It’s taken me a few days to figure out how to frame this post. It’s about what I’m actually doing on my own out here in rural Thailand. The header image pretty much shows where we’re at right now with the man cave build, sitting on top of the concrete-block structure that’s going to be the kitchen. That’s the same space we were sleeping in while we knocked the rest of the place together—the building off to the right in the photo.

I was chewing on how to present it without it just turning into another “here’s what I’m doing” update when one of our readers here at FreeTheAnimal, Gordon, sent me a video. That was the hook. The whole framing is geo-arbitrage.

Here’s what I want to drive home: if you can earn or otherwise pull in income denominated in Western money—U.S., Europe, that whole orbit—then the same dollars stretch five, ten, twenty times further depending on where and how you live when you plant yourself somewhere like this. That’s exactly how we’re going to walk through the post.

I truly have a passion to inform and assist others who might be inclined to up their standard of living by 20x without having to make more money.

So here’s the video that explains geoarbitrage perfectly, i.e., how you live 20x better without having to make more money. 11 minutes. Quite interestingly, almost all of the stock photo footage is of Thailand (I recognize much), which is where I have chosen to live.

He distills it. For hundreds of years, people practiced “geoarbitrage” in one way only. They pulled up stakes and relocated to another country where the opportunities were greater. Today, you figure out how to maintain your income, then move to a new place where the cost of living is 10-20x+ less expensive. America and Western Europe have priced people out of the market or made it such that it’s simply too expensive to live comfortably and have money left over.

It’s a simple concept. You simply need to understand how to think of it in reverse. I’m going to show you. I will tell you how I did it and had to scramble a lot, and then I’ll show you what I’m actually doing.

Income varies wildly from one person to the next. You might make it as a freelancer, a contractor, or a content creator churning out videos and such. You can start a business in a foreign country. Here in Thailand, Muay Thai (kickboxing) is a very popular and lucrative business for foreigners to establish. And, if you’re American, you can own 100% of the business. All other nationalities are limited to 49% ownership (you don’t really own it). Bars and restaurants in tourist areas are another popular option.

For a lot of younger people, that’s the practical path. You can even land work as a foreigner in any number of countries because they need the skills—often, time zone-dependent work. Companies that hire you will frequently sort out the visa paperwork for you. That’s certainly the case here in Thailand, where plenty of people work for American or European outfits and the employer handles all the immigration visa nonsense. Teaching English, either in-person or remotely online, is another common option.

Once you’re 50 or older in Thailand, maintaining a retirement visa is straightforward, and I take care of mine without any middlemen. Ironically enough, maintaining a marriage visa or guardianship visa (such as being the father of your own Thai-based offspring) is way tougher than a retirement visa. For younger people, the requirements are stiffer, but it’s still doable depending on how you structure the arrangement. Thailand is just one option anyway. There are scores of countries where the living is excellent and the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the U.S. or Western Europe.

As for my own situation, I built an income stream that would be perfectly adequate back in America but feels like a king’s ransom here in Thailand.

… To relate, I’m going to go back in time to when many of you readers of this blog first came around. My business had started quite a while before, but by about 2007 and 2008 when I started blogging the Paleo diet stuff, it was well established. I had about 30 employees, the company made around $3 million a year, and I’d eventually hired people to run it for me. So when I was blogging all that time from the late 2000s to roughly 2013, everything was going just fine. My personal take-home pay was on the order of about $22,000 per month, and with my wife’s income on top we owned two houses and wanted for nothing.

But here’s the thing about my company. Because we were in the California Bay Area, I’d established amongst my 30 employees five or so bilingual Spanish speakers in cubicles. I had an agent who signed up Spanish-speaking people—Mexican descendants—and he did very well. He brought in a lot of business. After a while, though, I noticed something with the phone logs. Those Spanish-speaking girls weren’t handling calls at twice or three times the normal length. It was more like five times. Every Spanish call got routed to them, and instead of keeping it to five or ten minutes of actual business, they’d run thirty minutes just shooting the shit.

That was it. I shut it down. No more Spanish-speaking clients. I retained a couple of the bilingual employees to service the existing ones since I wasn’t kicking anyone off, but we weren’t taking new ones. The agent who’d been signing them up got pretty upset about that. He eventually contrived for some Spanish speakers to complain to the Monterey County DA, which then went to the California Attorney General. I got hit with a huge subpoena and had to hire a lawyer to field their “investigation.” As I’ve always said, if you pay less than $500 an hour for a lawyer, you’re wasting your money. I got a good one, but it still cost me plenty—roughly a couple million dollars over the two years of the investigation. In the end the DA dropped the case, but I was still out two million bucks. That was just part of the whole slide and downfall of the company. By 2013 I just decided to shut it down. I wrote about it: Burning Down the House.

