From UK Centric to Thailand Centric

I bought my first condo in Thailand, more specifically in Bangkok, back in 2009. That first condo was the start of my transition from a UK-centric to a Thailand-centric investment portfolio. The first time I was in Thailand was 2 years before this. That’s when I met my wife who was from Thailand. She was dancing, and I wanted to talk to her and you could say the rest is history.

She was everything I was looking for in a wife. 22, no children, and it seemed like she had a desire to improve her life, and I wanted to be the one that would help her. I was 56 when we met, and I understand that the age gap might be a lot for some people. I didn’t see a problem with it. She was different to all the other girls that I’d seen. She seemed to be quite switched on and clever, and just the accident of birth meant she was working where she was.

I took her back to the UK with me. It took over 6 months to get the visa arranged, but it was well worth it when it was finally done. Having her in the UK with me was a blessing, but it did give me a wake-up call that I felt in a way England was not the place that would be right for us to live. She didn’t mind England, but I could tell she wasn’t happy there.

I’d been reasonably successful, and I had a portfolio of investments worth about £1.8 million. And before I met my wife, it was my plan to continue until the age of 60 or 65 and then retire. Thailand really opened up my eyes to just how much more there is to the world. When you live all your life in a country like England, it feels like you’re being coddled. Whereas in Thailand, it felt like you could just be.

So after we spent about a year together in England, I took her to lots of the different places in England so she could say that she had seen them. She was very happy to be able to have got back to Thailand and show her friends where she’d been. I felt that because I was able to give her this, she really loved and respected me. I wasn’t overly concerned when it came to the notion of love. Of course, there was an age difference, but I was more interested to have a wife that respected me. Respect counted for more than love, but love was still important. And I felt at least in those early stages that she did respect me.

There was no point me continuing to work because I didn’t need to. But I could have done if I wanted to. But the more I thought about things, the more it seemed like the best idea would be to remove all my investments from England and invest instead in Thailand because it seemed to be up and coming and it also seemed to have a few less rules in place which was an important thing for me.

The Marriage and Early Days

But I got married to my wife. We did everything the Thai way. We went to the village and had a marriage ceremony, and I paid some money for dowry. But I think my story is important because it explains why I did the things that I did.

I was successful throughout my life. I made decent money, and I wanted to finish off a bit of work investing into a portfolio in Thailand. I thought that because I’d had success, that it would work correctly.

But yeah, we were married legally as well, and that’s how we got the visa for her to go to England. And I actually had a friend who tried to take his wife, who was also from Thailand, back to England only a year or so ago, and the rules have changed considerably. I advised him to go to France and put her on a boat instead. That way, he wouldn’t even need to pay for his wife when she was there, and you get a free hotel as well. Perhaps that would be the better option instead of jumping through hoops where actual English people can’t even take their wives there without any stress.

Why Thailand?

I don’t know what it was about Thailand that I liked. Perhaps just a feeling of freedom and the feeling that I could live like I was in my early 20s again. What man getting on in their 50s wouldn’t want to live like they used to live in their 20s? Yeah, it’s doing it now with a lot of money behind you as opposed to nothing when you’re in your 20s. The most lucky people in the world are the guys in their late teens and early 20s who already have money behind them. That would be the best way to enjoy life. Yet people like me had to spend my whole life wasting my 20s and 30s and 40s just to be able to get into a position where I had enough money to enjoy myself.

Yet I did feel in a way like I was too old to enjoy myself properly. But I tried to put those feelings to the back of my mind because what’s the point in thinking like that? That’s why I loved Thailand because all of a sudden it didn’t seem to matter that I was in my 50s. I could still do things like I did in my 20s. And if you’re a guy like me who sacrificed so much of his early life, Thailand can be a place for you to reclaim some of that lost youth. That’s no hint of a lie. Thailand opens up the opportunity to be able to live again the life you missed out on. At least that’s what it felt like to me.

Then in 2009, we moved permanently. I got a marriage visa extension of stay. It was very easy to do just by putting some money in the bank, and then you’ve got it renewed every year. I know a few guys complain about having to do it every year, and then you’ve got the 90-day reports as well, and it gets annoying, but I pay an agent to do it or at least I did when I was there.

