MrMan wrote:
As a foreigner, can you own a coffee shop, either the location or the business in a rented location? I don't know Thai law. I can compare to Indonesia. In Indonesia, my wife could own a cafe or rent one, and I could 'own' it through her and run it if her company sponsored my visa so I could stay there. If I wanted to invest more, I suppose I could start a foreign company, which would take more money, and open a really nice cafe. I'd have to have a local co-owner of some stock of my foreign firm.
If you are going to co-own a business or if a local has to legally own it, then I don't see any way to do that with a woman you are involved with aside from being monogamous and having a relationship where you can really trust her to stay with you. That would probably mean marriage with a woman who really believes in marriage and stays with her husband because of her beliefs or because she's really in love with her husband or both.
Pretty much the same here as you describe.
Can start a foreign company IF you have capital AND Thai partners and have 4 Thai employees (just 2 employees in some jursidictions).
Foreign partners are usually either the staff of your lawyer's office, or your Thai wife's family. If you have some Thai faces actually WORKING there AND you have invested enough, then you can get a work permit and work there yourself. For example you could tend bar and chat up the customers, if you had 3 cocktail waitresses and a cleaner on the payroll. But typically in these countries the capital investment requirement is way too high for ordinary penniless vagrants like me, and the payroll and legal fee overhead for a company is serious too. Out of my league right now.
I was just going to put everything in Miss ChiangMai's name, that's how most guys do it. Okay if it's just a vanity business, a way to keep wifey busy and happy.
Most Farang-friendly country in the neighborhood is Cambodia, you can own 100 percent there no partners. But still cant work, just walk around and check on things.
I don't believe in monogamy, neither do most men in the world, clearly, since they admire other men who have harems. Nor do most women, actually, at the instinctive level anyway, since, like my mom, they don't mind marrying a guy who has had a harem before. Oh and neither did Jesus (read Matthew chapter 25). And since Jesus is on my side, and vice versa, I won't be changing. "Rather fight than switch."
The need to have a native start the company for you or with you is common in Asia. In Latin America you can sometimes do it on your own. Mexico, for example, was perfect for that. Pay the lawyer 1000usd then do wtf you want. Libertarian paradise.
Anyway, yeah, if I add Boopsie to the payroll, take care of her and her kid, then she thinks she will be my only family forever and ever, f**k that, she shoulda got herself an affable retired guy with a long white beard.
I am not, so you see, so affable after all.
I will make more babies, or I won't, but by the Mass, my heart's in the trim.