Books on Retiring in Thailand
27 October 2006Following the lead on the previous series on investigating a retirement in Costa Rica, the first thing you should do is look for books on the subject. With Thailand, it turns out to be a little more difficult - because it isn’t as popular a destination, nobody has turned out to be the “guru” on retiring there (if you’re a writer - there’s an opening for you). You can still find some useful information that will help you out, however. First up is Fodor’s Thailand, which is a travel guide, not a retirement guide. There are a couple of other ones, but this is the most recently updated available (2005) and has the most information. Another one is from about the same time period but got mixed reviews - Lonely Planet Thailand. Lots of the stuff in these would be utterly useless to you - but it’s worth a trip to the library if you’re considering this because there are a couple of things you can get out of a travel guide. First, they’ve got a lot of information on the various regions - Bangkok isn’t the only place to live, and from looking at various online real estate sites there are quite a few beachfront property areas targeted to foreigners, and a lot of them sort it by province (with some being sort of like New York - a big city surrounded by an outlying area of the same name). Second, you’ll have to travel there to check it out, probably a few times. So if you’re thinking about retiring there, the first thing to do is to plan a vaction there.
While I couldn’t find any books specifically geared towards retirees, there are some that are designed to help expatriates. There’s a lot of issues retirees face that a 30 year old wouldn’t - but it’s still helpful to have this kind of guide because even though it’s not comprehensive, it covers a lot of situations that anyone moving there would encounter. The Bangkok Survivor’s Guide is a good start, but focused on one city and not the country as a whole. There’s some stuff that would overlap, but my guess is it’s more of a book to check out from the library, copy what you need, and return it. Finally, in the useless but interesting category, there was a book called Traveler’s Tales Thailand. It’s a collection of interesting stories from people traveling there - technically it’s not really “useless” because it would help you get a sense of the country and what to expect. But you’re not going to find the phone number for the U.S. embassy here.
I was a little disappointed, frankly, with the few available printed materials. I ran across other books, but they were either focused on specific topics like learning the language or had some other reason they weren’t particularly useful. Nothing was really geared towards retirees, even though it’s a popular retirement destination. I have seen a lot of good online resources, however, and I’ll be collecting those next.
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2 Responses to “Books on Retiring in Thailand”
October 28th, 2006 at 10:17 am
That is a little shocking that there aren’t any real resources out there for retiring in Thailand. I have to say, Thailand is definitely on the list of places for my wife and I. We honeymooned there 4 years ago and despite numerous other great trips, that is our single most favorite trip of all time. There really is something magical about Thailand if you take the time to really explore.
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October 28th, 2006 at 11:58 am
It was a little surprising, but I guess it was one of those “what did people do before the Internet?” things. It might not be economical to publish a book on it, but web sites are cheap.