We rented a small place in Asok when we moved, and we started looking for that first investment unit. It was my intention over the course of the next 5 to 6 years to transfer all my investments into Thailand, mainly in the property market, but also in anything else that I thought would be good. I was looking for that first condo to be around the same area where we rented. And we looked for a few months and found the perfect place. It was a one bedroom, 50 square meters, and the owner wanted to sell it quickly. We put in an offer. It was accepted the same day, and I transferred the money into Thailand, and that first condo was bought.

The Decision to Put Everything in Her Name

I do need to make something perfectly clear before I go further. I did put that condo into the name of my Thai wife. It was about £80,000, and that was just going to be the first of many things to come. And I must make it clear that I need to tell you why I put the condo onto my Thai wife’s name. It is common knowledge that it is possible for a foreigner to own condos in Thailand in their own name. But because it was part of an investment portfolio perhaps it would be sold at a later date the buying and selling and working on condos and renovations all this type of stuff that I wanted to do I wouldn’t have been able to do that without a work permit, I didn’t think. And there were also the foreign quotas and Thai quotas to deal with. And I believed it would be better to be in the Thai quota for better prices and availability. And also if a deal came up straight away and the money wasn’t in the right place, we wanted to be able to act. So having a Thai person to be able to do that made things a lot easier.

But if you want to buy a condo to live in yourself, yes, you can buy it in your own name as a foreigner. But I didn’t. I wasn’t trying to rush into doing anything quickly. Wanted to take our time slowly, build up a good portfolio. That should have meant by the time I was of retirement age, we would be getting a great income coming from Thailand. Therefore, we wouldn’t have to worry about the exchange rate differences. We wouldn’t have to worry about an overnight reduction in income if something happened to the currency I had.

I thought that was a very sensible thing to do, and I thought it would allow us to have a more stable understanding of what would come in on a monthly basis. I’ve seen so many guys like me come from England like I did who were completely decimated when the value of the pound kept going down and down and down. Damn British government should have done something to stop that. But they didn’t. They should have, but no point talking about that. That was what my mentality was. I’d seen people lose out considerably and their incomes dropping by such a lot. I wanted my income to remain stable.

I thought everything I was doing was carefully planned out. I sat down and planned it out myself with my wife by my side, and I looked at her like she was my ticket to do things in Thailand at a level where people who weren’t married couldn’t.

The First Investments

Anyway, after that first condo was bought, we spent a little bit of money turning it into a good rental unit. Not much was spent, but it was great fun to be able to work on it, and my wife seemed to be doing a good job. She was the one who had to speak to all the workers. And it was great to be able to have someone doing the work that you could pay a reasonable amount of money for.

One of the things I never understood in England but when I did my one rental property in England, I found that the amount of money I had to pay someone to do work on my house in England didn’t really go together with the typical sort of salary at that time in England. Another reason why I was very keen to do things in Thailand. But I need to explain this in more detail so you start to understand why Thailand was so appealing.

If you have a condo in Thailand, you want to renovate it completely, and you want a good job being done of it a nice place for a future tenant to live. If the total price of everything that you want to spend in order to be able to do the renovation by that I mean all the materials, everything from the paint, plasterboard, tiles, electrics, plumbing, absolutely everything, even down to the furniture, the TV and the sofa if the total price for this was, for example, £10,000, your renovation price, including the workmen, might be about £12,000. So after you’ve bought all your materials and things, you’re spending 20% on top of that for people to actually do the job for you. That feels how it should actually be. Yet in England, it seems to be completely insane how much you have to pay people to do the work.

The reason I’m talking about this is because my son I did have a son, never married, never serious relationship, but I did always make sure I was there for my son he bought a property only 3 years ago in England and it needed a total renovation. He was earning a reasonable salary for himself £30,000 a year. It’s not a lot of money in terms of a fantastic salary, but it bought him the house with a mortgage, and it needed total renovation. Yet, he was paying people to do this manual labor considerably more than he was earning doing something that was mental that needed mental power in order to be able to do it. And that to me seems completely devoid of reason. Surely if somebody’s doing work on somebody’s house, they should be paid less than the average salary so that people who need work doing on their house can actually effing afford it.

