Part of the retirement visa application process for Thailand is a medical clearance that shows we are free from the following diseases:
1) Leprosy
2) Tuberculosis
3) Elephantiasis
4) Drug Addiction
5) Third Stage of Syphilis
Now, we have had the same doctor for over 12 years. He pretty well knows that we have none of the above medical issues since we believe they might just possibly show up in our yearly physical that we take. But....seeing how the US is a litigious society he would require us to have the lab tests necessary to prove we have none of the above maladies before he will sign the medical clearance for our visa application.
We have double coverage medical insurance so you would think that would be a breeze. However, since neither of us show any indications that we have any of the dreaded diseases the insurance company will NOT cover the lab and medical tests for them.
Ahhh, medical care in the USA. Gotta love it. Our medical insurance premium each month is $1532.46 EACH. Yes, that is per month ... not yearly or quarterly ... monthly! EACH! For the two of us that is $3064.92 per month. And they won't cover (estimates from labs, etc) between $500 and $1000 worth of tests each.
So we have decided to change what visa we will apply for next year when the time comes for our move. Instead of the Non-Immigrant O-A retirement visa we will instead apply for the Non-Immigrant O visa for purposes of evaluating retirement in Thailand.
The Non-Immigrant O-A retirement visa requirements include a $200 application fee, a police background check, the medical clearance for ugly diseases check, proof of 800,000 Thai Baht in the bank (currently $25,736 US) or 65,000 Thai Baht in guaranteed monthly retirement income (currently $2,091 US). None of these are an issue but we don't feel like paying up to $2000 to have ridiculous medical tests done.
The Non-Immigrant O visa requires we can show a bank balance of $480 US per person and pay an $80 US application fee. This visa would give us a 90 day stay in Thailand and in the last 30 days of that stay we can apply for a one year extension to stay for 1900 Thai Baht (currently $61.12). It also does not require the medical clearance or police background check.
Granted the O-A visa can be worked, with a visa run just before it expires at the end of 1 year, into almost 2 years before you need to apply for an extension of stay, but with the expensive costs of the medical testing here in the US to get the O-A visa it just doesn't make sense financially for us unless the medical tests were covered by our exorbitantly over-priced medical insurance.
Ahhh! The AMA. Do the math.
Friday, July 5, 2013
Monday, July 1, 2013
Shopping by Expiration Date
We have one year, one month - ish till we move to Thailand. I am continuing to think over what we buy, keep, sell, give away, and donate. Including during our weekly shopping trip to Costco where we pick up mostly fruits and veggies and large packages of paper towels, clothes soap and the occasional bunch of flowers my Handsome Husband buys for me.
Today was a hoot because we found ourselves shopping for things by expiration date. There is just two of us and the items that come in 55 gallon drum sizes usually last us a very long time or they go bad before we can use it all. As we shopped we asked each other....."When does it expire?"
Peanut Butter - August 2014 Yep, in the basket it went.
Raspberry Spread - November 2014.
Deodorant in a package of 5 - September 2014.
Hand Lotion - July 2014.
The small paper cups have 600 in the package and we have 405 days till we move......Yep!
As excited as we were to know we don't have to buy those things again for a year, it was a little weird to grasp the shelf life. So if there were food shortages in the US we could at least live on peanut butter and jelly, be soft and smell good!
Oh......The Kegerator in the background WILL be empty before we leave.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
ADDITIONAL COMMUNICATION OPTIONS
We’re pretty happy with our phone setup now, but what about other communication options to enhance our ability to stay in contact with family, friends, financial institutions, and other luxuries we might want to enjoy but are limited or blocked in Thailand?
We are already set up with Skype and use it now to visit with our son and daughter in law overseas so we will continue to use it. We have it on our laptop, tablets, and cell phones.
We also have Google Hangout set up on all of our devices but understand that it is currently blocked in Thailand.
We have a Google Voice account which gives us a US phone number at no charge.
