Thailand Retirement Dream and the Cost of Building a Life in Rural Isan

A Life of Stress, Worry, and Hard Work

A typical day for me throughout most of my life was a constant mix of stress, worry, and extremely hard work. For over 30 years, aside from weekends and very occasional holidays, there wouldn’t be a day where I would get out of bed any later than 6:00 a.m. And immediately it would be a case of getting ready as quickly as I could, getting in the car, and driving a long way to work. Every day when I woke up, hearing the alarm bell ring, wishing I was anywhere else but there. Yet, that was who I was and what I had to do. And I didn’t complain for the most part because so many other people had to do the same things.

I had a very stressful job, yet it wasn’t a job that paid me a lot of money. I did the same thing for years, and by the time I was 50, I was already completely burned out. I was married at 25, divorced at 45, and I had two great children. When I got to 50, I just looked back at my life and wondered why I put myself through all of that. Lots of my friends were the same. We put ourselves through hell on earth to try to provide for our families, yet we get nothing in return. We did what was expected of us by a system that we didn’t put in place because that’s what we thought was the only way to actually do things properly.

There comes a point where life is so difficult so many things happening around you that you have to interact with and deal with. Yet when one issue has been dealt with, another one just crops up. I found throughout most of my life living in England most of my working life, that is that everything over time just got harder and harder. There seemed to be no exception. From the first time I opened my bank account just walking into the bank and just opening it with not much proof of anything then at 50, you walk into the bank and you ask to withdraw money from your own account, and they ask you what you want to do with it. How is that any of their business? How money laundering all of a sudden became everybody else’s problem? I don’t know.

But I never understood why the vast majority of people had to be punished just so it was a little bit easier for the so called authorities to do their jobs. Nobody made my job easier. Nobody made my life easier. Everyone appeared to make my life so much harder. And I had just about had enough of it.

The System Is a Scam

The constant stress and worry to perform with no end in sight made me realize when I was 50 that if I continue doing this for much longer, I may never see retirement. I almost felt like if you want me to be part of the system, you’ve got to at the very least give me a date at some point in the future that I can count down towards. Yet, it doesn’t work like that.

I used to see it often when someone’s talking about not liking work, and you see people on benefits not doing anything. Some people look at them and think, “How dare they do that? You should go and get a job and pay your own way in life.” Yet, I never had those same opinions. Why the flying f*** should people do things they don’t want to do because they find themselves in a system that they had no part in creating, yet they’re only allowed to go down a certain path that fits within the confines of this system that they do find themselves in? Why should they go and get a job if they don’t want to? Because if they get that job, all it’s going to do is keep them. It’s not going to give them anything extra in life. So why should they bother?

I thought I was never shy of hard work, and I worked extremely hard. But by the time I was 50, I would be able to get my pension in 5 years’ time, and that would amount to around £600 a month. And I had savings amounting to my very small house and another even smaller house that I rented out. I didn’t have anything else apart from a little bit of savings, but it wasn’t a lot. Surely for a whole life’s work, I should have had at the very least enough money to provide me with the income I earned prior to deciding that I’d had enough.

I don’t mean to rant, but I appreciate when listening to stories on your channel that people are allowed to say exactly how they feel, what they believe, and how they think. I’ve seen it on other channels perhaps not related to Thailand that receive a story about something and they cut bits out of it. How do I know? It happened to a friend of mine who was sharing his experience with regards to something. I’m not actually going to say what it was because that video was quite viral. Yet, lots of things he said were cut out to make him appear the way the channel wanted him to appear. So, I leave it at that. I appreciate that things are not cut out of the stories on your channel. At least, I think they’re not.

That’s my opinion about life. The whole thing is one big gigantic scam. Mortgages are designed to keep people working jobs they don’t want to do. Everything is set up to keep people working jobs they don’t want to do so that the ones providing the jobs can make most of the money. I don’t see a problem with that either, to be honest. But I do have a problem with how the barrier of entry to that club keeps getting higher and higher and higher.

So, I hope you appreciate me sharing my opinions, which should help to further explain all my future actions, which if I’m being truthful, were purely based on the notion that things were so much easier in Thailand than where I came from. Unfortunately, that is not accurate. Some things are different, some things are easier, but the things I wanted to be easier, I found, were actually so much harder.