I am of course aware of the notion of supply and demand. But I find it completely disgusting the amount of money you have to pay people in England to do basic work. Perhaps plumbing and electric work isn’t basic okay, not basic work but in order to be able to afford these workers, normal people have to spend months saving up. In Thailand, it is basically like it should be. That’s what I’m trying to say. A normal office worker in Thailand who’s perhaps been to university and earning a good salary they can afford to pay people to work on their house out of their monthly salary because that’s just how it works and how it should be.

Not long after that condo was renovated, we did manage to find someone to rent it quite quickly. It was getting about 6% a year, and that was going into my wife’s bank, and she gave half to me no problems. We were still living in our rented place. The idea was to buy our own place eventually, but I still had a lot of money I wanted to invest, and that would take us over the course of the next few years.

Expanding the Portfolio

I’m not going to go through every single one that we bought one by one, but I’ll go through some because when I was doing this, there was no indication that my wife wasn’t everything I thought she was. The second condo we bought was actually not in the main area of the city. It was in Bang Na. The reason we decided to buy that condo was because the BTS line was being extended over the next year or two, and it was going to open things up, and therefore it would be easier for people to go on the BTS to Bang Na. We didn’t spend as much on that one about £50,000 but it was a three bedroom condo quite close to the central Bang Na mall. It needed everything doing to it. And it wasn’t in one of these modern posh style condominium buildings. It was an older building, but it was a big unit quite high up with good views. That was also put on my Thai wife’s name for ease, and she was responsible for making sure the workers did a good job to get it to the level where we could rent it out.

I need to stress that I was having a fantastic time at the time doing this. It was really fun, and if I was Thai, it would have been better, but I wasn’t. Before that unit was finished, a great deal came up on a condo in the same building where we bought our first one. £70,000 for a pretty identical unit, but it was on a higher floor, so we bought that one as well.

After that third condo had been renovated, we took a small break. By now, we had three condos, two of which were rented out. The one in Bang Na we did struggle to find tenants, and that would remain the case. Very difficult to get a tenant for that condo, even though we put it on for a good price. But you make some good investments, but you have to make bad ones, too. Perhaps that was a bad one, but I wouldn’t have minded living there, but it wasn’t really in an area I wanted to be in.

When we took a break, we went up to her village. I’d only been there once when we got married, but we always talked about building a house there, and that’s where we would spend about 6 months a year. It was never the plan to live there permanently. It was just always a plan to do something like a month in the village, a month in Bangkok, a month in the village, a month in Phuket something like that. That’s what we were thinking about. And just a way to keep our life varied never the same, never boring.

And when we were up in the village, we were looking for some land in order to build a house. Because it wasn’t going to be a permanent residence, I wasn’t overly concerned about some of the things that went on in the village. I always found things that they did quite amusing and sweet. But everyone seemed to have land available for sale if you were prepared to pay more than it was worth. If you wanted that perfect piece of land in the perfect location, you had to pay a bit more for it. So, I didn’t really mind because it wasn’t like it was a lot of money anyway, and we actually did manage to get a great plot of land.

In Thailand, they don’t use acres or hectares. They use rai. And I always felt that they did that on purpose because it makes you feel like you have more of something as a rai is actually quite a small area and they can justify charging more for it. At least that’s how I felt. Every time I thought Thailand more specifically rural Thailand you think the land is going to be basically free so cheap you should be able to buy an entire village for £1,000. Of course, it doesn’t work like that, but people who have never been to Thailand that’s what you picture it as a very cheap place to buy land because it’s meant to be a third world country. But we did buy three rai for about 1 million baht £20,000, £25,000 or thereabouts. It was a good size for what it was. It wasn’t time to build there yet. We were going back to Bangkok to look for more opportunities.

