Hey All:

I've been lurking here for a few months trying to soak up information.

In a couple of years, I'll be 62 and ready to take early retirement. My wife is Thai; we've been married for 30+ years which I guess makes me an outlier around here. We met in Los Angeles in the '80s, and have some kids and grandkids.

I've always been kind of figuring that I would work until I was 68, but lately I've been feeling like I want to get out of here. I work at a university in flyover country in the US, and it' getting old. Who knows how many years I have left?

So we decided to move to LOS in 2018. We'll have enough between Social Security and retirement funds to live there and possibly travel back to the US once a year or so. The wife wanted to build a house in her old village just outside of Korat, but there's no way I want to swat mosquitos over there for the next couple of decades. So I convinced her that we will travel around for a year or so and check out all the possible places. Lately, she's been watching a lot of Youtube videos on Chiang Mai, so she's starting to think that might be an option. I'm thinking about eventually moving to some place with a reasonable population of farangs, but definitely not Pattaya Phuket or Bangkok.

We're going over there this summer for a month to start to firm up some ideas. I've only been to Thailand twice, although I took some language lessons and can speak Thai like a 4-year old and read it like a 6-year old.

What do I need to worry about? I think my expectations are pretty realistic, but there's always something I could be missing.