My Marriage and Divorce

My ex wife, she worked as well, and she also provided for the family just like I did. I don’t have anything bad to say about me working and her taking everything. When we divorced, she did get half of everything. But she did pay for half of everything, so that was fair. But that amount of heartbreak and constant stress she caused me throughout our time together I wouldn’t wish that on even my worst enemy. You know, the constant nagging you get. If you’ve been married, you’ve been through it. “Don’t leave this there. Don’t do that. I don’t like this. Please do that.” Everything, every day, as if it has to be her way of doing things. As if her way of doing things was the only way to do things.

I would never have been the sort of person who would have told her she was doing things wrong. When she left some dishes in the sink overnight and I get down in the morning and they’re still there, I wouldn’t say to her, “Why did you leave the dishes in the sink?” But if I did the same, she would. Constant nagging, constant disapproval. That was my marriage. And I was happy that we got divorced.

From that moment, when I left school and I started out on my own, there was not one part of my life that gave me any peace. I was never allowed even a moment to just be. Weekends were similar. I’d wake a bit later, yet my wife had planned out lots of activities that we needed to do. And the weekends often were more stressful than the weekdays. Just let me be. Please, just let me be. All I want is just a bit of time for myself to relax.

I would say to any younger guys out there although I’m not really in a position to be able to give advice to anyone based on the stupid things I’ve done but what I would say is don’t sacrifice your younger years for your potential future years. Make sure you have plans for the future, of course, but live a little because you only have one life and you should at least try to enjoy yourself some of the time. Constantly trying to perform, constantly trying to please other people eventually it will completely wear you out.

Anyway, let’s talk about Thailand.

The Escape What I Was Told

I’d had a few people I knew moved to Thailand. One guy moved in 2004 and the other guy in 2008. 2005 was when I got divorced. Yet, that did nothing to alleviate any of the stress in my life. But those guys talked about how in Thailand you could just be. You could just exist if you had a little bit of money to your name. You didn’t need a lot. Women also were a lot more traditional. Bear that in mind. That was over 15 years ago. And it was more true then than it is today. To some extent, but perhaps not to the extent I was hoping and expecting for it to be.

But the way those two guys spoke about Thailand with me, it was as if there was an escape. Thailand was like the lifeboat that you had to jump into to escape the sinking ship of your life back home. It took me a while to come up with that, so I hope you appreciate it. But that’s what I thought. Thailand was based on what I thought it was being told by those two guys that lived there.

At the time, I was just a normal level-headed guy. If someone described something to me, I was still of the mind that their description would be true in the sense of how I interpreted their description. If they said, “In Thailand, things are easier. The girls are a lot less demanding, a lot more traditional, and don’t want for much of anything apart from a better life” I would take that 100% literally. Yet, I have found over time that people tend to play on their opinions, often exaggerating sometimes to an extreme how things actually were. So, you have to picture it your way and try to understand it might not actually be like that.

You meet up with one of the guys who told you these wonderful things, and they’re saying to you, “Isn’t it amazing how this is just like this and this is like that? It’s just like I told you.” But it wasn’t just how they told me. It was still great. Please understand. I still loved it, but it wasn’t exactly like they described it.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is two people living the same experience at the same time on the same street in the same bar with the same girl they’re going to describe that experience very differently even though it was the same experience. That’s why I wanted to share my story because I wanted to try to say exactly how Thailand wasn’t what I was led to believe. Yet someone else who went through a similar experience to me they may feel that the experience was totally different to how I felt. That’s why it’s better to not listen to anyone, I suppose. So you can just listen to this story and, you know, take the piss out of me for simply hoping to find an easier and better life in Thailand.

First Trip 2009

2009 was when I went to Thailand first. I liked some things about it. I didn’t like lots of other things about it. I wasn’t overwhelmed by it like so many people seem to be. The positives I found were that it was cheaper. It seemed to be more modern in some respects, yet it also seemed to be more free than how things were at home. There wasn’t as much nanny state ery going on in Thailand, and that felt great. I really appreciate the country because of that.

