Thailand’s City, Country, Beach Trifecta—and a New Visa—Make Living Here Easy

Nineteen floors above Bangkok might as well be 40,000 feet in the clouds.

Down below, incessant traffic grumbles. Motorbikes and scooters whine and wheeze as they swarm the streets, darting in and out of the slightly smaller swarm of cars and trucks and belching buses. The elevated Skytrain whooshes by like some Jetsons-esque monorail. An incoming tropical storm announces its pending arrival with a substantial and thunderous rolling bellow.

And everywhere people are…well, they’re just everywhere.

But up here, in Dimitri Bintein’s modern apartment with seagull-like views over Bangkok’s popular Sukhumvit neighborhood, all is peacefully quiet as I watch a whale shark glide past so close I think I can actually touch it.

That’s a weirdly incongruous sentence, I know. But it’s 100% accurate. Dimitri has wrapped a pair of virtual reality goggles around my eyes to show me the freelance technology world he works in. He has created a way to film the undersea world in a 360-degree, 3D view. It is remarkable. The watery landscape looks more real than reality. The clarity is off the charts.

NASA has bought the technology from Dimitri, and Facebook has licensed some of his footage. “People can’t always dive,” Dimitri tells me. “So, I will bring it to them.”

I’ve come to meet Dimitri not because he’s building this technology, but because he’s building this technology in Thailand. Thailand has long been a favored destination for workers of all persuasions who can log in and earn from anywhere in the world, and for retirees seeking a cheaper and more adventurous retirement. But that’s become particularly true the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. People cooped up at home for more than a year finally broke out, and many of them decided to toss off the cubicle constraints— and the rising expenses of life in America and Europe—to live and work in Thailand.

One of the best digital nomad visas on the planet.

From less than 200,000 tourist arrivals last January, Thailand is now recording about 1.2 million per month. It’s impossible to know how many of those are nomadic workers or those looking for a different type of retirement, but based on my recent trip, it’s clear that digital nomads and retirees on scouting expeditions are part of the mix. There’s a reason for this newfound focus on Thailand. Thing is, Thailand was never the easiest destination to navigate for anyone who wanted to stick around longer than a tourist visa allows.

It was always the consummate “visa-run” country—a place so many expats love to call home, but where every 30, 60, or 90 days (depending on your visa type) you had to hop across a border somewhere, then return to Thailand for a new stamp in your passport…before having to do it all over again.

For some people, that was just the cost of living the adventure in Thailand. For others, it was always a hassle, particularly when the goal was to stay rooted somewhere for a while. Now, however, that’s changing.

In September, Thailand introduced what is arguably one of the best digital nomad visas on the planet— a visa that allows you to live in-country for up to 10 years before needing to reapply. That’s the longest period of validity anywhere in the visa world. Moreover, the visa isn’t limited to digital nomads. It’s also open to entrepreneurs, wealthy global citizens, and retirees with a decent income.

English is widely spoken and safety is a given.

Let me say upfront that you will need $40,000 to $80,000 in annual income to apply because Thailand wants to attract a wealthier base of expats who can contribute more to the economy. But if you meet those requirements, Thailand’s varied landscape offers something for everyone.

Whether your preferred setting is an uber-modern metropolis with every conceivable creature comfort, a quiet mountain redoubt, or a cinematic tropical beach, Thailand’s got you covered.

Throw in the fact that daily living in Thailand is cheaper than a box of rocks, and suddenly this Southeast Asian nation has become one of the best places in the world to seek a nomadic or retiree lifestyle.

A Better Life, for Much Less

Dimitri came to Thailand several years ago, before the pandemic was a thing.

A Thai conglomerate called CP All recruited him to help build an artificial intelligence system for data monitoring. But during the pandemic, Dimitri found himself demoralized by lockdowns in Bangkok. He used those months to begin a passion project: becoming a dive master. Ultimately, he left his job at CP All to combine his dive-master education with his expertise in artificial intelligence to build his unique business creating underwater, virtual-reality videos.

