As far as laws and guidelines, I’ve lived enough places to know that sometimes things that are overlooked are overlooked, and sometimes not. I’d far prefer to figure out a way to just make it all legal so I don’t have to worry about it, I just can’t seem to figure out how.
It’s just that telepractice is such a new paradigm that noone seems to know how it works (the US seems to think I should do a foreign earned income exclusion, the Canadians think that since I’m a US citizen and not living in their country it isn’t their business, and, so far, I haven’t found anything at all about how the Taiwanese handle it). I find myself in the entirely odd position of not being able to find any country which wants to take my tax money.
On the disease thing, I know I don’t have any because a couple years ago I had to have surgery to fix my busted nose from a car accident (I cut the staples out of my scalp with a pair of side cutters and some pliers since the doc told me he wouldn’t do it without anesthetic), and I found a surgeon who put me to sleep with gas and then put in the IV and pulled my blood for bloodwork.
I feel your pain, Bum, I always feel like kind of a wuss bringing up a needle phobia, but the people who know me know that it’s just a weird needle thing. Having jumped out of planes and played live music for packed bars full of rednecks, I figure I can safely say I’m not generally a coward.
My understanding of a rep office is that I need a contract between a Taiwanese company and the company the rep office is representing. From the thread I started over in the Business section the impression I got was that even if I don’t have to have that initially, I will eventually.
It looks to me like I can get a reasonably nice place in a nice district for about 25K - 30K per month, bring it up to say 35K to include utilities/phone/cable? Another 25Kish for food? That leaves about 20K to screw around with or save per month.
Am I underestimating?
I could reasonably bring it up to around 120K per month, but I’m really trying to stay at 25 hours a week or less with 2 months off per year.
Keep in mind I’m looking for “reasonably comfortable”, not “lap of luxury”. Mostly I just want an interesting place to live where I can work shortish hours and have time to enjoy life.
25K rent
5K utilities including mobile nhone and ADSL depending on how much you use AC and heat
15K for daily expenses and food @ NT$500 per day. This assumes the occasional taxi or coffee at 711.
10K for visa run or Chinese lessons
8K for two nice western meals per week (i.e. NT$1K per meal twice a week)
5k for the occasional stuff that just comes up like a trip to Hualien, a new bed, the occasional new shirt, a book etc.
10K of savings
That’s 78K right there. And believe me, other expenses frequently arise in Taipei.
You did say you wanted a nice apartment in a quiet area and you like to eat well and socialize, which I assume means that you are going to want to eat western food. I have you pegged as a Da’an kind of guy. In which case, I think you might find your budget a bit tight. Doable but tight.
Now if you moved down to Kaohsiung or Taichung, bought a scooter, and restricted yourself to one western meal a month, you’d be living high off the hog and saving plenty.
Now if you add a significant other into all this and trips abroad at New Years, you might need to rethink your budget again.
Well, we can spread 10K of that over 12 months since my plan is to address my business needs in the States using a rep office and I’ll need to do 1 visa run per year (possibly 3 years, but lets be conservative). However, even with that it seems like you’re right and I’m tighter than I like.
I’ve read that Taichung has some of the nicest weather in Taiwan.
Sorry I’m not in Taichung. Taiwan has fast internet everywhere. I’m sure Taichung is just as fast as Taipei. If you are using ADSL, one factor may be distance from the nearest telecom switch.
Well, it’s less about bandwidth (up/down) and more about latency for my purposes, I need to maintain <200ms ping to a server in Saskatoon, Canada. I’m figuring, due to it’s location, Taipei has a link directly to the trans-pacific fiber cable off the coast of Japan. Looking at a map it seems like Taichung would have overland connection to Taipei, and from there to the cable, adding latency. I’m looking at a pretty fine edge already without a lot of overhead from Taipei.