I find it quite hard to put into words my opinions about Thailand when I was there in 2009. I didn’t fall head over heels in love with the country and want to move there because of that. I really liked the fact though that back then I could see myself having a life there without ever needing to work again. I didn’t see myself having the ability back at home to just continue. So that’s what attracted me to Thailand.

I was only there for 2 weeks, spent all the time in Bangkok, and what they say about Bangkok being different than it is now is true. But I don’t want to dwell on that because where doesn’t change in over 15 years. But I looked at my financial situation, and Thailand all of a sudden became a place where I could just escape my life back at home, stop working, and start living a bit.

So, I decided that although perhaps I don’t like everything about it you know, it’s too hot, the bureaucracy, the traffic, dual pricing you know, the typical things that many people don’t like about Thailand I was prepared to overlook all that for an easy life. And I returned home and started putting a plan together that would see me moving to Thailand the following year.

The house I lived in was worth about £90,000 at the time, that could be rented out for £450 a month. My other house that I rented out was worth £70,000, and I rented that one for £395 a month. Basically, you could get as much rent as the housing benefit would pay. So, I thought £845 a month for 5 years, then with my pension on top another £600 while it wasn’t a lot of money, it should be able to provide a good life in Thailand for me. This was based on how much things cost at the time and the expectations that things would increase in price over time, but not as substantially as they did.

By this point, I just wanted to take a break from life and relax and just enjoy myself. And it would mean leaving my job, which was paid about £3,000 a month. It wasn’t too bad at the time, but it wasn’t a great income by any stretch of the imagination but it wasn’t too bad. But there was no point doing that anymore, I thought, because it was causing me so much stress and I really hated it.

I spent the next 6 months making sure that I actually wanted to make this big life decision. I didn’t just jump at it. I spent 6 months thinking about it to make sure I was sure. But it’s all I thought about every single day. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, all I thought about was being in Thailand and living that easy and relaxed lifestyle. Maybe I could even find someone and have a more successful relationship with them.

Moving to Thailand 2010

I moved to Thailand in 2010. I just turned 50, and I was finally happy. I thought I had £845 a month coming in. And like I said, 5 years later I could add £600 to that. And initially I rented a small place in Phra Khanong in Bangkok. It was only 4,000 baht a month. I didn’t need anything big. I didn’t need anything flashy. I just needed a place where I could sleep.

I spent a lot of time exploring the local area. I went to bars probably twice a week, and everything was staying well within the budget. I got a retirement visa, which I extended by putting 800,000 baht in the bank. I should mention that I did have some money just not a lot maybe £50,000. And I just started to live the retired life.

At that point in time, I thought it was the best decision I’d made. I’d been living there for 3 months, got myself into a routine of not having a routine. I woke up when I wanted to, went where I wanted to when I wanted to, and I was happy. Plus, the fact I was within budget. That did include going away for weekends occasionally. It all fit into this budget. So, that gave me a lot of confidence that I could spend the rest of my life in Thailand.

Thailand did really appear to be an easier and more stress-free place to live. And that’s what I was after at the end of the day. It was easier because I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. Okay, I had to do the 90 day report, for example, but that was a small price to pay for all the other freedoms I had. It was stress free again because I didn’t have to do anything that I didn’t want to. And I think it was those first few months in Bangkok where I was at my happiest.

Things deteriorated over the years, and today life is far from easy. It’s full of stress again, full of worry again, and I’m 65 years old, hanging on by the skin of my teeth through a sheer lack of any other better options. I’m stuck, basically. And if I were to escape, that would mean I would be going for a worse situation back at home. That’s the thing. That’s what you have to think about before you get yourself into a similar position.

Meeting My Wife

I met my now wife not long after. I met her in a bar on Soi 4. She was 36, had a son who was 9 years old, and again, she was from a town in Isan. That’s where I now live with her, having a very bad time of things. I want nothing more than to be able to do something else to escape this life. I escaped my first life because it didn’t go according to plan. And I want to escape this one because it most definitely hasn’t gone according to plan. But the thing is, I have no chance to ever be able to escape the situation I find myself in now.

I’m going to tell you exactly what I did and how, by doing the things I did, I found myself in a position that I am not able to extricate myself from.