This allows us to make free calls to any US phone number. We can use it from our laptop, tablets, and from our cell phones using Talkatone in conjunction with Google Voice. If you have poor or no cell signal but can connect to wi-fi you can still make and receive calls.
Google Voice needs to be set up while you are in the US and gets verified by your current US phone number. Then you can go anywhere in the world and make free calls back home and folks back home can call you on your US Google Voice phone number. This will come in handy if we ever have to contact our financial institutions, retirement systems, or do any business in the US or if someone from back home wants to call us without incurring international phone rates. Phone calls to other countries are charged at Google Voice’s low international rates.
One of the tablets we have is a Nexus 10. It is not available with a sim card for phone service. But, fear not. There is a free android app called Groove IP Lite that creates a dialer for the tablet that can then use Google Voice to place and receive phone calls from the tablet itself.
Another of our favorite apps that we use is LINE. Free voice calls and messaging from anywhere to anywhere. Easily used from our smart phones and can be set up and be used from PC's and Mac's. Add LINE CAMERA and be able to take pictures and send them right away to family and friends.
We are researching VPN options so that we can still view Netflix, Hulu, blocked YouTube videos, etc. and also order things online while showing a US IP address. Then pay with one of our US accounts and have the item shipped to a US address and then forward it on to us.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Telephony, Get Set, GO!
We've been researching (sound familiar) our telephony options for our eventual move to Thailand. We definitely want to make sure that what we decide will actually work for us when we move. This was actually more confusing than we thought it would be but we have put our plan into action.
Let's start off with the basics. A cell phone. Sounds easy enough, doesn't it? In Thailand the cell service carriers there use the GSM standard which is, of course, an international standard that the US generally does not use. In the US most carriers lock their phones to their service so you can't easily change providers once you enter into a contract. The US has also recently passed a law that restricts your ability to jailbreak or unlock your cell phone. Yep, it is against the law.
So at this point we have decided to find an unlocked phone that is GSM compatible on frequencies both here in the US and in Thailand. We want to pay as we go. No contracts. That means we needed to research Pay As You Go providers here in the US and would need to purchase one of their sim cards to put in the phone.
Ideally we would like a plan that provides unlimited voice, text, and data. Data is the hard one to find an unlimited plan for.
Reading reviews of the different providers and comparing plans is a minefield in itself. We found that, for our area, the two networks that are offered through the Pay As you Go service providers are ATT and T-Mobile. We know from previous experience and from friends who currently use them that T-Mobile in our area pretty much sucks. Sorry T-Mobile, but where we are you just don't cut it. In other areas we know you are the better service, just not here. So we limited our search to providers who use the ATT network.
Unfortunately, ATT got wise to something that their iPhone customers found out about and had started taking advantage of. When their contracts were up with ATT they were able to have ATT unlock their phones (if they met the stiff requirements to do so) and then bought a $15 sim card that uses the ATT network through Straight Talk pay as you go service, purchase a $45 card for 30 days of service and get unlimited voice, text and data. So ATT stopped allowing Straight Talk to sell the sim cards that work on the ATT network.
Thank goodness for the interwebitudes, and eBay in particular. Some of the now unavailable sim cards would of course show up on eBay. So we checked eBay and found some for anywhere between $45 each and $150 each. These were new, unopened, unused sim cards that work on the ATT network through Straight Talk. So we found the "good" sim cards and now we needed to decide on a phone. An unlocked phone could be very pricey, but it was time to decide.
iPhones are waaay to pricey for us. We each want a phone and don't want to break the bank to get them. We've had iPhones and really do like them but we have also had Android phones and liked them just as well.
Of course a lot of the Android phones are pricey also. Let us save you a lot of time and just say that we ended up buying the Google Nexus 4 phones. But you need to search around to find a decent price. We found them priced all the way up to $1229 each because they are very popular right now. HINT: Buy them directly from Google. We got them for the suggested retail price of $349 for the 16GB version.
