, but the thing was she wasn’t. She was never wrong about anything. I still hung on though because I still thought that she knew who she was and what her purpose was. I still didn’t understand anything about her really, but I thought I did.
The Financial Damage of the Renovation
By the time we started getting a little bit more money in in terms of profits, my money’s gone down dramatically. Around this time when I had about £50,000 left, I thought I needed to do something for myself and completely remove her from the equation of money. Okay, the bar’s now bringing in money every month, so that’s one thing. But I transferred my money back to England because I’d been speaking to a guy who said that he was trading Forex. He spoke about how much money he made, said that it allowed him to live a free life from anywhere in the world he wanted to live. And I thought this could be something I could look into. I wasn’t about to just gamble all my money away, definitely not. But I opened a free demo account with FXCM and for over 6 months I traded this demo account and at the end of those 6 months I’d made a lot of money. Okay, it was only pretend money. It wasn’t real money, but that gave me the confidence to start trading for real.
I think it was a combination of just how upset I felt about how things had turned out for me what I felt through no fault of my own. But instead of taking things slowly, I put most of what I had into this account and started what I thought was trading. What I was actually doing was gambling, and within a year I’d lost £40,000. That was my lowest point. I started out with around £240,000 and if the interest rates stayed the same, I would still have it. But I felt like I was trapped and thrown into a corner where I had no choice but to take bigger risks because my money wasn’t working for me like I’d always expected it would. Now I had about £10,000 left. I still had my private pension income which I was able to rely on. Yet the bar was bringing in small amounts of money. The problem is my wife who is the one working there most of the time is keeping most of it for herself and not wanting to share it anymore. “I working, you not working, I keep money.” How it should have been was I say to her, I invested in it, you’re just working. I get the money because you’re getting 15,000 a month out of me and you should accept that as your salary for working there, but she didn’t accept that. She wanted that 15,000 regardless of how much money the bar made, and she wanted other money that the bar was making which was meant to be going to me. And then I could use that to pay for both of us. But she had just elevated herself above where I elevated her to by using me to do so.
And this is when I’m starting to fall out with her and really start to get angry because I feel like I don’t really know who this person is anymore. The person I trusted my life with and that I loved more than anything I really don’t recognize her anymore. Maybe it’s the girls in the bar that were talking to her giving her ideas about things or maybe it was just who she was all the time and I didn’t see it. Or maybe it was my fault for thinking that she actually loved me, but I never really know what the case is.
The Renovation That Pushed the Business Toward Collapse
The bar is making some money, but it’s not making as much as it was before we did the renovation. It doesn’t make any sense to me. ‘Cause while the place did look a lot better it looked a lot better in fact and we had started to get a few other girls working there, it just didn’t seem to be as popular. It would have been okay though if my wife had just had her 15,000 and nothing else. That would have been fine. But she’s taking out money and she’s not giving it to me when I’m asking her to. We’re falling out every single day nearly. She doesn’t seem to understand that I was the one who invested in this, therefore I’m the one who gets the returns. I’m the one taking the risk after all, but she doesn’t see it like that.
I told her one day that when things were really bad, “I’m not going to give you 15,000 anymore,” and she said, “Okay, if you not give that to me, I will not give anything from the bar to you when things start to go really well.” I got to the point of not caring anymore, but because I wasn’t giving her that 15,000, now the income that I had from my pension was enough for me to live on a very basic existence. But the problem was the bar was bringing in more than 15,000 probably 40,000 on an average month which wasn’t great, but 40,000. So she should have been getting 15,000 and I should have been getting 40,000. Then you save for a few months and we can go away for a few days to a really nice place and live the retirement that I always thought I’d be living.
I was still going to the bar, not really on speaking terms with my wife, but because it was really my bar although in her name I was able to drink at cost which meant I could save money there because I had started drinking heavily again even though I wanted not to drink excessively. And while she was the very reason that I used to stop drinking, it kind of went back on itself and now I’m drinking because of her. Because it’s a bar and because there are girls working in the bar and because my wife was a girl behind the bar, I got used to guys talking with her like she was available. The thing was though she didn’t immediately say, “Sorry, I just work behind the bar. This is my bar.” She never said that. She always liked the attention that she got because she said she was getting older, but people thought she was beautiful and it made her feel good. While I didn’t mind a bit of conversation here and there that’s to be expected and I understand that but when there are guys reaching over the bar and groping her and instead of her telling them straight, “No,” she kind of allows it and then allows them to buy drinks for her and this is in front of me and I’m not able to get angry because we’d lose a customer, but also I’m angry because my wife is disrespecting me right in front of me in the bar that I paid for. It’s when things like this happen that you stop and understand that all your opinions and ideas were wrong. Every single last one of them all wrong, all misinformed and it started to really upset me.
I arrived at the bar once and not only was my wife speaking to a guy, she was sat on a sofa with him very, very close. And that was when I completely lost it. We didn’t really last much longer after that, and the problem was the bar belonged to her and there was nothing I could do about it. I started to see reason, but it was already too late. I started to understand that she never really cared about me, only what I could give. She never really respected me, and she didn’t even respect what I gave to her. It was as though she was entitled to it, which I personally thought was the exact opposite of how she should have been.
When we got divorced, I was still living in Thailand. She still had the bar. I was still living in the same place, and not having to give her that 15,000 it did make all the difference to actually be able to live. But I no longer had £240,000 anymore. I had about £10,000 and that was it. All my opinions about Thailand had changed. All my opinions about the girls had changed. Everything that made me feel like my life was worth living was no longer there anymore, and I was so angry that I allowed this to happen.
I’d built Thailand up to be a place that was a place like anywhere else. Where people treated each other with respect. Where people understood where they came from and where they currently were. And I thought I fit right in ’cause I thought I was showing my love for the country and for my wife by being there in the first place. Opening the bar to start with was going okay. But it was listening to her and her ideas for the renovation and her incessant demands to put the prices up as a way to fix the problems instead of putting them down. And then when things started looking like they’re coming together again, instead of me getting the money she’s keeping it, thinking that she earns it because she’s working there. That’s not how this works.
The Decision to Leave the Marriage and Start Again
In the bar she was an employee of it. Okay, she owned it on paper because she was Thai, but she was an employee. An employee who had a lot more benefits than all the other employees there, but that’s what she was meant to be. We were meant to be a team working towards a shared future goal. I considered her to be my equal. I considered her to be my valued team member. And I also considered her to be my wife and the love of my life. The thing was though, she didn’t consider me to be on her team. She considered it to be me and her with completely separate everything.
I thought the idea of getting married was that this brought two people together to do things together. Where one has the financing has a little bit more say in how things were going to be done. But it seemed to her the idea of getting married was for financial benefit and financial benefit alone. And while I fully accept that financial benefit should be one of the reasons for her to get married, it shouldn’t be the be all and end all. The reason for her getting married should have been the same as me. A mutual love and understanding of each other with hopes to spend the rest of our lives with each other to the point where we’d grow old together. Maybe I grew old first before she did, but even still. It didn’t work like that, and I lost all my life savings.
I was thankful though that she ran the bar into the ground and therefore she didn’t get any financial benefit from it when it went wrong. That was the only thing that actually made me feel good because she had to go back to working in a bar again, not understanding that if she did things my way, she wouldn’t. But we got divorced. I stayed on in Thailand and watched her downfall which made me happy, but then I moved to Cambodia where I remain. It’s a lot easier to stay there for a start. My money stretches, and I also get a state pension now, so I’m in a lot better position. I didn’t get married again though no intention to and being single is the best thing I ever did.