Today, Dimitri is officially employed as a dive instructor in Thailand, which gives him a work permit. But he has to renew it yearly, “which is a hassle,” he says.

The new Thai digital nomad visa, he says, is his way to “reduce the hassle” and he has begun pursuing that because, “I have no desire to leave Thailand. I really like living here. I like the climate because all year round it’s the same. I have easy access to the islands and great underwater experiences for my new company. And Bangkok has everything—absolutely everything—I need, whenever I need it.”

Moreover, he says, “the cost is so affordable.” Outside of a few other destinations like Hanoi and maybe Kuala Lumpur, “any other metropolitan city in Asia is going to be four to five times more expensive.”

His stylish 600-square-foot corner apartment 19 floors above Bangkok is a bright, modern, one-bedroom with windows on both sides of the living room offering never-ending views across the city. For this, he and his girlfriend pay $500 per month. Modern, Western-style, two-bedroom apartments are available nearby for under $1,000 per month.

Rental costs aside, he pays just over $25 per month for phone and internet access, and food expenses are minimal. He can pay as little as 60 baht (about $1.65) for a filling meal.

Healthcare, meanwhile, is remarkably good and low cost compared to the U.S. Many Thai doctors were trained in the West, and a host of Western-style hospitals and clinics dot the capital city. The Global Health Security Index ranks Thailand’s medical system at #5 in the world among 195 countries, which helps explain why Thailand has become a leading destination for medical tourism.

“All my expat friends who have lived here and moved away tell me all the time how much they miss living here and how they want to come back because the quality of life is so much better,” Dimitri says.

The Sprawling Metropolis of Bangkok

I’ve traveled to Thailand four times in the past decade, which has given me a pretty good feel for the place. I’ll say, I would not hesitate to live here. The country may well be exotic by North American standards, but it also feels entirely comfortable.

English is widely spoken and safety is pretty much a given. You can walk around at all hours of the day and night and never feel threatened, even in Bangkok. It’s a very polite society.

Bangkok is a good place to start discussing Thailand because it tends to be the primary point of entry for anyone traveling to the country.

This city is huge. Gargantuan. It sprawls across the Chao Phraya River Delta for more than 600 square miles… if Bangkok were relocated to the U.S., it would compete with Houston as one of the 10 largest American cities in terms of geographic footprint.

Within that space are some 14 million people, so it’s crowded for sure. And at all hours. Because of its size, you’ll find anything you could possibly want in a city that manages to be both ultra-modern and ancient at the same moment.

Super-luxury malls, with high-end stores that look like they were built yesterday compete with Buddhist temples that are hundreds of years old.

You can grab extremely good street food for a couple of bucks, or you can pop into the stylish malls that are everywhere and find exquisite, high-end Japanese restaurants that cater to wealthy executives visiting from Tokyo and who are willing to drop a few hundred dollars on sushi and sake.

Likewise, you can find knock-offs of every famous brand…or you can find the authentic famous brands in those same high-end malls: Prada, Louis Vuitton, Christian Louboutin, upscale watchmaker Vacheron Constantin, and so many more.

This is a city that can meet any desire or any budget.

One afternoon, I ventured out to stroll a street where local artisans are still handproducing the brass bowls that monks use to collect alms on their daily walks… then headed to catch up with a long-time friend from my Wall Street Journal days. He’s lived here nearly 20 years and loves the place. We met at an uber-stylish coffee bar/bookshop that consumes much of the top floor of one of Bangkok’s ultramodern malls. That day, it was filled with what were clearly digital nomads buried in their day’s work.

Just after 11 p.m. I found a street vendor busily selling a single item—bowls of chicken rice—that was as tasty as it was fragrant. Making my way back to the hotel (feeling entirely safe despite the hour), I hopped on the BTS Skytrain—think: above-ground subway. It was just before it shut down at midnight, and for 79 cents I rode for four stops on one of the most modern transit systems I’ve used.

That day is a perfect encapsulation of why Bangkok is one of my favorite cities in Asia. It has an energy hard to find in most places. There’s almost an overload of mental and visual stimuli.

