America Priced Me Out! Southeast Asia Retirement. Bangkok Thailand Travel. Expat minimalist

America Priced Me Out! Southeast Asia Retirement. Bangkok Thailand Travel. Expat minimalist

Well, good morning. We are in beautiful Bangkok at Benikitti Park. I’m going to be changing hotels. I’ll show that to you in this video. But I want to talk about how my hotel costs have slowly gone up a little bit. Now, that’s by my choice. I can still find $15, $16 hotels, but I’ve started to increase the cost of the hotel that I stay in to around $21. Right? And we’re going to talk about this because my investments have been growing. I have been traveling like this as a minimalist around the world for 3 years now and I’ve been investing along the way because my cost of living is so low. It’s allowed me to increase my quality of life but still I can’t afford my home country. Three additional years of investing I have increased my ability to stay in a little bit nicer hotels but I can’t afford my home country. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m going to also take you out for a nice bite to eat today. I’m going to show you transferring to the different hotels and a little bit more of Bangkok. Man, we’ve got a lot to talk about in this video. I can’t afford to go back to my home country still, but I am increasing my quality of life. Let’s go. Traveling the world as a minimalist with one backpack. That is what we do here. Subscribe and come along with Retire and Go. I’m staying a couple days in one of my favorite little hotels here. It’s costing me about $30 a day. I’ll show it to you. I’m only staying there for two days because I’m going to be moving on to another hotel. I’ll show that to you in another video. But the new hotel that I’m going to be moving into is $21 a day. When I first started this journey, I was staying in hotels that cost me like 12 $14 a day. sometimes 15 and 15 was like a luxury. If you’ve watched my videos over the years, you’ve seen these hotels because I always bring them to you. Now, $21 a day. And I might say to myself, gee, if I’m starting to look at my investments and I’m able to stay in places that are a little bit more expensive, could I actually go back to the West and live? Let’s take a look at that. This is what it’s going to cost me to stay in a hotel for $21 a day if I stayed there for a full 30 days. That’s what it’s going to cost me. If I went back to my home country, I know where I’d be staying. I know what the cost of living is in my home state of Hawaii and I know what the rent would be and that’s what it would be. It’s not affordable. It’s ridiculous. In fact, it’s more than I make in my investments just for housing alone. The West has basically priced me out. Oh man, I’m getting rained on. See that? You don’t get free showers like this in the West either. They got the sprinklers turned on here at the park. The cost of living in the west simply priced me out and I had to come to realize that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go back. I don’t even know if I really want to so much anymore. This is a much more affordable lifestyle. It’s also a peaceful, beautiful way to live. traveling and visiting these different countries, nice people getting hit with sprinklers. I don’t know if I want to go back. I don’t think that it’s just the cost of living, but specifically in this video, that’s what we’re going to talk about. I enjoyed staying at the Kowan Art Hotel. It cost me $21 a day, and it’s a fun hotel. It’s filled with half of it’s a hostel. So, you just have all these great backpackers that are traveling around, lots of college kids. And I to get to the new hotel, I checked first the price of a tuk tuk, but they wanted 400 bot. And so, I went with my trusty, you know, using the scooter. They wanted 200 bot. And it’s not a bad way to go. One good thing about taking these scooters is that you carve around traffic no problem. Sometimes however they do break down work. You think you think it’ll work? We’ll get there. But I survived and I made it to the Nana City Hotel. This is $30 a night. I like to stay here just for a couple of days. I like the location on Soy Forana and then I move on to another hotel somewhere in Thailand that’s less expensive. But this place actually works great for me. [Music] [Music] The US has priced me out for food as well. Yeah, it has. I can’t really afford the meals there. A simple meal like going to get a hamburger and some fries. Uh I’m not talking fast food. I’m talking at like some kind of a nice sit-down restaurant. you’re looking at 20 $25 for that meal. And that’s just crazy. I can’t afford that. Three times a day. Cooking at home would mean that I would have to basically go to the supermarket and buy those items. And one thing that I’ve learned about the West is when you go to the supermarket and buy all your food, I don’t think there’s that much more of a savings. The cost is very high. Here I am eating for $34 a meal. It’s also possible for me to go to a sit-down restaurant and eat for $7. That’s a nice sit-down restaurant. That’s a nice meal. I have been priced out of my home country and I’ve kind of accepted that and I don’t really have a problem with it that much anymore. Even in an area that is considered to be touristy, like the Kawasan area that I just came from, I can find a little stand like this that will make me a nice fresh pad thai chicken noodles. They’ll throw an egg in it and it will cost me about $4. And there are outdoor festivals that I see advertised and talked about on social media back in my home country that you have to pay 50 bucks to get into. And then when you go to the outdoor mu uh music festivals and outdoor food festivals, it’s $20 for a meal. I mean, you walk out of a place like that paying hundreds of dollars. It’s ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah, I mean Kawasan might be a touristy area, but yeah, you can find music here. You’ve live music, enjoyable. You can eat for $4. This is a much better environment. Let’s talk a bit about healthcare. The cost of health care here in Southeast Asia has made it possible for me to just pay cash. I have had surgeries done for a few thousand. I have had dental work done, crowns for $460. I get dental cleanings done for $30. I go see a chiropractor, it cost me about $30. I went to go see a eye doctor and get all my checkups done. That cost me about $40, $50. It’s like the co-ayment price. I was priced out of my home country when it comes to health care. And health care is important as we get older. When we’re