About 4 months after I met my now wife, I found myself getting very serious with her. I felt like she was a breath of fresh air everything I was looking for. And she wasn’t the sort, at least in the early stages, to nag and complain. She seemed to have a very easy come, easy go attitude very relaxed in her day-to-day life. She wasn’t fazed by little sorts of problems that fazed me. It was as if nothing mattered to her.

Now, of course, things did matter to her, but something could go very wrong when you were meant to do something, and she just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Mai pen rai.” Which in Thai means “never mind.” I liked that attitude. I saw it as something to be sought after. I think that’s the very thing when you see something like that. Although it goes against everything that I have done, I welcomed this “never mind” sort of attitude. Yet, while this attitude can be great in certain situations, when it’s in a situation involving finances and big decisions, that’s when problems can start to arise.

We were married not very long after. We did the whole village ceremony. I can actually look out of the window and see the place where we married in 2011. At the time, I found all the differences and the traditions and the strange way of doing things to be exciting. Of course, strange to me because I’d never experienced them before. To them, it’s perfectly normal. But we got married in the village and then we got married legally, and things started out great.

We were still living together in that small little condo in Phra Khanong. I was still living within budget, and life was okay. I wouldn’t say it was amazing, but it was how I thought married life should be. Wake up late, go eat some noodles on the street something like that spend an hour going for a walk on the treadmill in the gym (don’t do that anymore I’m quite out of shape at the moment), and then you go for a late lunch, read for the rest of the day, have dinner, go to bed. Some days we might go for a few drinks at the bars. Some days we might go watch a film in the cinema. And at weekends we might go to Koh Samet, which wasn’t too far away from Bangkok.

Throughout the first year of our marriage, that’s what we did. And I was staying well within budget. I did buy a car, and I did spend a little bit of money when we got married. So, I didn’t have much left in terms of savings apart from the money I kept in the bank for my visa, but my income was at the moment more than enough to cover our lifestyle.

Everything went downhill from there. And this was 2012 a never-ending downward spiral until today.

The Car A Sign of Things to Come

And it all started when my wife came to me and mentioned the idea of building a house in her village, close to the place where we got married. In 2012, you did hear stories about people who did things like this, but nowhere near as many as there are today. So, I didn’t know just how much my life would change by doing something like that. I had to look at my financial position, and it would mean selling one of my houses in England. That would also mean that my income would be reduced considerably. Yet, as I’d already found out, having visited there previously, things in the village were cheaper, and life would be easier even more. Again, it’s the thought of something being easy that was appealing to me.

As much as living in Bangkok was fun, you still had all the stress and craziness of the things going on around you. You tried to go on the BTS, and there were so many people cramming in close to you, and you were pushed up next to each other. So, I did find getting about Bangkok quite stressful. And when I bought the car, initially I found it very funny that my wife liked to use the car to go anywhere in Bangkok. We lived a very short walk away from the skytrain station. And as much as it was stressful to have to use the skytrain, especially during busy times, it still made the most sense as the best way to get around the city.

But as soon as I bought the car, that was it. She was using the car to go from Phra Khanong to Asok, for example, and I thought that was incredibly strange behavior. I couldn’t understand why anybody in their right mind would think about driving as opposed to using the skytrain. I went with her a few times. Maybe we were going for some drinks, and she’d drive, and I would be in the passenger seat, and we’d be sitting there for sometimes over an hour to go what would take 5 minutes on the skytrain. If we went anywhere else what the purpose of the car was for, for example, going to the beach then I would drive. But there was no way I was driving in Bangkok traffic because the purpose of doing so completely eluded me.

But to my wife, being able to drive, being able to sit in traffic just the very fact she had a car, even though it was only a cheap Toyota, and the fact that her friends didn’t have a car that was more important to her than anything. When you see things like this in the very early stages of the relationship and our marriage, as I said, you find it quite amusing. Yet, as time goes on, you find it just incredibly annoying and so strange. Such weird behavior like things you’d never experienced before.

Yet, when you’re told that “that is how we do things here,” there is no mention of the fact that by doing that, you haven’t really had any success in life. You haven’t really improved your situation whatsoever by yourself. So perhaps the way you do things in that sense isn’t correct. I’ve had more success in my life than you. So perhaps you should put your old ways to bed and do things my way because that would be better in the long run for everybody. But of course, they don’t see it that way.