The Main Residence

I have to be clear at this moment. We had three condos and the plot of land, and everything is in my Thai wife’s name, but I viewed her as an extension of myself. We were husband and wife, so what was hers was mine. But when I got the next condo which was a two bedroom unit in Phrom Phong I did put that on my own name because that was going to be our main residence. It was the most expensive one so far £150,000. I spent quite a lot of money getting it to how I wanted it to be. I guess I spent about £50,000 to do that, which might sound like a lot, but I wanted the best of the best. And guess how much of that £50,000 was work or labor costs? Not even 20%. It sickens me that people in England today can’t get work done on their house unless they’re rich, but I can’t change that.

Having our own place in Bangkok was a game changer. I always heard people talking about how you should never buy in Thailand, but I was always someone who felt differently. I felt Thailand and I still feel that to some degree is moving in the right direction while the West is moving backwards, and perhaps there’s not going to be any crossover at any point soon. But at some time, I can see that changing. I always thought if you had the right condos in the right places in Bangkok, they are going to be good investments.

But living in that condo was great. It was a big two bedroom as well. The building was great not like these new two bedroom units that you see getting built, which are extremely small. I never understood the new build craze in Thailand. Building everything smaller and smaller and smaller, and it’s not like they need to. I never understood it because Thailand is a big country. Bangkok stretches for a long way. Yet in these main areas, everything is becoming smaller. So that’s why I did a lot of investing into older buildings because the units were considerably bigger and many seem to be of a better construction quality.

I guess at this point we’re in 2012. I’m still extremely happy with my wife. I think my wife is happy with me. And we both spent time looking back at what was left in England and what we needed to bring to Thailand. And we just seem to be great partners. I never looked at her as being younger than me. I just looked at her as my equal, and I thought she looked at me as her equal. I thought she respected me. And as I said before, respect for me was far more important than love. But love was important as well.

Additional Condo Investments

We managed to find another condo that we wanted to buy and renovate not long after. $100,000 total, including the renovation costs, and we got that one rented out quickly. By now, the one in Bang Na hasn’t really been rented all that much, but I don’t mind too much because it’s just one of the few we have. I was in my early 60s by now, and it was my intention to always completely stop doing everything when I was 65. And that’s why I thought it was good that my wife was younger than me because she would be able to handle everything.

After we finished off that condo, by now everything that I bought was still in Bangkok. My wife really wanted to work on the house up in her village. That would mean spending time apart. I didn’t want to stay in the village in such uncomfortable conditions, but she wanted to be there to make sure things went well and also to keep track of progress. We decided on a design that she liked. I left this one completely up to her. And I will admit that we did spend too much money. We spent 6 million baht, which was way too much money for a house in a village like that. It looked very out of place when it was complete. But we’re not at the completion stage yet.

She spent 6 months in the village, though, coming back to Bangkok occasionally, and I’d go up to the village very occasionally for a visit. So, we weren’t really spending a lot of time together at the time. I was just settling into life. I knew I’d be retired in a few years’ time. I knew that we still had a lot of money to bring across to Thailand because I wanted to get that invested.

During the construction stage of the house, I did find another condo I wanted to purchase, and the money was transferred in. My wife came down to Bangkok, and we bought that condo as well. That one didn’t really need any renovation work whatsoever. The idea behind it was she was already dealing with the construction of the house, but we actually managed to find a tenant for that one quickly.

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions going on talking about Thailand property. People say that you buy a condo and then it’s going to be sitting vacant for a very long time. It’s difficult to rent them out or difficult to sell again. And while if you’re used to things in England and you compare it to that, there might be some truth to this, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people seem to make it out to be. Apart from the condo in Bang Na, all the other condos seemed to get tenants. Perhaps you’d get someone signing for 6 months, then they’d be empty for a month, and then you get someone in for a year something like that. And I always found that the returns were okay.

That was all going to my wife because I was a foreigner. I couldn’t work. But she always gave me my share without saying anything. Everything was 50/50 ’cause she was doing more than 50% of the work, and I felt like it was fair.

The First Signs of Change

When she came back from the construction of the house, I did notice a bit of a shift in her. She was a lot more snooty than she was before, and she still mixed with the same friends that worked in the bar. Some of them still worked there, and we’d go out to the same bar quite often together, and her friends would be there, but she would always be buying them drinks, and she liked to show off. And I was never someone who liked to show off, but I just let her do it because I suppose it made her feel good. But I did notice that she was starting to change because of the money.