At the same time, I’d had a luxury chalet for years in the mountains—Arnold, CA, up in the gold country with skiing in winter and wine and museum touring in summer. I’d been renting it out as a vacation rental since about 2011 and it was turnkey, easy money. If we wanted to use it, I’d just block off the dates. It took almost no time to manage. Then in 2013, right when I was shutting the company down, I stumbled into owning occupancy contracts for a number of high-end condos in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. We’re talking properties that rent out at $3,000 per week. That too was easy to set up and run. I was the real-life version of the Tim Ferriss fantasy. The guy who wrote The 4-Hour Workweek was full of shit—he worked a lot more than four hours a week. I was the one pulling in well over $100,000 a year from a business that truly took less than four hours a week to run.

It was hugely successful and easy. I used two listing sites, VRBO/HomeAway and AirBNB. The former was 10x better than the latter. The way these sites worked was you paid upfront for listings (this cost on the order of $1,500 per year) and when you received inquiries, you’d get in contact. Email and telephone. For high-end as I was doing, telephone calls are often essential for closing a booking, especially if the renter was a chick. Dudes close deals easily. Chicks need to ask a million questions.

So that’s how things went from about 2013 onward. I was still married, my wife brought in solid income, and between the two of us we kept the lifestyle going until we finally decided it was time to go our separate ways. That’s another story entirely, but the divorce was amicable. We split the assets cleanly, and both walked away satisfied.

The divorce was finalized in early 2019. I cashed out, sold the house I’d kept, and ended up with real money in the bank plus the vacation rental business. By early 2020 I was ready to pull the plug and go nomadic—60-liter backpack, cash in hand. Thailand was the first stop. I’d been visiting since I was 25.

Even before Covid, the vacation rental business was beginning to wane. Another institutional problem. Just like governments are fuck-ups that fuck with you, so too are large corporate fucks. In this case, Microsoft’s Expedia travel site bought out VRBO/HomeAway and immediately fucked me over. Sure, I still had to pay the listing fee, but now, there was no contact with the rental prospect. No more direct email/phone. All comms through messaging on the site, they would process the payment and hold it until after checkout. I had my own long-established CC processing, and I always got payment upfront (I professionally handled the rare cancellations/refunds). I cleverly got around it. I sent my PDF rental contract through the site’s messaging and told the prospect to look closely at the upper-left corner of the page (my email address). Astute renters knew what to do. Shortly, I’d have an email. I never processed a single booking through fucking Expedia’s VRBO. AirBNB followed suit. I rarely rented trhough AirBNB. Different kinds of peeps. Anyway, my point is, by 2015, shit was going south everywhere around me, even before they came up with Covid in an attempt to assume total subservient control over everything on the planet. You will own nothing and you’ll be happy.

Fuck them all, all to Hell.

Then Covid hit. I shrugged it off at first, but eventually it was obvious this was going to be a big deal. Turned out to be a two-to-three-year attempt by the leftists, the woke, and the progressives to kill the world. They didn’t quite pull it off, but they did manage to kill my vacation rental business. I’d been clearing a hundred grand a year and sitting on cash. I thought I was set for life. The whole operation took me less than four hours a week. For 2 years I didn’t make a penny from my vacation rental business whilst still paying debt service and maintenance costs, which further dwindled my nest egg of cash in the bank. When Covid finally eased up and I began getting inquiries again, and closed some bookings sometimes, it never came close to its former glory, to the point it just wasn’t worth it for me, anymore. Even at only 4 hours per week.

So for the second time in my life, the government destroyed my business and my livelihood.

It took me a while to come to grips with the situation. I still had decent money in the bank and, though I had no real income coming in, I was living off savings here in Thailand. That went on for more than a couple of years. In the interim, I scrambled. In mid-2021 I turned this blog into a paying membership site. Hundreds of you good people began popping for membership, and it has been a joyful experience, exceeding expectations. Thank you all. What you did, in effect, was tide me over from when savings finally ran out and the next thing took hold.

The first thing I did, once I started thinking clearly about the long haul, was face the fact that I was coming up on 62. That meant I might be eligible for early Social Security benefits. I looked into it and even wrote up a blog post analyzing the early claim decision. What it boiled down to is pretty simple. If you’re living in the States, it’s arguable whether you should take the reduced amount early or wait for full retirement age. Live in a far lower-cost environment like Thailand, and it’s a no-brainer. Take the money early.

I’ve now been on it for three years. The payment comes to roughly $1,600 a month. In Thailand, that’s the equivalent of about $5,000 a month if you live in priced-out-of-the-market USA, depending on how you live. For my purposes, it was more than adequate, and the income from this blog boosted me to $2,500-$3,000 per month. Poverty level in USA. Very comfortable here in Thailand, with money left over to spend on young, sexy, Thai gals. A micro harem, of sorts.

The surprise was how dead simple the whole process turned out to be. I didn’t have to move, didn’t have to go anywhere. I applied on the SSA website and soon got a call from a guy at the Federal Benefits Unit at the embassy in Manila—the office that handles Thailand. He conducted a short interview over the phone. A couple of months later, the direct deposits started showing up, clean as a whistle, month after month.