So we ordered the phones and ordered the sim cards from a seller on eBay. When we got them we purchased the 30 day, $45 Straight Talk Pay As You Go card, went to the Straight Talk website and easily signed up and activated the phones. They assigned us a phone number based on our zip code and now we have unlimited voice, text, and data phones that we can activate in Thailand by purchasing a sim card there and changing it out.
The best thing yet for us though is that I am going to use my new phone at work because I am required to be accessible 24/7 by phone. If I use my own smart phone my job will pay me a $103 per month stipend. Do the math!
Let's start off with the basics. A cell phone. Sounds easy enough, doesn't it? In Thailand the cell service carriers there use the GSM standard which is, of course, an international standard that the US generally does not use. In the US most carriers lock their phones to their service so you can't easily change providers once you enter into a contract. The US has also recently passed a law that restricts your ability to jailbreak or unlock your cell phone. Yep, it is against the law.
So at this point we have decided to find an unlocked phone that is GSM compatible on frequencies both here in the US and in Thailand. We want to pay as we go. No contracts. That means we needed to research Pay As You Go providers here in the US and would need to purchase one of their sim cards to put in the phone.
Ideally we would like a plan that provides unlimited voice, text, and data. Data is the hard one to find an unlimited plan for.
Reading reviews of the different providers and comparing plans is a minefield in itself. We found that, for our area, the two networks that are offered through the Pay As you Go service providers are ATT and T-Mobile. We know from previous experience and from friends who currently use them that T-Mobile in our area pretty much sucks. Sorry T-Mobile, but where we are you just don't cut it. In other areas we know you are the better service, just not here. So we limited our search to providers who use the ATT network.
Unfortunately, ATT got wise to something that their iPhone customers found out about and had started taking advantage of. When their contracts were up with ATT they were able to have ATT unlock their phones (if they met the stiff requirements to do so) and then bought a $15 sim card that uses the ATT network through Straight Talk pay as you go service, purchase a $45 card for 30 days of service and get unlimited voice, text and data. So ATT stopped allowing Straight Talk to sell the sim cards that work on the ATT network.
Thank goodness for the interwebitudes, and eBay in particular. Some of the now unavailable sim cards would of course show up on eBay. So we checked eBay and found some for anywhere between $45 each and $150 each. These were new, unopened, unused sim cards that work on the ATT network through Straight Talk. So we found the "good" sim cards and now we needed to decide on a phone. An unlocked phone could be very pricey, but it was time to decide.
iPhones are waaay to pricey for us. We each want a phone and don't want to break the bank to get them. We've had iPhones and really do like them but we have also had Android phones and liked them just as well.
Of course a lot of the Android phones are pricey also. Let us save you a lot of time and just say that we ended up buying the Google Nexus 4 phones. But you need to search around to find a decent price. We found them priced all the way up to $1229 each because they are very popular right now. HINT: Buy them directly from Google. We got them for the suggested retail price of $349 for the 16GB version.
So we ordered the phones and ordered the sim cards from a seller on eBay. When we got them we purchased the 30 day, $45 Straight Talk Pay As You Go card, went to the Straight Talk website and easily signed up and activated the phones. They assigned us a phone number based on our zip code and now we have unlimited voice, text, and data phones that we can activate in Thailand by purchasing a sim card there and changing it out.
The best thing yet for us though is that I am going to use my new phone at work because I am required to be accessible 24/7 by phone. If I use my own smart phone my job will pay me a $103 per month stipend. Do the math!
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Banking Challenges
We have been researching the best way to do our day to day banking while in Thailand.
The US government puts unrealistic demands on foreign financial institutions to report every baht/peso/yen that an American citizen keeps in bank accounts in a foreign country with severe penalties to the foreign financial institution if they don't comply. This has resulted in many financial institutions in foreign countries closing and/or refusing to open accounts for American expats.
