The Mistake That Cost Everything In Thailand

The first time I was in Thailand was in 2007. I did not think very much of it back then in some ways, but in others I loved it. That is the truth of it. I was posted there by my company to transition the office in Bangkok out of Thailand to Singapore, and I spent 12 months there in total.

I guess you could say that is where it all started, though. By the end of those 12 months, Thailand had already thrown a spanner in the works of my life because I did something I am not proud of. Something that hurt the people closest to me happened, and I felt able to become a different person there. I thought I could get away with things that I would never even have considered doing at home.

When I moved there, I was 42 years old. I moved together with my wife, who was also 42, and our two kids. The company put them in an international school as part of the package, and I also received a very nice accommodation allowance that allowed us to rent a big, luxurious condo in a brand new building right in the heart of the city.

At home, I had always felt like I was me. I was proud of what I had achieved at work and proud of my family.

In Thailand, however, I started to feel like I was bigger than I actually was. I was paid around $15,000 a month, as well as receiving the school and accommodation allowance, and back then that felt like five times what I earned at home. I let it go to my head, and I really did.

The Mistake That Cost Everything

I wanted my family to have the best time. Unfortunately, I thought that having the best time would involve hiring a live-in maid so my wife could become a lady of leisure. We discussed it for a few weeks and eventually decided it would be a good idea, but that is how things went wrong.

One night I was out with some of the other expats who worked for the company. They were typical Thailand expats for the time, and most of them had been in Thailand for over five years. They took me to Soi Cowboy for my first time there, and it was fun.

When I was drunk, I started talking to a girl in one of the bars and got carried away. I went to see her a few times when I was meant to be staying late at work, and I liked her. Somehow, I thought it would be a good idea to ask whether she would become our live-in maid. I told her about my situation and said she would have to be discreet, but she immediately rejected the money I offered.

I think it was the adrenaline rush that made me unable to stop. My wife caught me, and it was not worth it. This was around four months after I arrived in Thailand, and she left with the kids. Divorce, money loss, depression, and a very difficult life followed.

I stayed in Thailand and completed the work assignment. The maid stayed with me, but it was not the same, and when that post ended I returned home to a very different life.

The Aftermath in England

Going back to England was really strange. Everything looked exactly as I had left it, but nothing felt right anymore. I moved back into the family home while the divorce was being sorted out.

I slept in the spare bedroom because I could not bring myself to use the one my wife and I had shared. The kids’ rooms were still full of their things, and I would walk past them on the way to the bathroom. I would just stand there looking at everything and wishing things had turned out differently.

The divorce went through in early 2008, and she got the house, which was brutal. She got more than half of everything else, too. The Thailand situation made me look as bad as possible, and I knew my behaviour had been crazy, but I had been on a high and loved the feeling that I could do anything I wanted.

I walked away with about £250,000, which was devastating. All that hard work over all those years had left me with very little to show for it. The job I returned to was not a joke in itself, but going back to the same office and the same hours made everything feel dull and miserable.

The commute took an hour each way, and a lot of my salary went to my ex-wife. Thailand had shown me that life could feel more exciting, but I would still have gone back to never visiting in the first place if it meant keeping what I had lost.

A New Adventure in Brazil

I was starting to think that I had had enough of my life at home, my job, and everything else. When the financial crisis hit in 2008 and the world seemed to be falling apart, I became very interested in researching Brazil. I had a bit of money, and I felt attracted to the idea of going there, starting a business, and having a very different life.

I went there and back, and property was very affordable. I was drawn to the idea of opening a guest house in a city called Recife. I spent two weeks there and had already made up my mind.

When I returned home, I found out that at the time I could get a visa if I invested only $50,000. When I told my kids I was moving to Brazil, they thought I had gone mad. Maybe I had, but life was not the same anymore and I wanted an adventure.

I moved to Recife in early 2009. I knew straight away that I was going to be happy there. It made me feel a little like Thailand had made me feel when I first arrived, as if I was somewhere that made sense to me even if I could not explain why.

I found a guest house to buy within my first month. It had nine bedrooms and an attached restaurant, and the owner had got himself into trouble and needed cash quickly. I bought the whole place outright for less than it was worth, hired a Brazilian woman to help me run it, and before long we were in a relationship.

