Am I being lowballed on the salary? ☹️

This is in a serviced apartment building that’s pretty popular with foreigners. Not bad, but it’s almost 10 years old and looks it in person. Price drop from $60 to $55 tells the story.

The furnishings are definitely a notch above what most Taiwanese landlords will put in but that bed is quite small and the location while convenient is pretty isolated in terms of the immediate surroundings. $60 (including service fee) is aggressive.

Does “this has potential” mean that it might be decent if you could convince the owner to take out the tacky furnishings and gut the interior? :joy:

Taipei isn’t really a place for baller apartments. Unless you’re at $100-110,000 and up, higher price more readily gets you bigger size and better location rather than higher quality. A lot of places in even the $60-90,000 range are just renovated boxes in old buildings.

If I had an employer offering me $82,000 in housing on a $100,000 salary, I’d negotiate for a lower housing allowance and higher salary. In a citylike Taipei, the higher housing allowance benefits the employer way more than the employee.

Honestly, I do not understand who can pay over 150k for a place. Most of those were ads in English.

To be honest, that was just a quick and dirty search. I have seen better places for way less, but I wanted to justify the 80k plus allowance.

And I am used to searching for cheap and cheaper and settle for anything where roaches do not open the door for you.

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people keep saying this, but I’ve had a similar offer.
I got an offer to teach in Beijing. the salary was about 90,000ntd while the housing allowance was 75,000ntd. at first it seemed strange but it happens. I know Beijing isn’t Taipei, but Taipei isn’t cheap. they can probably write off housing for taxes in a way they can’t for salary. many companies play around with bonuses to give the employee a better deal without paying them more salary

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Yes, there can be financial benefits to the employer if the salary portion is tied to various other employer burdens, like retirement contributions, insurance, bonuses, etc.

It’s also a way to artificially keeping salaries lower than they should be, since the employer can position the housing allowance as being based on the cost of living in a city/region, not the employee’s value.

As an employee, I’d rather go into my next job salary negotiation being able to say that I made $142,000/month (with $40,000 housing allowance) rather than $100,00/month (with $82,000 housing allowance). And if I’m going for a promotion in the same company I’d rather have the higher base to build on.

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Indeed. Look at TES and TAS contracts.

I appreciate we are just teachers and don’t understand how complex business is, but I think we’re not that far off.

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It’s also the way OP ask things here, like “is my salary fine for this job?” then says he has a 82k house allowance, and the other thread “do you think I can rent something good for 90k a month”?
The first post of this thread looks like trolling Young professional with a 85-90K rent budget per month I mean the guy is 27 yo lol.

Anyway, good for him if true :smiley:

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I’ve heard that occasionally happens here…:thinking:

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Trolling would be pretty sad :frowning: - it’s just difficult to gauge outside of Taiwan I think partly because my search results on google are limited and you’re given a selection of agencies to check from work (such as mangoroc) that tend to have much, much higher costs and rents than the website you’ve all shown me.

I’ve never paid rent other than uni (lived with parents) otherwise, so my understanding of what it costs to live somewhere foreign is pretty non existent. Search results showing Taipei as one of the richest cities in the world also doesn’t help haha.

That being said, this forum has been super helpful in realising it was a good offer. I said around 90k because I read in some places you have to factor in maintenance fees or cleaning.

As for the 27 yo part, I wish I was the rich one from my friends lol. Sadly, I get laughed at (in jest) for not taking IB/Finance route (not saying I consider myself to be poor). But just for perspective, this isn’t a crazy offer and also partly fuelled my posts on here- I really needed opinions of people already living there and not in that circle per se.

Anyway I hope once I do move over I’m able to post questions about lifestyle and dining and partying and culture and all the rest of it. It’s been a lot of hard work- engineering study whilst working and then working in two time zones and building towards this moment.

Thanks everyone :pray::pray:

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Yeah Taipei may have lots of rich people, but the COL is quite low on a worldwide standard, especially compared to the QOL.

Is there any option to rent a 2 or 3 bedroom place and then take on a roommate(s)? I realize it will depend on your personality and preference, but if I were 27 again and moving to a new country I’d try to find one or two friends/roommates, and the additional rental income would be sweet…

That is something to consider. Engineers in the US can earn a big salary soon after graduation. From that perspective, the Taipei offer may not be a great deal and could even put you at a disadvantage when you go back, since HR might take your previous salary into account when making an offer. This happened to me when I came back to the US. I got a seriously lowball offer off the bat, but fortunately the HR team was flexible so it worked out ok. Just had to convince them of the difference in COL.

So I don’t know if you are being low balled, and people in your specific position would be in a better position to answer. But you can certainly live comfortably in Taipei on that salary and rental allowance.

TSMC has doubled their market cap since beginning of 2019. They are growing and they have shit tons of cash. When they recruit an executive from the US market with really specialized knowledge, a family, and a mansion (by Taiwan standards) in Texas, then that person needs at least $150k/month housing allowance if not more to be convinced to make the move. So that’s who is willing to pay.

Or, even more often, it’s a TSMC supplier, paying big bucks to get the best talent so they can maintain their lucrative contracts with TSMC.

Taiwanese oligarchs not so much, I think they’d just buy property, or more likely, they’ve already bought lots of property long ago and can just live in that, hence why they’re an oligarch in the first place…

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Yeah, that was my thinking. If you earn that much, buying makes more sense. I mean, they really have to sugar coat it for me to pay that much…if I could. And so far I am not impressed with the pickings.

Then sorry about the previous posts. Now look what you can get for 78k [整層住家]遠雄天母14樓景觀戶(忠誠路巷內) - 591租屋網
Not bad isn’t it?

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Not bad if you want to live in a Versace showroom.

If you want to live in an apartment with tasteful furnishings and sensible room layout, good luck with that at any price in Taiwan.

It’s either an orgy of over-the-top bling bling at the high end, or a mess of institutional white-lit dilapidated shitboxes at the low end, and basically nothing in between.

Housing stock is the only thing about Taiwan that truly drives me nuts.

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This x10000. https://rent.591.com.tw/rent-detail-9720866.html is a low-end attempt at a gaudy mess. Only after living in Taiwan for a while could something like this be considered “not bad”.

For $78K, you can find very nice apartments in many major American cities and “normal” apartments in even expensive American cities, although you won’t get 3br. And don’t even look at what $78K gets you in a place like HCMC or KL.

I don’t know why Taiwanese like to imagine they are living in dodgy motels.:sunglasses:

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When I said “not bad” I obviously meant for Taiwanese standards, I don’t think many of us would complain living in a place like this.
But of course OP is free to spend 120k monthly to find something he really likes.

Unless you are a Trump.

Even $120K doesn’t guarantee you a “normal” apartment in Taiwan. In all price ranges, it’s difficult to find quality here. Probably the worst thing about living in Taiwan.

LMAO