I didn’t stop there. I was still scrambling, and since that initial foothold was established—early social security and the income from this blog’s wonderful readers—I have continued to build USA-based income and am now at a solid $6,000+ per month. Comfortable living in the USA on that, but here in Thailand, I can build, build, and build more. See the title image again. See my vids about building the Great Wall. It’s as though I was getting $25,000 – $30,000 per month in USA. There is zero debt associated with this building. No home loans, no refinancing. It’s done by cash, month by month. As things used to be.

… OK, so now let’s get into the specifics of how I use money here in Thailand. And let me say that you don’t have to live in Thailand to do this. There are hundreds of countries around the world where, if you can manage to have a Western-styled income but the cost of living is five, ten, fifteen, or twenty-five times less than what it is in the West, then this changes everything.

Where I live in Thailand, we’re talking about building out a homestead. Daily cost of living with food and everything else varies highly, depending on what you eat. But if you eat Thai food exclusively, it’s a huge difference. You can eat well for less than three bucks a day.

Let’s talk about building housing and so on. I run with some knowledge here because I grew up in construction. Say I spent three thousand dollars. What I can get done for that three thousand in terms of materials and labor would roughly cost about fifty thousand in the USA. Part of the big reason for that is the labor unions going back a century, basically. All of that gets priced in. What labor you do is socialized via the labor cost, so that raises the labor cost and raises prices across the board for everything. Often, the materials supply companies are unionized and “regulated,” too. Shit flows downhill.

I’m tired of arguing about this. Let’s just say that in Thailand, there’s no such thing as labor unions. Never has been. So you go right ahead and contract with the guy who drives up in a big new Ford F-350 pickup. A thousand-dollar-a-month payment on that truck is going to be factored into his price for his services. And then all of his recruits also pull up in F-250s and 350s. You’re paying for that. That’s why I can get done for three thousand what costs you fifty thousand. LOL, suckers.

Also. $30,000 for a “building permit” and the myriad “associated fees.” Two houses I’ve built, now. How many permits and how many fees have I paid to government? LOL. Zero. Zero is the answer. Suckers.

Look. I wish I had understood all of this back in 1986 when I came to Thailand to chase and snag Thai pussy. In my older, objective mind and sense, many young Western men are far more astute now. There are many of them with established businesses here in Thailand. Rather than 2-3 chicks per day, they find one single hyper-hot one who understands what he’s up to and supports him fully whilst looking like a trophy, eligible for any model runway in the world.

I’ll give you an extreme example of that. His name is Bill Heinecke, an American.

Heinecke moved to Bangkok in 1963 at the age of 14 with his family, having previously lived in Japan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. Heinecke’s father spent 25 years in the United States military, serving in World War II and the Korean War. When he retired, he joined the foreign service. His mother was an Asia correspondent for Time magazine. Heinecke studied at the International School Bangkok, and persuaded the editor of the now-defunct Bangkok World to let him write a weekly column on go-carting. In return, he received advertising space alongside it. (Wikipedia)

He’s now a billionaire and amongst the richest men in Thailand and the world. He renounced his US citizenship in the early 90s. Do you know why? IRS. America (“Land of the Free,” LOL LOL LOL) asserts tax liability to anyone anywhere in the world who was BORN IN THE USA!!! Even if they never lived there much after birth. “Birthright citizenship” is a double-edged sword, should you ever make something of yourself. Evil to the core.

My overall point with all of the foregoing is about creating a sustainable, regular monthly income while living here in Thailand—but you can do it in many other countries of your preference. Much of what I’d established as an American back in the USA dried up—dried up in ways I didn’t see coming. I thought I was set, and then everything started evaporating.

The message I want to drive home is aimed at two groups. For those of you who are older and already have established sources of income or savings, moving to a country where the cost of living is ten, twenty, or thirty times lower is a no-brainer. Millions of you already had the foresight and wisdom to do exactly that, and it’s straightforward.

The bigger message is for the young folks. Don’t sit around saying “someday, someday, someday—my dream, my dream, my dream.” Do it now. Make the big leap. Drop yourself into a situation where you have to scramble, and scramble hard. Whether you do it as a nomad or plant yourself in one particular country, you might very well put yourself in a position where you’re fighting for every dollar, just like I did starting in my early sixties. I endured years of that scrambling right here in Thailand. I didn’t have the option of regrouping back in America the way some people suggested.

And the reason is very fucking simple: I can live for twenty times less here than there. Moving back to America would have amounted to a twenty- or thirty-percent tax on everything I was trying to accomplish. That’s the reality, and that’s why I stayed and fought it out.

Now here’s some specifics. I’m not going to embed a bunch of videos. I get people, including family, who ask “when are you going to show this thing?” Check my last five videos on X or YouTube. “I don’t get notifications.” Of course, you do not get notifications from social media platforms about ANYTHING I do. Are you stupid?

My YouTube Channel. My X Feed. Here’s a couple of my latest, but if you are interested in more, go especially to the YouTube channel.

There’s more, but you’ll need to go check it out for yourself.

That’s all for this time. Young men: get fucking smart and make big-ass fucking moves. No more “someday someday someday…I hope hope hope.” Stop that nonsense. It’s total chick thinking and talk. Be a man, and above all, in your youth.