The guest house started doing well after about six months, mostly with Europeans travelling to Brazil for an adventure. My kids visited twice a year on average, and my son loved it there. Life felt like an adventure every day, but my relationship with the woman I had hired was starting to fall apart, and I began thinking about leaving Brazil.

Looking back, I often wonder whether moving to Brazil was just running away from problems I had created. At the first sign of problems there, I was already thinking about leaving, although I am not sure what that says about me.

I did leave Brazil in 2011. I left with more than I had arrived with, which was a good move financially. I had approximately £300,000 after selling the guest house and adding my other savings, but I regret selling it because it would be worth much more today.

Back to England, Then Thailand Again

I returned home thinking, what am I going to do now? As soon as I got back to England, I felt that I did not want to be there, but I did not know where I really wanted to be. I regretted leaving Brazil, although at the time I did not feel that I had been running away.

I found a new job almost on autopilot, even though I did not really want one. I rented a place because I was not sure I would stay, and before I knew it three years had passed. Both my kids were now living on their own, and once again I was in the frame of mind that I was somewhere I did not want to be.

By the end of 2014, I was thinking about leaving again, this time for good, with no plans to return. I did not have enough money to retire permanently, but I had around £350,000. It was not nothing, but it was not a fortune either.

One difficult thing to accept was that I was thinking about returning to Thailand. What upset me most was that I would get far less Thai currency for my English currency than I had received when I first went there. If I had the same amount of money at the old exchange rate, it would have been enough to retire permanently.

When I went back for two weeks at the end of 2014, I had the time of my life in Pattaya. I did not spend any time in Bangkok, but those two weeks made me return home, pack everything up, close everything down, and leave England for good.

I moved to Thailand permanently at the start of 2015 and would turn 50 that year. I think that when you get to that age, you realise that you really need to do something about your life. Thailand was me doing something, and I hoped everything would work out.

Finding Hua Hin

I got to Bangkok and the first thing I did was get a taxi straight to Sukhumvit and check into a hotel. I thought I would stay for a week or two while I looked around and decided where I was going to live. When I had visited Thailand for those two weeks before, I had stayed in Pattaya rather than Bangkok, which in hindsight was a mistake.

Bangkok did not feel the same as it had in 2007 and 2008. Everything seemed more expensive, and I was not the same person anymore. Back then, I had been there on a big salary and could do what I wanted, while the amount of money I earned in Thailand had felt close to obscene.

I did not really want to live in Pattaya. I liked it as a place to visit occasionally, but as a place to live it was too in your face and not really my cup of tea. I decided to go to Hua Hin to see whether it could give me what I was looking for.

When I went to Hua Hin, I immediately felt that it was the perfect place for a man like me. It was only a few hours from Bangkok, had Western conveniences on the doorstep, and appeared to have a reasonable expat community. I arrived about a week after landing in Thailand and decided within the first day that I would live there.

That decision felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. After I received my retirement extension, I arranged a place to live about ten minutes away from downtown by motorcycle and bought a motorcycle to make getting around easier.

Life felt as if everything was fitting into place, but I was aware that I only had a certain amount of money. At 50, I could probably have made it last, but I did not think it was wise simply to watch my money drain away.

Meeting Someone New

Everything changed around this time, and I stopped thinking about business for a while because I met someone. I had met quite a few women since arriving in Hua Hin, mostly along Soi Bintabah, the main bar area that catered to tourists and expats.

I met this woman in a bar. She was 31, so you could not really call her a girl, and I was not looking for someone in her early twenties. I was drawn to her because she seemed like a female version of me in some ways.

She found the same things funny that I did and seemed to enjoy the same things, although perhaps on a different level. I felt that she was someone I could get to know better. We talked, I liked her, and I repeated that routine for a few weeks.

Eventually, I did not want to see her in the bar anymore. I wanted her to be with me all the time, and having her made me feel complete in a way. I thought life would be easier in Thailand because I was in a relationship with a local woman.

We got on very well, and when she started living with me I felt whole again. I had not felt that way since my divorce. We never argued or fell out, and I saw the relationship as the first step in my new life in Thailand.

