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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of living in Thailand if you're working during key socialization periods?

I usually work during the afternoon, then have a long break in the evening when my wife comes home from her English teaching job. We have dinner, hang out with friends, then I continue working later on at night.

We also live in a really small town in the middle of nowhere. We have a couple of nice restaurants, but the nearest city with a mall is 1.5 hours away by bus. It's very peaceful, though. The cost of living is also extremely low, to the point where 2 or 3 weeks of consulting work would cover a year of rent and food. So it's the perfect way to bootstrap a startup, I think.

Makes sense. Hit me up if you come down to Bangkok - my wife is a teacher also.

Cost of living.

I expect there are other reasons as well? From a pure cost of living point of view, e.g. Ecuador would not be very different from Thailand, and you wouldn't worry about time difference to U.S.

Though I must say that for instance Costa Rica sounds a lot better for living, even if it is 30 % higher cost.

Well quite. There are many good reasons to live in Thailand - I've been there maybe 10 out of the last 30 years - but I think you'd skip most of them if you were working from 6pm to 4am frequently; and you'd quickly end up in a situation where somewhere in Central or South America would give you normal working hours + many of the benefits of Thailand.

Central or South America would be great. The main reason we're in Thailand is because my wife found a job teaching English. The money isn't that great, but she enjoys the job and it's nice to be here on longer term visas. I'm not sure if there are any English teaching jobs in South America, but the timezone would be nice.

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