Of course, not everyone wants to live this uber-urban existence. For those digital nomads and retirees who prefer something a little more laidback, there’s the Thai interior and the many islands down south.

Chiang Mai: A Mecca for Digital Nomads

Tweet sent, I settled into my iced latte at a café in Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second city, nestled in the country’s mountainous north. Moments later, I heard, “Hey, are you Jeff ? I just saw your tweet.”

That voice belonged to Ryan Duguid. He was smiling and holding an iced tea when I looked up. “I follow you on Twitter, and I live nearby and I know this place,” he announced, “so I wanted to come say hi.”

Initially, it seemed random and odd that someone would know me and track me down in northern Thailand on what was literally my first day in town. Then again, this is Chiang Mai, and for the world’s digital nomads, the city is like a station-of-thecross— a place where they must pilgrimage at some point to pay homage to the gods of their digitally nomadic existence.

In Chiang Mai, the pace of life seems slower than Bangkok.

Literally every coffee shop and co-working space I ventured into had numerous caffeinated nomads from the U.S., Europe, Australia, and New Zealand working on whatever their project du jour happened to be. So, the odds were fairly decent, I imagine, that another digital nomad would see my social media post.

The appeal of Chiang Mai is immediately obvious. Though the city is home to 1.2 million people, it feels noticeably more parochial than Bangkok. Fewer people crowd the streets. The pace of life seems a lot slower. Traffic is markedly less. It’s also a much more walkable city than Bangkok, especially in the center, where digital nomads, expats, and retirees tend to congregate.

As with Bangkok, you’ll find most everything you need, though in a narrower band. There are fewer shopping malls, for instance, and not so many high-end retailers. And unlike Bangkok, which feels aggressively urban, Chiang Mai looks like a city stuck in a never-ending war with Mother Nature as both jungle and concrete battle for supremacy…and even now it’s not clear which side is actually winning that war.

Frankly, that’s what makes Chiang Mai so charming. It has warts. Sidewalks are often imperfect. Restaurants tend to be a rung or two below what you’ll find in Bangkok. The streets aren’t as clean (and Bangkok is surprisingly pristine for such a ginormous city). But what Chiang Mai lacks in refinement, it more than makes up for in character.

When I met Ryan at My Secret Café in Town (see: facebook.com/mysecretcafeintown), a hugely popular nomad hangout, he’d been living in Chiang Mai for a few weeks. As you read this, he is nearly a full year into life as a roving digital nomad, having left his previous job last December working as a mutuel clerk for the sports book at MGM International in Las Vegas.

Ryan’s a techy guy who now works as betting product manager for a cryptobased online gambling platform. As such, he can work anywhere in the world and over the last year has bounced around parts of Europe, India, and Asia. With no intentions of returning to the U.S. unless an emergency crops up, he’s looking for a place to settle overseas for the long-haul.

“Thailand’s digital nomad visa is on my list in Southeast Asia,” he tells me. “Ten years without having to go through visa renewals sounds really good to me. I like this place—a lot.” (He’s also looking at the new digital nomad visa taking shape in nearby Indonesia, after spending several weeks there in Bali.

Fueling his leap into the digital nomad world was his feeling that “life in Vegas had become monotonous, and I feel like traveling has opened my mind to so many different possibilities and cultures. It’s definitely made my life more meaningful and a lot more interesting.”

Sharing a similar sentiment is Jonathan Gillian, an electrical engineer from Southern California who retired early to take the off-ramp out of the U.S. because, “I’m just done with what’s going on in America. It’s not my country anymore. It’s too angry. Too polarized. It’s not the country I grew up in. You can’t have a conversation today without inadvertently saying something that you think, ‘Hmmm, did I just offend that person somehow?’”

I met Jonathan at the Artisan Café (see: facebook.com/artisancafecnx), a coffee bar near Chiang Mai’s Old City, encircled by ancient walls that are still mostly intact even though they date to the 13th century. With its exposed steel beams, brick walls, and gray-brown herringbone wood floors, Artisan could just as easily be part of a hip Brooklyn neighborhood.

