Reese Kaplan -- The Ins and Outs of Moving Overseas for Foreigners

If folks can tolerate it, now is time for another episode in the seemingly never ending quest to become a legally permitted resident of the country of Malaysia.

Do you know what it was like growing up with the Mets annually fighting to stay out of the cellar and your friends who were Yankee fans gloating with glee that their club was on its way towards its 17th or 21st or whatever number of World Series titles?  

Part of it was frustrating and made you whine internally that they got to see the best of the best year after year while you were hoping that the likes of Bobby Pfeil, Joe Foy and George Theodore were somehow going to make the hometown heroes dance their way to the pennant.  Sometimes your plans don't work out exactly as you had anticipated...

That little historical reminiscence brings us back to the travel that took me to the other side of the globe in quest of a culturally enriching, bargain priced and certainly exotic early retirement.  On paper it all made perfect sense.  

There were no political problems other than the usual corruption and graft as one set of would-be captains of misunderstanding people in charge gave way to another, the new ones creating jobs for their supporters, friends and cronies while the whole government ground to a snail's pace as everyone had to scramble to change their hierarchy, their training and the new methodologies.  

Weather can be an awful nightmare in various parts of the world.  Other than high humidity and a lot of rain that keeps the territory vividly green, they don't generally suffer from earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding in non-rural areas and the only snow they experience is at the bottom of a cup of shaved ice in a regional dessert called cendol.  

The cost of living continues to amaze folks back in the USA when I share tales of what things cost.  I've mentioned that the original plan was to rent a furnished home while living here for the first year to give time both to obtain a longer term visa and to ensure whether or not this locale is somewhere I really wanted to be.  

The 2200 square foot condo rented for what they considered a high price of 1600 ringgits per month ($358 in US dollars) which included furniture, appliances and apparently shared membership into a golf and country club.  Then the landlord offered a deal to pay up the year's lease in advance and he would collect for 11 months instead of 12 which dropped the average monthly tab down to an even more modest $328.  I used to have a car payment that cost more than that when I was in El Paso.

Even more ridiculous is the price of labor for things here.  One day getting a bumper reattached on a car, sandpapering and painting to restore it to new, having a flat tire replaced with a new tire and having 9 accent color walls painted in the condo came to a grand total of under $675 including all parts and human wages.  

Where it's even crazier is in the cost of food.  I was offered an opportunity at the outdoor produce market to buy a kg (2.2 pounds) of grape tomatoes for under 1 dollar.  Lunch out with typical Asian dishes featuring noodles or rice accompanied by exquisite sauces and shrimp or chicken or whatever other protein with beverages might set you back a grand total of 6 to 8 dollars in total for two people.  

Oh, and they don't understand nor expect the concept of tipping.  I had one waitress chase me into a parking lot to hand back the money I'd left for her service.

So in general things have been even better than anticipated.  My landlord who owns my dog-free condo agreed to let me get a puppy.  Tropical fish for my aquarium set me back a grand total of perhaps 50 cents for a bag full of them.  Neighbors have been both friendly and helpful.  Yes, this place is indeed somewhere I want to live.

I won't bore you with the ins and outs of the politically charged and ever changing long term visa landscape except to define the two parts of Malaysia known as West where I live now on the mainland and East on the island of Borneo that Malaysia shares with part of Indonesia and the country of Brunei.  

The East and West parts of Malaysia treat one another as if they were separate countries and not part of one and the same.  As an overly simple analogy, think of island-based East Malaysia as Puerto Rico and West Malaysia as the 50 states.  Yes, they're all part of the same structure but when a rule changes in Nebraska it doesn't necessary apply in San Juan.  (And vice versa).

So there is a long term visa program here called MM2H which stands for Malaysia My 2nd Home which was designed to recruit foreigners into living here.  Unfortunately the programs for West and East Malaysia differ significantly and the rules are highly inconsistent.  

