You will see the point about the blog cover art down below. I thought it was kind of funny 🤣. This is the cover of a notebook you can buy from Amazon for estate planning.
The back is genuinely better. It is such a relief to not be in constant pain. I’m still taking it slowly in terms of exercise — stomach and back both need to be treated carefully — but I’m moving around, going out occasionally, even hopped on a motorcycle taxi a couple of times. Small things. But after the last couple of years I’ve had, small things feel significant.
The condo continues to evolve.
I had bamboo blinds installed out on the balcony. Before the installer arrived, I had actually gone out and bought safety harnesses — my balcony is high enough that working at the outer edge of the ceiling at the edge of the balcony is not something you want to do without some form of security. Came back to find him straddled cheerfully in mid-air, balanced with one foot on a ladder and the other on the balcony railing, harness sitting unused on the floor, because he found the strap inconvenient.
Thailand. 😊
The blinds are genuinely wonderful though. Even in blinding tropical sunshine they convert the light coming into the room into something soft and ambient rather than something that makes you want to squint. I leave the curtains open all the time now, which I never did before. Small quality of life improvement, outsized effect. After years of living in the house in the Philippines which was single story, I always kept the blinds drawn to prevent people seeing in. Here, on the 4th floor, facing a jungle lot, it is really nice to keep the curtains open all the time. I find that keeping them closed causes anxiety.
I also replaced every outlet and light switch in the condo with Panasonic black designer units. This sounds minor until you see the result — clean, elegant, consistent. And no loose outlet sockets. Everything is starting to come together in here. The last significant item is replacing the living room air conditioning unit, which happens next week. After that, a repaint job sometime next year, and the condo will be exactly where I want it. I changed out the beds, put in wall fans to get the floor standing fans out and got my fire extinguisher.
Kim’s death (see last month’s post) has forced me to take a long hard look at my own estate arrangements, and what I found was not encouraging.
My situation is, admittedly, more complicated than most. I have bank accounts in multiple countries, four wills in four different jurisdictions, three valid passports, and different executors responsible for different countries — each of whom needs access to specific documents and specific passports to do their job. Layer on top of that the Thai reality I wrote about last month: if I die here, there will be requirements for certified and translated death certificates, and given the police’s documented habit of helping themselves to whatever’s in your safe, I now have to plan around making sure the right documents reach the right executors before anything goes missing.
Then there’s the IT side of things, which is its own headache. I have a complex digital life — passwords, accounts, financial apps, security keys. Good security practice says keep all of this locked down and compartmentalized. Estate planning says your executor needs to be able to get to it when you’re gone. Those two requirements are, to put it mildly, in direct tension with each other.
I’m working through all of it. The solution I’m settling on is an encrypted cloud drive — accessible to the right people under the right circumstances, kept continuously updated, and organized clearly enough that an executor isn’t left puzzling over what goes where. It’s coming together, slowly. I’m also in the process of splitting my financial apps across two phones, which has been an exercise in patience given the security checks every app wants to run when you move it to a new device. I really hate banks.
The broader point, and it applies to any expat reading this: if you haven’t reviewed your executor instructions recently, do it. Not someday. Now. Mine were woefully inadequate and I thought I had it handled.
A friend from the UK sat down with me recently. He’d had a prostate cancer scare and spent the better part of four months navigating the UK system — which eventually routed him to private clinics anyway. The whole thing could have been done here in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost, and the quality of care at the better private hospitals in Thailand is genuinely excellent. I couldn’t quite understand why he hadn’t considered it. Especially since he moved to retire here.
Though I suppose people simply don’t know. And if you are from a ‘developed’ country it might cause a little anxiety to go into a Thai hospital. But Thailand doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves as a medical destination. If you’re an expat or a long-term visitor and something comes up, it’s worth knowing that you have options — good ones.
I’ve been reading a couple of books that between them produced two lines worth keeping (I can’t remember the books, I just found the lines written in my notebook):
“Better to build something than to build nothing.”
“Everybody wants the Goldilocks zone, but sometimes we have to settle for what can be achieved.”
I’ve been thinking about both of those quite a bit lately. Given the last few months — the grief, the unexpected property purchase, the will revision, the physical recovery — there’s been a temptation to wait until conditions are perfect before moving forward on various things. These two lines are a reasonable antidote to that temptation. You build with what you have, where you are. The Goldilocks zone is a fantasy most of the time.
Getting on with it. 😊
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