“I come here to do a bit of writing,” Jonathan says. “Nothing for pay. Maybe I’ll make it a memoir one day—old-man moves- to-Chiang Mai kind of story?”

Until he retired in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, Jonathan had never spent much time outside the U.S., except for a brief visit to Whistler in Canada’s British Columbia, and a week in Cabo San Lucas years ago.

“I was cooped up at home during COVID. During that time I realized my life has pretty much existed in a very narrow circumference around my house. I wanted a different retirement,” says the 59-year-old lifelong bachelor.

He chose Thailand because “it seemed exotic to me.” He settled on Chiang Mai after test-driving Phuket, Pattaya, and Bangkok “because it’s sort of a great middle ground. It’s a big city, but a small-city feel. I can get around easily, and I can find anything I want. Bangkok was just crazy, to me. Getting around is insane. Pattaya and Phuket were a bit small and felt kinda provincial and a lot more touristy. Chiang Mai is definitely touristy, but it feels more Thai, more authentic. Maybe it’s the monks I see wandering around every day. I don’t know, but it feels like the perfect middle.”

Another big attraction is the affordability. Where Dmitri pays $500 for his 600-square-foot apartment in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit neighborhood, Jonathan is paying about $660 for a modern 1,050-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment spread across two floors, with views of the mountains to the north, and just a couple miles from the center of the city. He pays about $2 to hop into a three-wheeled tuk-tuk and get wherever he wants to go.

Utilities, internet, phone are just as cheap as Bangkok, as are the numerous food options. I popped into a local, outdoor night-market near Old City and grabbed a hearty plate of Pad Thai made fresh in front of me for about $1.90. Red Bull, my go-to beverage, cost all of 27 cents compared to $3.50 to $4.50 in the U.S. That’s for the local version, on which the global brand was based. But even the international version is just $1.60 here. Jonathan hadn’t yet applied for the digital nomad visa when I met with him because the process was so new at that point. Until now, he has been using sixmonth tourist visas, and hopping across borders to renew them. He tells me that applying for the new visa as a retiree is “on my New Year’s to-do list” after he returns from six weeks in New Zealand.

I understand entirely why he plans to live here long term. Chiang Mai is, all Once known for coconut plantations, today Samui is famous for pristine beaches and laidback vibes. around, an exceptional destination for someone who wants big-city living without the big city. Dollar for dollar, Chiang Mai offers more value, and it’s quieter. Plus, it’s easy to reach, only an hour or so by plane from Bangkok, though it has no international flights, so you will have to connect.

The only real downside to Chiang Mai is the vast distance to the ocean. So, if what you really want is a sandier landscape, then you’ll want to head south to Thailand’s beaches and islands…

The Island Paradise of Koh Samui

Frankly, there are numerous towns and villages along the Gulf of Thailand and the western side of the Thai peninsula bordering the Andaman Sea that offer a tropical, beachy lifestyle. But they’re generally quite small and remote, and therefore not likely the kinds of places most digital nomads and retirees want to settle. That’s why it’s best to look to the islands.

For my money, Koh Samui is a fantastic option, particularly around the main town of Chaweng, where the airport is located.

There’s real luxury to be found on Samui.

Samui is the second-largest Thai island (behind Phuket) at roughly 90 square miles, much of it covered in forest canopy. So it feels like you’re living as part of the jungle. That doesn’t mean, however, that you’re removed from civilization. Far from it.

Samui is easily reached by way of 10 flights per day on Bangkok Airways, the only airline to serve the island through an airport that the airline built and owns privately in Chaweng. For the record, Samui is one of the cutest, open-air airports you’ll find, almost like it was designed by Disney.

Despite Chaweng’s small population of roughly 20,000 people, the town (also called Bo Phut in Thai) is active and offers everything you’d need. A new outdoor mall called Central Festival is packed with brand names from Adidas to Timberland, and food options that include Starbucks, KFC, and Haagen-Dazs. (If you’re a fan of sushi and bento boxes, check out Zen Sushi. Best bento I’ve had in years.)