Sweet little things that I found different and exciting in the early stages of our marriage now I just saw them as extreme annoyances and completely ridiculous ways to go about doing certain things. But the thoughts of escaping this craziness around us, having an even more stress free life, and starting to live like I always wanted to live that was very appealing to me.

Because if I go back to the start where I was saying earlier on, the visions and pictures I had about being at a place like that, in a house like that, surrounded by people like that the thoughts I was having about this I expected things would be like that. Yet, you found out that they’re completely different to how you thought they would be. And often then, it’s too late.

Building the House

With that being said, we did start to build a house at the end of 2012. I sold my cheapest house in England and put most of the money into the house. The plan was to keep the remainder of the money which wasn’t a lot to supplement my income until I got my pension, and then I should be on about £1,000 a month in this amazing house in Thailand. The land that we built on belonged to the family. I actually paid them 100,000 baht for it, and then it was transferred to my wife.

Quite early into 2013, the house was already built, and we were already living there. Life in the village started out fantastically. I had a nice big house that I built in my wife’s name, and I quickly got to know restaurants in the local area that I could go to for a beer and some nice food. They might have been 15 to 20 minutes’ drive away, but that didn’t bother me. For the first 3 or 4 months maybe even longer I really enjoyed living there.

But there were little differences that you saw when you were getting married that excited you. They made me feel like this might be a very special place to be, but they do drain you out and wear you down as time goes by.

The Chickens

The chickens, for example every morning at the crack of dawn, you’d hear them. And they were just allowed to roam freely around the village. Although we had a big wall around our land, occasionally they would be able to fly in. And then when you buy a dog and the dog starts catching them on your land, the locals come and expect to be paid for their chickens because your dog ate them. Yet it was on our land, so what’s the problem? But my wife at this point, because she was married to me, she felt like she was now one of the key people in the village because the house was the best or whatever. So, she always wanted to keep the peace, and that meant I would have to give them a few hundred baht even though it was on our land. Shouldn’t work like that, but it does. Of course, if my dog escaped and killed their chicken on their land, of course I’d pay for it.

The Snake

Another example I didn’t like, which happened around that time. I’m sitting in my garden on the hammock with a beer, just loving life. Didn’t want for anything. But her father was there, and he sees a snake in the corner of the garden. He picks up a machete, goes over, and hacks it to death and then throws it over the wall. I was furious when he did that. I was never one who was able to keep my temper very well. But I shouted at him like, “What do you think you’re doing?” And then you find out it’s very common, and they like to kill things there, especially snakes. While under certain circumstances, perhaps yeah you might understand that if they’re poisonous and dangerous, but it was in the middle of nowhere, far away from the house, so it should have just been left alone. I was happy just to let snakes be. If they came close to the house, you’d move it. But that’s not how they did things there.

But these little things don’t send you over the edge and make you want to escape. They don’t make you wish you didn’t do what you did. It’s just things that you need to get used to about living somewhere like that. I thought it was my house, my rules but it wasn’t. It was more like her house, her rules, and I’ve got to accept it yet I paid for it. So, how does that make sense?

The Communal Mentality

Another thing was the way people did things in the village. Family would come around to visit, and it was always like what was mine was theirs. It took quite a lot of getting used to that fact, but I had to get used to it eventually, as much as I didn’t like it. But they would come around, and there were no boundaries. There was nothing separating what was ours and what was theirs. It was all communal. But just because it’s communal doesn’t mean I was happy with that situation. I had more stuff. Therefore, I was the one who was expected to allow this communal attitude to thrive around my house.

Yet, while it could be stated that if I went to her mother and father’s house, for example, I would be welcome to help myself to things there as well. Yet, the problem was you went there they didn’t have anything because they didn’t have any money. So this communal aspect of things was very one sided because most people didn’t have anything to be communal with in the first place. So I didn’t feel like that was very fair. But it’s just one of those things you had to get used to living in the village.

I got used to all these little things as much as I hated them. Yet for whatever reason, I continued to keep tying the end of the rope that I tied around myself even tighter while the other end was firmly attached to the village. I don’t get that. Out of anything I did, I really don’t get that.

