If you’re thinking about retiring to Thailand, you’ve already watched the videos where somebody shows you a $400 apartment and a $2 plate of noodles and tells you this is the life. It can be. It also costs about three times what they said, the first hospital visit is usually for something stupid, and the loneliness doesn’t start until the fun people have gone home. A retired American who’s been in Pattaya for years says all of this in a long, rambling vlogger’s video shot on a drive to Rayong, and his five points are a better starting list than most of what’s out there, so they’re the frame here. The visa and insurance figures have been checked against the Thai government’s own pages, because he’s upfront that he never read them.
What carries a Thailand retirement past the first six months: a body that can handle heat and a new diet, somebody to talk to on a weekday, a first apartment you can walk everywhere from, about three times the vlogger’s budget, and something to do that isn’t drinking.
Get Your Health Sorted Before You Go, Because The Food And The Heat Hit First
You can’t get the retirement visa before 50, so everybody arriving on it is at the age where the body starts handing out bills. The husband in the video is clear on his first point: be in good enough shape to walk, because walking is how you see the country. In a Grab you see where you’re going. On foot you see the street, the market, the soi behind the market. He and his wife walked everywhere their first year.
His own first trip to a Thai hospital wasn’t anything exotic. It was heartburn. Weeks of it, from food his stomach wasn’t used to, then a daily acid blocker from the doctor, then, by his account, heart palpitations after the sweating and the beer and the jet lag had worn him down. He’s careful to say he’s not a doctor. You don’t need one to see the shape of it: a hotter climate, a different diet and bad sleep land harder at 55 than at 30, and the first medical bill abroad is usually for something that wasn’t on the list.
The bill matters more than it used to, because the O-A retirement visa now requires health insurance, and the required amount isn’t small:
- Coverage of at least US$100,000, or 3,000,000 baht, for the whole stay, with a certificate from the insurer, per the Thai embassy’s O-A long stay page.
- That figure took effect on October 1, 2021, replacing a much lower one, according to the Thaiger’s summary of the rules for retirees.
- Past 70, fewer insurers will take a new applicant and existing conditions get excluded.
So the time to ซื้อประกันสุขภาพ, which is what the Thai sites call buying health insurance, is while you’re still a customer they want. Pacific Cross, one of the Thai insurers, sells a visa plan built to that US$100,000 floor and takes new customers up to age 75.
The Loneliness Starts When Your Bar Friends Fly Home
Most people who retire abroad do it alone, because that’s who’s free to go. The friends you make in the first month are on holiday. They go home. You don’t.
After about six months the newness wears off, you’ve seen the sights, and you notice you haven’t had a real conversation in a week. The husband’s answer, and he doesn’t dress it up, is to find a companion. He’ll tell you where that usually starts in Pattaya, which is with a bar girl who speaks some English and will show you where to shop and what to pay, and he says it’s the same in the Philippines or Colombia. He calls that person a tour guide, his wife objects to the word on camera, and he keeps it. The useful part is the warning attached: the first person you meet is the first person you meet, not the one you’ll stay with.
By month six the tourists are gone and the bar is boring. The retirements that work are the ones where somebody built a real relationship, or joined a group that isn’t a bar, before that point.
He adds a twist at the end for men who do settle down with a Thai woman who has a regular job. She works six days a week, often seven, Sundays off if she’s lucky. You’re retired. She isn’t. Most weekdays you’re on your own again, with someone to eat with at night.
Rent For A Year In A Place You Can Walk Out Of
Find an apartment for the first year that you can walk out of and get everywhere from, where the neighbors are easy, in a building you can picture yourself in for twelve months. Not for good. A year.
Thailand works as a base. Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Laos are each a cheap flight away, you’ll go, and one of them might turn out to be the place. The husband says if they’d seen Da Nang before they came to Thailand they’d be living in Da Nang. They stayed in Pattaya because by then they knew where everything was and the flooding drains fast, unlike Bangkok. If your reason for Thailand is work or a recovery stay instead of retirement, the visa categories are different and are set out in a guide to employment and recovery visas for Thailand, and the people going abroad to recover from burnout run into the same six-month wall he describes.
On safety he has one rule, and it’s about the clock. The chain snatchings and bike thefts he’s heard about happened at four or five in the morning to people who’d been out all night. “Don’t nothing good happen at night except if you’re out there partying,” is how he says it. His wife adds that serious crime is rare, a few cases a year, not daily.
Take The Budget In The Video And Multiply It By Three
Whatever the vlogger’s told you Thailand costs, multiply it by three and use that as your base. That’s his rule and it’s the one people argue with him about most, so he explains it. The $1,000 budgets count rent, some transport and food and stop. They leave out what happens once you have friends: the Facebook group organizes a bike ride and a lunch, you do a visa run, you need a crown at the dentist, you fly to Vietnam for a long weekend because it’s right there. And he has no time for the skip-your-coffee school of saving. “Life is too short for you to count every dime up until the time that you’re no longer with us.”
The visa rules back him up. To get the retirement visa you need, per the Thai government’s document guide and the embassy page above, either 800,000 baht in a Thai bank account, about $24,000; or a monthly income of at least 65,000 baht, about $1,950; or a combination that reaches 800,000 baht for the year. Immigration’s own floor is roughly $2,000 a month. The $700-a-month video is about somebody else. Anyone who has done a family trip on a tight budget has already met this gap between the advertised number and the number on the card statement.
Find Something To Do With Your Mornings, And Don’t Make It The Gym
The partying gets old. Every day a party, every night a bar, and then one day you’re tired of the bars and sitting in the apartment. That’s the point where he says a lot of retirements quietly fall apart.
His suggestions are small. Keep a diary. Start a vlogger’s channel, which is how he ended up with one. Write the book you always said you’d write. Something with a next step in it.
What he warns against is the other common move, deciding at 58 to become a gym person. If you weren’t one in the States, Canada, Australia or England, don’t start in the heat, because a pulled hamstring at that age takes months to heal and puts you on the sofa for a dry season. Walk. Every other day, three times a week, out the door and around until you know the neighborhood. He knows that’s the same thing he said under health. He says it twice on purpose.