pitbullowner said:
with my plan to settle down in the next couple of years, I'll need exponentially more than that to have 3 kids and a wife that i'd prefer to only work a part time job vs being a career woman. 200k would be a drop in the bucket. Back when i owned a trucking business (small 2 truck power only capacity) I could blow through 200k like it was nothing.
New Engine ? Used cheapest Caterpillar engine that i wanted was 12k...
200k would go quick especially if you have a family. Bump the number to.....700k and i think i could maybe make it work for about 10 years
You're thinking about it wrong. Ideally you don't touch that 200k, or 700k, or whatever. The point of that hoard is not to spend, but rather to generate more money, and the tried and true number is around 4% a year, with variability in the base amount of like +/- 30%.
To that end, 200k is no where near enough to last forever. You can confidently pull 8k/yr, forever, with something like a <5% chance of ever going bust. But 8k/yr is basically a poverty level of existence. But, one big emergency and you could be screwed.
Secondly, it will be very, very difficult to conduct business as a foreigner in Indonesia. Having worked for 2.5 years in the back lands, and travelled there extensively, the prevailing attitude of westerners setting up shop there is "how much can we bilk the rich foreigner for?".
There is paperwork and "fees" for everything, a lot of which I simply wasn't allowed to be around, since as soon as someone saw foreigners, be it police, gov't, whoever, the "fee" would triple. Now, that isn't to say it's vastly different than the west, there are fees here for everything as well, it just so happens that here the fees are fixed, predictable, and won't change on the whim of who ever for completely unrelated reasons like they had a shipment of weed seized and there are pissed off people
who need cash. Laws are wholly flexible, and to be competitive, you need to know which laws are real, which ones are not, and which ones are up for discussion.
You'd need an Indonesian fixer to handle all the local stuff, and that will cut into your profits making you less competative, and there's always a risk that the partner might take the business from under your nose, or another friend had their B & B burned down because locals felt that they were a little too successful, and started questioning why they should prosper while locals did not beyond a few jobs at $10 a day.
There is money to be made, but it's the quintessential high risk investment. Case in point. The Gili islands off Bali is a place I've frequented for diving like a dozen times. There's been a law on the books since forever that the beaches belong to the ppl, and you can't build on it. But people did anyways. If you didn't, you'd be obeying the letter of the law, but would be less competitive since no one else did. But then about 4 years ago, they out of no where decided to enforce it. So anyone with buildings on the beach had them bulldozed at their own expense. Whether you succeeded or failed, depended entirely on when you built, and whether or not you were able to skirt the law long enough to cover the costs later on. If you're comfortable with that sort of unpredictability, then have at it.
