Maybe ED is short for education.

Cars are more expensive in Thailand but car ownership costs around the same (higher initial cost balanced out by slower depreciation on the asset value, cheaper tax, insurance, maintenance, parking, speeding fines, etc). If you care about safety, you definitely shouldn't hire a local driver as driving standards are awful here and professional drivers are among the worst. In reality, you will end up driving more than you expect because things just aren't set up to be walkable and when it rains, it rains so hard you will get soaked wet through in seconds.

A similar thing happened to me at a land border - they stamped the wrong date so I inadvertedly overstayed by a few weeks - the staff at immigration in Bangkok told me the error can only be fixed at the office where the error was made - so I had to drive back to the same border crossing (+1,000 km round trip) but they let me off the overstay fine.

take her to MK, maybe she'll change her mind, if not sign the paper and move on

you can own a minority equity stake in the hair salon (even without a visa) but to work in the hair salon, you would need a get a work permit - which would be almost impossible, regardless of which visa you have

You can own shares in any business but to work in it you need a work permit and most blue collar / low level service type jobs are restricted to Thais (or in some cases nationals of neighbouring low income countries) and work permits are supposed to be for managerial type jobs for which it makes sense to pay +50k/month (exact number varies by nationality). For example, if you open 5 shops/restaurants/bars, it makes sense for that business to hire an operations / marketing manager to oversee things but if you open 1 little place, there isn't likely to be any job within it that justifies a work permit.

It depends what you mean by "comfortably" and "modest income" but essentially Thailand is a relatively low-income country so things (especially anything with a significant human labour input and things that are more local than international) are generally cheaper than in richer more developed countries (although this will become less so over time as Thailand catches up).

most Thai banks use really outdated systems making some activities extra hassle for the staff to process - often, you have to be really friendly and/or lucky to get them to do anything - branches that deal with many expats/tourists are usually the most flexible

Yes IF you meet the other conditions, which normally include some combination of paying a decent deposit (+20% of purchase price), having a Thai in good financial standing act as your guarantor, and showing evidence of +6 months of consistent income (well in excess of monthly cost to service the loan).

@Steven **********

I'm talking about the price of UK universities in the UK - Thai students pay tens of thousands of pounds more than locals