The Business Ideas Begin

But in 2014, my wife says that she’s very happy in the village and she wants to start a business. I’ve heard it in lots of stories, lots of times, and this seems to be the case throughout many of them where the Thai wife didn’t have very much money, so she had to go to Bangkok to work doing whatever it is that she did. Yet, she’d always wanted to really live in her village and do something there. That was no different to my wife.

But at this point in time, I wasn’t yet ready to do something like that. I didn’t have much in terms of savings. I had my income coming in and a little bit of buffer to keep me until I got my pension. So, I didn’t really see the need to do anything else. Yet, that’s all she talked about probably for 6 months. All she talked about was wanting to do something to make some money so she could help with the expenses.

One thing I left England was to get away from constant nagging. I didn’t want to be nagged all the time. That was the last thing I wanted. But I did think to myself that if we did open a business, as long as I’d have enough savings to see me to get the pension, that should still give me enough money to live on anyway. And in theory, if we had a business, it should make more money. Not a lot more, but maybe a little bit more than I was getting in rent from my property. I failed to take into account the increase in property prices over the years or pretty much anything that anyone should think about.

But I put that house up for sale, and it sold in 2014, and I transferred all the money to Thailand. By this point, I’d already changed from a retirement extension to a marriage extension. So that halved the money requirements that I needed to keep to maintain the visa. That freed up a bit of money for me as well. But now I’m firmly committed to Thailand. I’m all in in the village. There was no going back. And in a way, my future was in the hands of my Thai wife. That wasn’t the position I ever thought I would be in, nor was it a position I would have ever willingly let myself get into.

If I didn’t get into that position gradually over the course of a few years, it might not have happened. I wouldn’t have just gone all in at once and done that. But it was the ongoing process: from living in Bangkok, to selling one of my houses, to building a house in the village, to acclimatizing and getting used to life in the village, to smaller requests to do things in the village for example, helping out family. Then it morphed into the idea that she wanted to start some form of business.

The Restaurant

Lots of things were tried, but the first one was to open a restaurant. She already had the land for it. So, a few hundred thousand baht was spent to build it. And it was kitted out with basic stuff nothing fancy, but it was reasonable. It was just meant to be a small village style restaurant selling food for 30 or 40 baht, beers for a very cheap price just a very small profit. But that was meant to keep her in her position without asking for money from me anymore, because I was just making sure I could get my pension, which was still a few years away.

When she talked about doing the restaurant, I sat down with her and we talked about how much she expected to make, how much things would cost, how much she would sell things for, how much money she would make per dish. And although I thought she understood things perhaps I understood it myself some things to me were so basically obvious that I didn’t second guess the fact she might not actually understand.

But it did seem that perhaps she could make maybe 10,000 baht per month. That wasn’t a lot of money. I wasn’t expecting this to make a lot of money, but for the small investment you know, I still had most of the money from my house I’d sold for her to get 10,000 baht a month as opposed to me getting 18,000 baht a month or thereabouts for rent from the property, that would be one step towards making more money in the future. The hope was to invest in things and get to the point where, perhaps, I was bringing in twice what I got from rent from the house. That was using all the money from the house. I thought that was extremely conservative. I wasn’t expecting to make a lot just a little bit.

But she opened a restaurant, and she would drive all the way to Makro every week, buy everything that she thought she would be able to sell, come back, and she opened for a month. Everything seemed to be going absolutely amazingly. Don’t let appearances trick you.

Part of me agreeing to do this was every time she bought something, she had to give me the receipt of how much she paid. If she was in Makro, I would get the receipt. If she went to buy anything extra from somewhere else you know, if she’d run out of something, for example, perhaps it didn’t warrant going all the way to Makro you know, if the place you bought it from didn’t give a receipt, she had to write it down how much it was, and she’d let me know. This included how much fuel she used for the car, and for every thousand km put on the car bearing in mind it needed servicing every 10,000 km, which cost about 4,000 baht every 1,000 km put on the car we had to add another 400 baht on top for costs. Nothing difficult here just basic maths really. That’s all it was.