Fortunately for us we won't need to have a Thai bank account to qualify for our retirement visa and extensions to stay in the kingdom. Moving the $25K or $26K into a Thai bank account to qualify for a retirement visa raises eyebrows at the IRS. Since we will be able to qualify for the retirement visa with letters of income from our retirements and social security rather than deposited funds in a Thai bank we won't wave the offshore accounts flag to the IRS.
Thailand, like many Asian countries, is a cash based society. You can use debit cards and credit cards in very few locations. Cash is King.
So, how do we get cash to live with while we are there?
ATM's are everywhere in Thailand. The problem becomes the fees associated with each transaction. Most charge a 150 baht fee ($5 US) for each withdrawal. Then there is the foreign transaction fee that your home bank charges which ranges from 1% - 3%. On the maximum withdrawal of $500 that would range between $5 and $15 per transaction in addition to the $5 ATM fee. You can easily see that making several withdrawals per month for living expenses the fees can add up in a hurry and we would rather spend it on curry.
Enter Charles Schwab Bank and their High Yield Investor Checking account. This is tied to Schwab One Brokerage account, which amazingly doesn't need to have a balance. With the High Yield Checking Account we get FREE use of any ATM worldwide. That's right. If we are charged an ATM fee Schwab will refund it back into our account. Cool, huh?
But wait!.....there's even more. Schwab does NOT charge any foreign transaction fees. WHAT!? That's right....no foreign transaction fees either. Hello more curry dishes.
So we opened our account with Schwab this week to get prepared for the upcoming move. We also felt it would be prudent to keep another degree of separation between the bulk of our savings and any possible problem if somehow our account got compromised. So we are still going to have all of our deposits from our retirement accounts and social security direct deposited into our existing credit union. Then we will electronically transfer just the funds we need into the Schwab account and withdraw them in Thailand. And the transfer between our credit union and Schwab is free.
The US government puts unrealistic demands on foreign financial institutions to report every baht/peso/yen that an American citizen keeps in bank accounts in a foreign country with severe penalties to the foreign financial institution if they don't comply. This has resulted in many financial institutions in foreign countries closing and/or refusing to open accounts for American expats.
Fortunately for us we won't need to have a Thai bank account to qualify for our retirement visa and extensions to stay in the kingdom. Moving the $25K or $26K into a Thai bank account to qualify for a retirement visa raises eyebrows at the IRS. Since we will be able to qualify for the retirement visa with letters of income from our retirements and social security rather than deposited funds in a Thai bank we won't wave the offshore accounts flag to the IRS.
Thailand, like many Asian countries, is a cash based society. You can use debit cards and credit cards in very few locations. Cash is King.
So, how do we get cash to live with while we are there?
ATM's are everywhere in Thailand. The problem becomes the fees associated with each transaction. Most charge a 150 baht fee ($5 US) for each withdrawal. Then there is the foreign transaction fee that your home bank charges which ranges from 1% - 3%. On the maximum withdrawal of $500 that would range between $5 and $15 per transaction in addition to the $5 ATM fee. You can easily see that making several withdrawals per month for living expenses the fees can add up in a hurry and we would rather spend it on curry.
Enter Charles Schwab Bank and their High Yield Investor Checking account. This is tied to Schwab One Brokerage account, which amazingly doesn't need to have a balance. With the High Yield Checking Account we get FREE use of any ATM worldwide. That's right. If we are charged an ATM fee Schwab will refund it back into our account. Cool, huh?
But wait!.....there's even more. Schwab does NOT charge any foreign transaction fees. WHAT!? That's right....no foreign transaction fees either. Hello more curry dishes.
So we opened our account with Schwab this week to get prepared for the upcoming move. We also felt it would be prudent to keep another degree of separation between the bulk of our savings and any possible problem if somehow our account got compromised. So we are still going to have all of our deposits from our retirement accounts and social security direct deposited into our existing credit union. Then we will electronically transfer just the funds we need into the Schwab account and withdraw them in Thailand. And the transfer between our credit union and Schwab is free.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)