Is it time for SIAMFIRE ?

I am an outlier Singaporean man because I do not go to Bangkok to hire prostitutes.

In fact, my effect is so powerful that my friends who go Bangkok with me are often worn out so badly that they also do not have the stamina to call prostitutes.

Why ?

We're just too busy eating the great food there and going to their night markets.

Also Bangkok is home to Battlefield Bangkok which is the best Tabletop Game Shop in Southeast Asia.

If you read the rest of the blogosphere and popular finance books, we're starting see variants of the Financial Independence Retire Early approach to life.

Enter SIAMFIRE, a variant of FIRE for folks who find it hard to retire in Singapore but might be able to live on their passive income in Bangkok.

SIAMFIRE is like FIRE with relaxed prerequisites. In Singapore, the 55 year old single retiree would need $1,721 SGD a month to eke out a bare existence. An expat living in Bangkok would only need $903.77 a month according to this website. The trick is to get permanent residency in Thailand and maintain your trading account back home to extract dividend payments.

Suppose you can structure a portfolio that yields 6%, to cover $900 worth of dividends a month would only require $180,000. You will need $340,000 if you want to pull off the same stunt in Singapore.

There is a hidden advantage to setting off to Bangkok to settle down - your cash cushion to fight off sequence of return risks shrinks to $900 x 24 or $21,600. This is consistent with the advice from Christy Shen's Quit Like A Millionaire, if your investments are not doing too well, it's better to spend more time travelling to places like Bangkok than to stay in a developed country like Singapore, this buys tie for your equity portfolio to recover.

I did some googling to see whether this is feasible for a 40-something year old single man. 

While I am not an immigration expert, it seems that the fastest way to get a VISA is to marry a Thai lady to get a Non-immigrant O Visa, then try to get permanent residency three years laters (which seems to be an onerous process). The pain of operating with a VISA in Thailand is that it needs to be renewed every 90 days.

Also permanent residency status can be given to investors who have $3M-$10M THB.

The FIRE mindset combined with geo-arbitrage is a wonderful way to ensure that somehow your financial aims will always succeed.

I leave it to you guys to figure out how to execute KLFIRE. From what I observed, it is even easier than SIAMFIRE.

Too bad my wife is already a Singapore citizen.

If you are a reader who have already succeeded in SIAMFIRE. Give me a shout on the comments section and share with us whether there are any downsides to this plan.