But I did get all the receipts in over the first month, and I found myself going to the restaurant often, and there were quite a lot of people there. The village wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t tiny either. It appeared like she was a very good cook because lots of the villagers were coming to eat at the restaurant. They all seemed to be happy with it. Some guys came for a drink in the evening. And at the end of the first month, she made a total profit of minus 4,000 baht.

Okay, I’m not getting concerned to start with. But she had absolutely no idea about the concept of working out how much certain things cost and then working out how to work out a profit and how much you needed to charge things for. You start to notice that you go into the restaurant, and she’s giving really huge portions to people. And when I say to her, “You’re losing money by doing that,” and she says, “Well, people are hungry. They want to eat a lot.” And then you look at her like, “But you’re losing money. You’re actually working and paying money for these people to eat. Does that make sense?” “Oh, no it doesn’t.”

So, I developed a system for her where if she was cooking a plate of pad krapow, for example, she would have to weigh out how much pork to use, how much rice to use weigh everything out, even down to the chilies and the garlic and the sauce how much of everything you could use per dish. I got her some weighing scales and got everything for her to be able to do that. And I left her to it for another month.

She comes to me a few days later saying, “People no happy they say food portion too small.” Then you say to her, “Well, tell them to go somewhere else.” But they say food portion too small there, too. Obviously, the concept of how much things cost hadn’t gone as far as a rural Thailand village. Yet, there was an old lady that sold food and had been doing for a long time. Her prices were similar, her portions were similar, and it really does make you think is she actually making money, or is she just doing this and the cash flow is what keeps her fed and watered? I don’t know.

But that restaurant lasted for 3 months, and she got bored with it when she had to do things so precisely in order to try to make some money. So that was a total loss. And then her sister moved into the restaurant still lives there today. 200,000 baht. Goodbye.

The Land

Then there was the case of buying land. I bought a few plots around the village, and that was used to grow things, but mainly it was for investment purposes. The land has gone up in value over time, and that’s great. It’s not like we plan to sell it, but you’ll find that your wife goes to borrow some money against the land, then you’ve got to pay it back because whatever she borrowed the money for didn’t work.

Now, I want to be clear here. I’m not saying that my wife is malicious. I’m not saying that she went to borrow money against the value of the land because she was trying to take advantage of me, knowing I would pay it back. She honestly believed that she would have the ability to pay it back. She was not and is not a malicious person. She is just extremely stupid. In a way, that’s even more scary. She had these delusions of being someone who was fiscally smart. That’s saying something coming from a guy who made some stupid financial decisions. But I did them based on false understandings and false impressions of where I actually was and how things worked. But she was doing it on the understanding that she knew exactly what she was doing. Yet, when her latest business venture failed, I had to pay the money back or the land would have gone.

So, as of now, things are not as fun as they seem. And because I sold the house and put a little bit of money into the business, she just lost money doing it as well as spending all her time doing it thinking she was doing a good job.

The Pigs

Throughout the years, I’ve put money into all kinds of things, thinking eventually something will work. 2015, I built a small enclosure, and she got some pigs. Not many. It wasn’t expensive, but it’s very difficult to do that type of business. People don’t work for a lot of money somewhere like that. And she quickly found out that she wasn’t happy to prepare the food for the pigs. You couldn’t just go and buy pig food and give that to them because they would eat far more money than you could sell them for. You had to supplement the pig food extensively by shredding the trunk of a banana tree and chopping it up with a machete. That took a lot of physical labor to do that. Then you had to boil up some kind of concoction that the pigs could eat so that you could keep the cost low enough to be able to sell them for a profit.

But after trying herself to do that for 2 days, she came to me and said, “Can we pay someone to do that?” And I said to her, “How is that going to work? If we pay someone to do that, when the time comes to sell the pigs, it’s going to have cost us a lot more than we can sell them for. So you’re not going to make any money. You’re just wasting your time and money.” Things like that just didn’t register with her. It was as if she didn’t understand the basics of the differences between how much something costs and what you need to sell it for and that little bit of profit in between is what you live on.

Over the course of the next 3 years by this point, I’d already got my pension, thank God, which is £600 a month we tried all kinds of different things. Yet, nothing ever worked. All that happened was money continued to go down and down some more. But I still had hope that at the very least she’s going to be able to make enough money just to keep herself.