younger, we might not go see the doctor that much, but once you start getting to be in your 50s like I am, you start to think about the cost of health care and whether you can afford it or not can mean whether or not you can get surgeries done, whether or not you can get checkups done that can identify problems. You know, I get my blood work done here in Southeast Asia every year. It costs me a little over $100, but I also don’t have to go to two different doctors to get that done. I don’t have to go to one doctor that’s then the gatekeeper to get to the second doctor and that’s the system in my home country. I think it’s set up that way as a grift and I don’t agree with it and I don’t want to pay those prices for it. I don’t pay for gym memberships. I use outdoor gyms and walking. I work out in my room every morning. That saves me money. You know, it’s possible to get a good workout and not have to have these gym memberships, which back in my home country, that’s hund that’s like another car payment to be a member of some private gym. No thank you. Let’s talk a bit about entertainment. Entertainment, probably the most expensive form is travel. And instead of not being able to afford to travel, which would be the case if I was living in my home country, my life is travel. The most expensive form of entertainment is now what I do every day of my life. Now there are things that I have learned to cut back on like alcohol, things like that. That has definitely been good for my health and it also reduces my costs. But yeah, entertainment for me is music, it’s reading, it’s travel, getting out and enjoying myself like this. That’s my entertainment. I think because of the cost of living in the west, people turn devices. If you think about it, if you travel, you’re paying thousands and thousands of dollars if you try to go out to a movie with a family. Are you kidding me? Think how much it costs to go to a movie with a family. And so, it’s cheaper just to turn on the TV, click, and buy a bottle of alcohol. That’s cheaper. And I don’t want that. I don’t want that for me. I don’t think it’s healthy for other people entertainment wise. I think this lifestyle wins out over the west as well. If you’ve traveled through Thailand, you will see what we network engineers call the rat’s nest, which is all these cables. Well, I’ll have you know there seems to be a big cleanup going. All the old cables are getting cut down and a much cleaner look. This should be really interesting to see as it develops. But we are going to go and get ourselves a great bite to eat tonight. We are here at Ari. Ari is an open air seafood restaurant. They bring in the seafood and they have great prices. I don’t find it overpriced. [Music] 200 200 bot for a plate of those. Yeah. Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll do a plate of that for two. Yeah, one plate. Yep. You see right in front of you what you get. And here in Bangkok, you know, it’s not like it’s frozen food. They fished it out the night before. It comes into the city, they serve it up. The next day, it all happens again. Come early, and you have no problem finding seating. The crew is getting my shellfish there, ready to go. They washed it up, and now they’re going to set it up for a nice barbecue. I didn’t find this a bad price at all. $6 essentially for a nice plate of wonderful shellfish that they’re going to barbecue up for me and then that comes with a nice spicy sauce on the side. A lot of times I’ll ask them to do a butter garlic sauce, but you know what? Let them just do what they do, man. Thank you. I love to try the different seafood while I’m here in Thailand. And when you come to these places, you look and see what they have laid out on the ice. You pick what you want, have them cook it up. I think it’s just fantastic. Man, these were good. And this sauce was spicy. It had some serious kick to it. Southeast Asia has made it possible for me to have a retirement that’s affordable. I couldn’t afford retirement back in the US. Doesn’t mean I have a problem with the US. It means that I realize it’s too expensive for me to enjoy a retirement there like I can here. Thank you. Thank you guys very much. Very good. Thank you, sir. I want to thank you for spending some time with me today. Today, we got a chance to cover why it’s still so expensive in my home country. I just can’t afford to live there, and this lifestyle is still the right choice for me. Are you interested in this lifestyle? Traveling this way with a backpack as a minimalist around the world. If you are, like and subscribe the video and come with. You can support the channel by picking up a copy of my new book, The Traveler and the Bard. The link is in the description. Okay, we’ve got a lot more of Bangkok to see. And we’re going to continue traveling throughout the year and into next year. All right, we’ll talk again soon. Aloha. I was just roaming the streets and minding my own dang business. And suddenly he saw me, the mad dog of Bangkok. But he didn’t have no time for me. He ain’t got no time for my foolishness. And it’s well within the money that I’m making in my investments. Vehicles with no muffler. Noise pollution in Thailand. I want to give a little behind thescenes look at nomad life. A couple of things that I run into. One thing is one of the hardest things to find in Southeast Asia is after shave. I don’t know why. There’s razors, there’s shaving cream, but trying to find after shave is almost impossible. I found this plastic bottle which is good for travel with a cream which is good for travel. And this was several months ago and now it’s empty. And believe me, I use it until I cannot get any more out of it. And then you’re back on the hunt again. I was able to find after searching all day all differentarmacies and drugstores and supermarkets that have big selections of shaving items. And I was able to find a pharmacy that had a Gillette bottle of aftershave. The problem is that it’s heavy. It’s in a glass bottle. Okay. So, this probably won’t even make it through an airport. So, a little nomad trick is that I will take uh go to the pharmacy and get like a bottle like this. This is saline solution for cleaning wounds. And I’ll just drain it out and I will replace it with this. Uh something like this can be like 10 bot, like that cheap. Um it’s just saline, so very inexpensive. Replace that and now you can get on an airplane with this type of liquid and it’s a bottle that’s built well and it will seal liquids. That’s nomad life.

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