And that was the first time I found out that she cheated on me. It was only a one-off at the time, and she was drunk, and I was able to let it slide ’cause a lot of people do make mistakes from time to time. And she was very sorry, and she wouldn’t do it again. But I did tell her that she needed to be careful because it wasn’t acceptable. I personally don’t think that her cheating on me once was much cause for change. I didn’t want to change what we were doing. I just saw it as a one-off small indiscretion that she didn’t mean. It could happen to the best of us, and she was very apologetic, and I was dead set on continuing along the path that we were going down of building up this investment portfolio in Thailand.

I also decided to invest some money into the Thai stock market. We opened up a brokerage account in my wife’s name, and I put in about £150,000, and we just invested in a few stocks that seemed okay. We also bought another condo in Bangkok for about £100,000, and things are progressing. I’m trying to speed up the level of getting everything to Thailand by the time I’m 65 because after that I didn’t want to do anything apart from enjoy the retired life.

My wife kept talking about getting a condo in different parts of Thailand Phuket or Pattaya. So we decided to buy one in each, and after that, we bought two more condos in Bangkok. We were now fully invested, and I felt like we’d done very well together over the past few years getting everything sorted out. This was to a point where we were bringing in a decent income within Thailand. We didn’t have to worry about exchange rate variations, laws changing in England “you can’t do this anymore” or “you can’t do that anymore.” And I felt content and happy for the first time. It was never like I wasn’t happy, but I was never content. When I’m talking about being happy, I don’t mean I was ever unhappy. I mean, I was always chasing the next thing, trying to get to a point where I wanted to be. So, happiness was real, but it took 65 years for me to get there.

Didn’t take much longer for things to start going backwards, but I wasn’t to know that. I was just very happy in the moment to have hit the goal of being fully invested in the country where I wanted to live for the rest of my life.

Giving to My Son

I also have to make a quick note and say that I did give my son £250,000 cash when I turned 65. The last money that I had in England because I was investing in my Thai wife’s name I knew that it was only right that he got something out of it. I wish I’d given him more. I feel bad that I didn’t, but he will be getting some more soon if things go okay. I’m in my 70s now, and all I ever wanted to do was what I thought was the best thing for me and my wife and those who I loved.

We moved up that year to the village. The house was stupid, if I’m being perfectly honest. It was way too big for what we needed. It looked very out of place. Yet, my wife acted like she was the queen of the village or something. I don’t know what she thought, or I don’t know who she thought she was. But as soon as we moved there, she was acting very differently than before. She wasn’t coming to me demanding anything. She knew everything was invested and the money was coming in. She knew there was nothing else to come after that. But the way she would act around other people like she was this mighty clever person I expected her to remain humble throughout, understand that her position was based on 99.9% luck. But it doesn’t work like that. She saw it like she was some genius businesswoman who had conquered the property market in Thailand. That seems to be how it felt to me anyway. And I didn’t really like the way she acted like that.

But we weren’t having any problems at the time. At least I didn’t know we were. I would find out not long after that she was in a small relationship with a guy in the village.

Life in the Village

I find myself living in the village. And aside from all these things my wife is doing that I’m not really enjoying because I want a humble, sweet Thai girl as a wife I’m actually enjoying living there. The land is big enough to not be disturbed by all the goings on in the village. That would be more in place in a place 100 years ago, but I’m not really bothered about any of this because that’s how it was. I was never one who tried to impose my ways on anybody else.

But I find we spend a month there, and I’ve had enough, and I want to go somewhere else. And for the first 6 months of us living there, that’s what we did. We always went places together, even if it was just for a week at a time. But after 6 months, every time I wanted to go, she wanted to stay in the village, which was okay with me because I could go by myself spend a few weeks clearing my head before going back. I was happy and content.