Nearby is a large, open-air Aussie restaurant and bar, Bondi (see: bondiasia. com), that draws in a large crowd of expats for sporting events on big-screen TVs… and a really good burger. I stopped by one afternoon when one of the Aussie league sporting finals was live on TV and there was not a place to sit.

Nomads like Samui because it’s not hard to find a coffee shop or a co-working space with a strong Wi-Fi connection. I popped into WYSIWYG Coworking Space & Café (you’ll find it in the COSI hotel) one day to get some columns written, and found a bright, airy, two-story space with lots of power outlets and places to work. I paid 150 Thai baht (about $4) to enter for the day and I could apply 100 of that to a drink or a snack—not a bad bargain.

In many ways, the main drag through Chaweng reminds me of the main drag through Tulum Beach in Mexico’s Riviera Maya. It’s tropical and it’s cheek-by-jowl with resort hotels and spas on the ocean side of the road, while restaurants, shops, and cafés line the other side.

Housing here can be expensive by provincial Thai standards since so many high-end beach properties are in the rental pool. That said, if you look around, you will come across nice, if small 500-square foot, one-bedroom apartments from $360 a month.

And if you’re willing to spend more, there’s real luxury to be found…try a Balinese-style two-bedroom villa built around a private garden and swimming pool—and with an outdoor bath—for $925 per month.

The big benefit of Koh Samui is that beautiful beaches are everywhere. The water is crystalline, clean, quite calm, and shallow. From my breakfast perch one morning, I watched a couple easily walk 100 yards or more in the sea, and the water had not reached their waist.

This is definitely laidback, island living. Nothing moves fast here. Taxis and tuk-tuks are everywhere but, frankly, if I lived here I’d probably just buy a scooter to zip around easily and quickly.

The primary downside is that Samui, like most of the Thai islands, is tourist-packed at various points in the year, making getting around a bit of a hassle. And Chaweng can get rowdy and bawdy at night because of a street called Soi Mango that juts off the main road through town. Though it’s short and compact, it’s brash and manages to pack a goodly number of bars, some open-air, that are always filled. It’s famous, as well, for other forms of nightlife vice. All of that can make traffic a bit of a bear at times.

One other challenge is a marked absence of traditional supermarkets. They do exist—including Britain-based Tesco, German chain Makro, and local Thai chain Big C. But they’re definitely limited in number and sort of packed along one road to the west of Chaweng. Living elsewhere on the island means getting to the supermarket would be a bit of a haul. But otherwise, Samui is tough to beat as an affordable, tropical beach destination.

Obvious Appeal

While traveling through Thailand, I was regularly sharing pictures with my wife back home in Prague. She was not terribly excited by the pictures of Bangkok. They struck her as images of just another big, chaotic city.

But she instantly loved the photos of Chiang Mai and Samui—so much so that she immediately began Googling places to rent because she wants us to return to Thailand and spend a month or two living in both locations.

And that’s just based on pictures. Had she been in Thailand with me for this tour, there’s a chance we’d probably still be there today because I don’t think she’d want to leave.

Indeed, I showed her a picture of that high-end Balinese-style villa in Samui— the back gate opens directly onto a beach—and she was smitten. I did a bit of research and found that hiring a housekeeper costs about $3 per hour, while local cooks aren’t much more. In other words, you can live a champagne lifestyle on a beer budget here. You certainly won’t find beachfront living anywhere in the U.S. at these prices.

This truly is a wonderful, tropical, laidback country where you feel comfortable, and where you want for nothing because everything you could want is readily available. Moreover, the new digital nomad visa makes moving and living here so much more convenient than it has ever been. For anyone—remote worker or retiree—who has ever thought about jetting off to live and/or work in Southeast Asia, Thailand has now made it that much easier to do.

Jeff D. Opdyke is the editor of The Global Intelligence Letter, IL’s guide to personal finance and investing. Based in Prague, he spent 17 years at The Wall Street Journal and writes on personal finance and investment. Check out his free e-letter, Field Notes at IntLiving.com/FieldNotes

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