We opted for the Sarawak (East Malaysia) application as the financial restrictions were much more modest and when the choice was made it only required you spending 15 days per year in Sarawak, allowing you to live anywhere else you desired.  Two weeks on a tropical island was mandatory?  Sign me up!

The application was accepted by Immigration in October and I got a message that I am on the approved list.  However, that's only part of the story.  Until the Sarawak Immigration department actually prints up the official S-MM2H (S being an abbreviation for the state of Sarawak in East Malaysia), I'm unable to pursue buying a home.  

Well, that's not exactly true.  The government in each Malaysian state (both West and East) will allow you to purchase a home for over 1 million ringgits (about $225,000 in US dollars).  While most of you are saying you can't buy a parking spot for that little in various American places, by Malaysian standards that is a somewhat exorbitant minimum level.  

More importantly, however, is that even if you pursued this level of real estate purchase, without an MM2H visa from West or East you can't legally live in it as the best you can get is a 90-day tourist visa which prevents you from working.  There are working permits available which renew annually, but the goal of retirement is not to go back into an office day after day.

Now if you wait for the long term visa to be granted, then the minimum spend drops significantly, sometimes to less than $75,000.  Obviously if you can find a suitable accommodation at that price you'd much rather do so than at $225,000 and the MM2H would allow you to stay for 5 years on a multi-entry visa.  

Sounds great, right?

Wrong.

It's now been 10 months awaiting the S-MM2H visa to be granted.  Without it I'm back to the $225,000 minimum spend.  I can continue to rent and not buy anything but then every 90 days folks in that situation must go on a "visa run" to leave the country for 48 hours and returning to get another 90 day tourist visa.  I did that successfully on a train trip to Thailand several months ago, bought a legal 60-day extension at the local immigration office and then just recently flew to Singapore for 2 nights to repeat the process.  Easy-peasy, right?

Upon arriving in the airport in West Malaysia on the return flight they decided they would "help" accelerate the MM2H process by making supervisors in the Immigration department find out what is the delay.  This morning I spent 5.5 hours at the Immigration office who didn't post their new hours on their website, sent me to the wrong department to wait on line only to be told I needed to go to a different floor (which is what I told the folks at the welcome desk when I arrived).  

They took what for a government office was a fairly reasonable amount of time, but said everything was in order and then sent me back to the other floor where the obvously not very knowledgeable personnel pointed me in the first place where I sat for hours and hours until finally I was granted the 90-day visa WHICH THE AIRPORT OFFICER COULD HAVE PROVIDED PER THE RULES FOR FOREIGN VISITORS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

So right now as my June lease is coming due, I can either sign up for another year of renting, buy a needlessly large or overpriced property without a long term visa, or just keep waiting until I do have one in my hand.  Once I do, I can then buy a reasonably priced property but now according to the new rules changed by the last outgoing politician in charge as 2022 flipped into 2023 it now states that recipients of the S-MM2H must live in Sarawak and are forbidden to live in West Malaysia.  

Obviously people who had applications in process for nearly a full year who spent time and money based upon the rules for the program were told that everything is different and now it will take even longer.  No more is it a matter of a 15 day visit to Sarawak but a permanent residence in Sarawak.

Visa consultants are beside themselves in anger and frustration as they felt applications already in process should be grandfathered in with the rules in place at the time the forms and money were provided to the glacially slow Immigration office.  Some even advised ignoring the rules and expect several more changes between now and the 5-year renewal date.  

For now while I'm happy living here and glad I made the change, I've come to earn a grudging respect for notoriously inefficient departments like Motor Vehicles in the USA because once you learned the rules, they worked.  Oh well...at least there are monkeys, lizards, tropical birds and the occasional snake outside to keep things interesting.  Moving to Sarawak may be in the long term cards...though just to make the environment a bit more "wild" they have orangutans (much larger than the monkeys here) as well as rivers filled with crocodiles.  

And snakes...many, many snakes.  That life spent dodging rattlesnakes in El Paso apparently has inured me from freaking out.