And while my wife did cheat on me that time before that I was aware of, I wasn’t aware she was cheating on me at the time. But because I knew that she had cheated on me once, of course, when I went somewhere by myself, I would be in the bars. There was no way I was going to be cheated on yet not cheat. For me, it wasn’t to do with not loving my wife or respecting my wife. It was just to do with respecting myself. So, I hope you get that.

But the year must have been 2015 now. We’re bringing in great money from the income we have, which is split 50/50. More than enough for us to live a good life. My wife is always giving me my share. I’d never had any problem with her giving me money. That wasn’t it. I didn’t see a problem with her getting 50% of the money either because she was doing everything. But she always did show her bank statements to prove that when money came in, how much came in. She couldn’t say that she was giving me 50% but she was only giving me 30. We had it set up so that was an impossibility.

The Betrayal

But in 2015, I was actually not in Thailand for a few weeks. I was lucky that although I was getting on in years, I was still able to walk and I felt healthy. Felt like I was 20 years younger. I went quite a few times out of the country for little breaks every now and then by myself when my wife didn’t want to go. But it was in 2015 where I was sitting in a bar wherever it was, and I was thinking about wanting to give my son a little bit more money. It only felt right because family is family at the end of the day. And I decided that because the Bang Na condo never really got tenants as often as the other condos, we could probably sell it for an okay price, release some money, and I’d be able to buy myself a new car, and then I could give the rest of the money to my son.

When I got back to the village, I spoke to my wife about this, and she said, “Yeah, we’ll think about it.” And I asked her to arrange to get it sold. I didn’t think much of it for the next few weeks, and then I brought it up again. “How was things going with the condo in Bang Na?” I can’t remember what she said exactly, but it was clear that she didn’t really want to sell it. I tried to make it clear to her that it wasn’t her choice because it was ours together. But then she said she had something to tell me. She sold the condo over a year ago ’cause she saw another opportunity come up with one of her friends. She was going to tell me about it when everything came off, but everything went wrong. So, that condo is gone, and there’s no money there anymore.

That was a surprise when she said that. I couldn’t believe that she’d gone behind my back to do something like that. I mean, she was the one who always looked after the title documents for the properties. And then I have to ask has she sold any more? No, she hadn’t sold anymore. It was just the one. She was going to go into business, and she was going to get more of the money back. Then she was going to tell me that she’d made some money and look at buying another condo. I was very shocked, and I did make her show me the paperwork for the other condos, and they were all there. But my wife wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t believe that she’d done that.

I think she got so worked up with herself that she was some kind of amazing businesswoman, and because she used my money to be able to buy some condos, but her friend came to her with some business idea and she thought she was going to be the one who could make it a success. Was it malice? I think it was stupidity, really, and it was dishonesty by not telling me. I wasn’t expecting to sell it for a fortune, but it would have brought in a nice new car for me, and I would have been able to give my son some money. Yet she’d sold it and wasted all the money.

And then I’m thinking I’ve made a mistake. When I got married to my wife, I viewed her as an extension of myself. When she did little things like cheating on me, I overlooked it as being just one of those things that happened from time to time. I cheated on her as well because of it. But I viewed her as an extension of me when it came to everything to do with business. She would only do what I said was right, nothing else. But the very fact that she for some reason had an idea in her mind that she had the ability to do something like that that she valued herself so highly instead of realizing that it was basically because of my money that she was in the position she was in I didn’t say it like that. But all of a sudden, I didn’t feel the same way about her.

Now it was a question of making sure she didn’t do anything else like that again. But all of a sudden, the wife that I loved so much she became like the devil. I didn’t show any changes in myself towards her, but I wanted to do what I could to protect what was left, considering the vast majority of it was in her name. It shouldn’t have mattered that things were in her name. It shouldn’t have mattered for one second. She would have had everything when I passed away. All she needed to do was wait. But she couldn’t wait. Stupidity on her part.

Facing the Consequences

But now I’m starting to think I was stupid for thinking my wife was an extension of myself. That’s what she was meant to be. And I bet everything on that. I guess I was an idiot who was always allowing things to happen that shouldn’t have. Of course, I had to pretend like it didn’t matter. I just told her it’s fine. But the problem was I didn’t have any other money coming into Thailand that she was able to get her hands on. So, what that meant was now I was more reliant on her than she was on me. And being reliant on someone like that is not very good.