Moving to Korat

After three months, I asked her to marry me. She had two children, and her youngest was only two, which meant that her children would be a major part of our lives forever. When I met my fiancée, the children were living with her parents in the village, and I assumed that was what she preferred.

That was a dangerous assumption. The village was about 20 minutes outside Korat, also known as Nakhon Ratchasima. I had not seen anywhere like it in Thailand, but the city itself was great.

Korat felt like a busy version of Bangkok without the high-rise buildings. It felt like a real Thai city rather than a tourist city, and to me it seemed full of opportunity and potential. While we waited for the wedding, I began thinking that it could be a good place to start a business aimed at local people.

We rented a car, went to the village, held the ceremony, and completed the formalities. We were due to return to Hua Hin, but I asked my new wife whether she would stay in Korat for a week so we could look around and get to know it better.

I told her that perhaps we could live there because I liked it, and she said that was fine. We gave up the house in Hua Hin, sold my motorcycle, bought a car, and drove to Korat with all our belongings.

We checked into a hotel when we arrived. Two weeks later, we had rented a place only a five-minute walk from the middle of the city. We were ready to begin our married life, and I felt that we were doing something amazing.

The Bicycle Shop Dream

I changed a lot when we moved there. Until that point, I had been focused on enjoying myself, living in the moment, and acting as if I was retired when perhaps I was not. Now we were in Korat, everything became about what came next.

I desperately wanted to build a business that would allow us to live well. The business I wanted to start was a bicycle shop. I had always enjoyed cycling, and it seemed that more people in Thailand were taking up the hobby.

I spent months travelling around Thailand with my wife, looking at other shops and asking owners how they operated. I thought I could import bikes and earn a reasonable profit margin, even if we sold only two or three bikes a week.

I wanted to buy our own shophouse. The business would be downstairs, while one or two floors above it could provide living accommodation. We would not have to pay rent for a business premises or a home.

Under other circumstances, I would not have considered buying a place. Foreigners could not own it, so it would have to be in my wife’s name, and I liked the freedom of being able to pack up and move. However, the calculations made buying seem sensible.

After several months of searching, we settled on a building in what I thought was a perfect location. It cost the equivalent of about £200,000, which was a lot of money to invest, but it was meant to be a future investment as well as our home and business premises.

It would have been a good buy if I had owned it, but because I could not, it had to be in my wife’s name. I was in love with her and thought she was the love of my life, so I did not even bother getting a lease. I was thinking about building a future together, not about what could go wrong.

By then I had spent about £250,000 of my £350,000. I did not think the money was wasted because it was tied up in the building, which I believed we could sell later. We fitted out the shop downstairs exactly as I had designed it, and upstairs became a very nice living space.

The Cracks Begin to Show

As soon as the shop was ready, something happened that I was not expecting: her children came to live with us. We had not discussed it for even a second, and I did not feel that I had any say in the matter.

My wife took the car to collect them, and while I was putting the finishing touches to the shop she returned with the children. She also brought her younger sister, who was six years younger than her, and told me that the sister would stay with us to look after the children.

I was expected to pay her sister a salary. I had already been giving my wife 15,000 baht a month to help her look after the children, but now I found out that she expected me to pay her sister another 10,000 baht.

When I said I would give my wife less, she said that was not possible. I agreed angrily because I was trying to forget about it and did not want to fail before the business had even started.

I ordered the first stock and hired a local marketing company. A month later, the shop was fully stocked with bikes, helmets, parts, and everything else we needed. I invested around £30,000 in stock, and the expected profit margin was about 25%.

I had changed to a marriage extension, set up a company, and obtained a work permit. My sister-in-law was put on the books as an employee, along with someone else from the village, so I could get the permit.

At first we did well. We sold as many bikes as we needed to, then employed someone who was good at building and repairing them, so we began offering servicing as well. After six months, we were making approximately 80,000 baht in profit after everything had been paid.

Then my wife’s youngest child was due to start school, and she wanted both children to attend private schools in the city. I thought they should go to a government school because we were not making enough to pay private school fees.