The Child

That was when she came to me saying she wanted a child. Absolutely not. That was something I wasn’t prepared to do. Then she said, “Okay, I’ll go and have a child with someone else.” I thought she was joking. I laughed at her and said, “Go right ahead.” And the thing is, she did. Yet at this point, I didn’t have much money left. My only option really was to just accept it or return home to an even worse existence than I currently found myself in.

There’s nothing wrong with her daughter. She lives with us. But the fact that she did that so matter of factly, as if it was normal still confuses me how she thought it was okay. But I still genuinely believe that she had no malicious intent by doing something as insane as that. I don’t think she did it to be a bad person. I just think she did it because she’s a very different person, and she wanted a child, and she thought that’s how she could get one. I mean, there are very different people around somewhere like that compared to me and what I’m used to. So it is difficult to get over, but I had two choices. Didn’t have much money left. Didn’t have much income coming in, and the alternative would have been far worse. So I just thought to myself, get over it. If you can’t, you know what you have to do. Yet, I didn’t want to do what the alternative actually was, which would have been to return home. That would have been worse. So, as crazy as it was, I had to accept it.

Please understand that by not accepting it, it would have put me in a worse position.

Where I Am Now

Since then, my wife has tried lots of different business ideas. She’s never made any money. All she’s done is lost money. Yet, she still tries, and she thinks eventually she’ll be able to do something and make a lot of money. She has this never ending ambition to do something, which is all well and good, but her ambition has cost me a house and some of my income. And if I had that now, my living situation would be a lot better.

£600 in Thailand every month it’s not a lot. In fact, it’s barely survival. While you can survive in the village if you have to, I have 400,000 baht in the bank for the visa, and that’s it. £600 a month coming in. I’m not even sure I’m going to get a state pension in a few years’ time. But even if I get something, I would be happy with an extra £200 a month. That would make such a huge difference.

But 10 years I’ve been living there. 10 years I’ve been living this life. And during that time, I’ve seen and this is no hint of a lie lots of other foreigners building houses within a 15-minute drive of where I built a house. These were all foreigners that I went to speak to and had a beer with and where my wife spoke to their wife. These are the ones I knew about. 11 of them. Guess how many of them are still there? You would be right if you said none of them. None of them are still there. The closest one a German guy he lasted a year, I think. Another guy lasted 18 months. I think the longest someone was there was 3 years. And lots of the times it’s pretty much the same story. Meet a girl in a bar I mean, I did that as well come and build a house. All of a sudden, their wife’s mother is now dripping in gold. The house is built.

Whether it’s a case of the wife scamming them and getting rid of them I would say that was only three out of the 11 cases where it was a downright scam. The other cases were more the guy had no idea what it was actually like to be there, not understanding what village life was like, and having to escape because it was sending them over the edge. Usually, they split up with their wives because of that. But one of those 11 one of them did move down to Pattaya with his wife, and they do come to the house occasionally. The thing is, though, he could afford to do that, and I can’t.

So I think from my experience that goes to show that the odds are heavily stacked against you if you do something like this in Thailand.

Am I happy? Absolutely not. I’m not happy. Do I want to be here? Absolutely not. I’d rather be anywhere else. Will I remain here? I have no choice. So here I will remain.

To think about how I found myself in this position stuck in an Isan village it was a slow progress to get me here.

A Final Warning

Not long ago, a guy came round to the house from England as well. Everybody knows in the local area that me as a foreigner lives there. So, other foreigners are told, “Oh, go and speak to him.” He’s got a big smile on his face, how happy he was, saying he’s going to be building a house soon. The thing is do I tell him the truth, or do I just let him make his own decisions? You try to tell someone the truth, and they just laugh, saying, “No, that’s not going to happen to me.” Every single time. Every single time you try to warn someone not to build an effing house in a village in Thailand, they look at me like I’m stupid. Yet, I want to point at my house and say, “I’ve lived here for 10 years, and the only reason I’m here is because I don’t have any other choice.” But you don’t actually say that because the gossip would go around, and his wife would tell my wife. So, you just have to say, “Best of luck to you.”

But if I had my time again, perhaps I wouldn’t do this. But I will tell it now and say it once again. Don’t build an effing house in an Isan village.