I could never understand why she did what she did, but I think it was just putting herself on some kind of pedestal that was completely unwarranted. So, I couldn’t do anything about this. And I found this out. I was still living there. She was still acting like my wife. She was cooking, cleaning the house, going to the shop if I wanted something. She was acting like this. But I still wasn’t able to overlook the fact that she sold that condo behind my back and used all the money for some harebrained scheme.

I had the condo in Bangkok in my name the place where I always stayed when I was in Bangkok and I never rented that one out. Luckily, that was the most valuable condo we had. After a few days in the village, I decided to go to Bangkok to get my head together. I spent not too long there and just went back up to the village just to start pretending like everything was fine. I had to pretend like everything was fine for my own benefit. And that’s not a position that I thought I was going to be in. That’s the warning I would like to give. I always thought I would be in control. That’s what the idea was. My money I’m in control. Yet, as soon as she thought she had control over the money, instead of her thinking that her being in control of the money was at my good graces which is what it was meant to be all of a sudden, she thinks like she’s got something over me instead.

That was when I found out she’d been in a relationship with a guy in the village. I’m just looking at her when I find out this guy is a rice farmer, and you’re in a relationship with him, and you’re going to listen to him to do with things about money, and you think that’s a good idea? I’m not getting pushed into a corner here. I don’t want to lose what I’ve got yet. I don’t want to accept what my wife’s doing. But she did say that it wasn’t serious this relationship and it just lasted for a few months when I wasn’t there because she was lonely. But she really loves me mainly..

The Legal Reality

That’s when I contacted a lawyer. I told him about my predicament, and he had to ask me a few times to repeat what I said. “You did what? I invested all my money in the name of my Thai wife in condos in Thailand because I thought it was a good idea. Can you say that again, please? I don’t really understand.” And that’s when it hit me how stupid I’d been. But when all was said and done, I was blinded by the beauty of this girl. I married her, and I thought she loved and respected me. But I said the love wasn’t 100% important. It was just respect. “Just respect me. When I’m dead, it’s yours” kind of thing. But she wasn’t prepared to do that.

And it was when I was contacting the lawyer that I found out she’d sold two of the other condos as well. Money nowhere to be seen. And the thing was I couldn’t do anything. They were legally hers. So I had nothing that I could do to get anything back.

Out of all the money £1.8 million I’d given £200,000 to my son, £150,000 for the house in the village, I kept £50,000 in cash as an emergency (which was meant for health expenses or anything like that), and about 1.4 million was invested in condos, of which she’d sold about 350,000. I had 200,000 in the condo in my name, and we had remaining what was left.

I told my wife I was speaking to a lawyer and what she had done was unacceptable. So, we need to work things out amicably, otherwise we can go to court. When she spoke to a lawyer as well, it seemed quite apparent to her that going to court wasn’t a good idea. So, what I had left was about £600,000. I lost 2/3 of my money to a Thai bar girl.

Where I Am Now

My only sort of happiness is that while I remained in Thailand for a few years after that, she made some very stupid decisions, and she lost most of the money. I’m extremely happy about the fact that she wasn’t able to keep it because she was too stupid the most stupid one. Me, really, because I lost all that. I kept my condo in Bangkok and only just sold it recently, which I’m happy about. And I returned to England with about £350,000, keeping the condo in Bangkok. I gave £150,000 to my son as an apology for being an idiot. I bought a very cheap house and invested the little bit left, got my pension, and I’m okay living a retired life.

And I do travel to Thailand every single year. Even in my mid 70s, I still travel to Thailand every single year. Of course, I missed out during COVID, but I will be going back to Thailand every year until I can’t because I love it. I love the bars there, and I always have, and I always will.

I thought that I was doing something good. I thought that my ex-wife would have been grateful for everything and at least waited until perhaps I died before doing anything stupid. But in her mind, the fact that she had all those condos selling one or two wasn’t going to make a difference because she honestly thought she was going to make more because of it. But of course, that didn’t happen because she was stupid. But I have to say, I was stupid as well.