I initially refused, and she did not speak to me for a week. When she finally spoke, she asked whether I had changed my mind. I said yes and apologised, and I agreed to pay. It was emotional blackmail and manipulation.

After that, my wife was happy again and said she wanted to help me make more money. When she realised she could not help with the bicycle shop, she said she wanted to start something herself. I told her to go ahead and said that if it worked, great, and if it did not, she should not worry.

That was the starting point of everything going wrong. I thought I was giving my wife harmless permission to try her own business. I did not realise that she might take it as permission to do anything she wanted, regardless of the cost.

The Devastating Discovery

Over the next five months, my wife was busy setting up something she wanted to do. I let her get on with it because there was no indication that she needed help or money. She did not tell me what she was doing and only said she was working on an idea with some friends.

Because she had not asked me for anything, I did not feel it was my business to investigate. It turned out that she had taken out a loan against the building to finance her business. When I found out how much it was and what she had spent some of it on, I realised that I had trusted someone with my life.

To cut a very long story short, she borrowed 6.5 million baht. I do not know how she managed to do it, but the family had a brand new pickup and money went in all directions for ridiculous things. She seemed to think that because she had not used all the loan for her business, the rest was available to spend.

Her business was a food stall in a market with a few friends. It might have made some money, but the loan payments and huge interest rate were crippling. It was a nightmare scenario that I had not even imagined.

When she explained that she had borrowed 6.5 million baht and spent some of it helping other people, that was the moment when I could not look at my wife in the same way anymore. She had destroyed both of our lives, really.

The loan payments were just over 55,000 baht a month, and I could not afford to pay them. I suggested that her family sell the pickup and return the money, but she could not do it. I suggested asking the people she had helped to give the money back, but she could not do that either.

I started wondering whether she had done it on purpose. The family’s house seemed much nicer than before, and everything appeared better for everybody apart from me. If I could have owned the building and done it myself, this would not have happened.

The End of the Road in Thailand

I contacted the lawyer who had helped me set up the company and asked whether I had any rights. He told me that there was basically nothing I could do because the building belonged to my wife and she was free to do what she wanted with it.

I asked about getting divorced, taking the matter to court, and trying to recover something. It looked like my only option. I would have to pay the loan for the time being, then get divorced and force the sale of the building, pay back the loan, and receive half of whatever was left.

When I understood the situation, I told my wife, “It is over. We are not staying together. You completely destroyed my life.” I thought she had done it on purpose, but she did not even blink.

She only said, “I try my best. You have problem with me, but I try my best.” I wondered whether she could really have been that stupid, but perhaps she was.

It took 14 months, and I left Thailand with about £92,000, not the £350,000 I had arrived with. I returned to England completely broken and did not know what to do. I had lost £258,000 because I trusted my wife not to do something stupid, but she had used the building as collateral and borrowed far too much money.

The building had housed a business that was working for us and allowed my wife and her children to live well. She used it as collateral, spent the money, and thought that because she did not need all of it for her business she could use it elsewhere. I will leave it to you to decide whether that was stupidity or planned.

Starting Over Again

I had to get another job. Returning to work was difficult, but I had no choice. I was fortunate to be in an industry that paid well, so I worked hard and managed to put money away again.

I have retired again now, but it took several years of hard work. I worked through COVID and spent a period working from home before I could finally stop.

If I tell you where I retired, you might say, “Why did you not stay here all along?” I retired to Brazil. I like more things about Thailand than Brazil, but the things I do not like about Thailand are much stronger than the things I do not like about Brazil.

In Thailand, I felt that I was not competing on a level playing field, even when I managed to make things work. I had to trust somebody, and even when I did, she still made reckless decisions.

In Brazil, I feel that I can simply do things myself. It was not as easy as it had been when I first moved there, and I needed to invest some money to get a good visa, but I made that money back through hard work. This is where I will stay.

I will finish by saying that Thailand is a great country. The people are great, and there is a lot to enjoy. You should visit and enjoy it, and if you want to live there, you can.

But do not do anything there unless you can do it yourself without relying on somebody else. If you can do that, you should be okay. The minute you involve somebody else in something you want to do, that is where things can go wrong. That is where things went wrong for me, and I would not want it to happen to anyone else.