Maybe, maybe not. They might be getting around the same amount or just slightly more. Any more than $3k or $4k/month in Taipei is just overkill. Hong Kong you would see bigger ones. In general though, housing allowance is becoming a thing of the past except at Director+ level, so you got lucky on that front.
But not Xinyi.
Anyways, an acquaintance did following, his wife (Taiwanese) bought a house and than he rented it with the housing allowance he got from company he worked for.
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Housing allowance doesn’t include paying mortgage for a house?
I think he means that they set up a rental contract from the wife (as the house would be in his wife’s name), and he gave this contract to the company to get his housing allowance.
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This makes no sense. No company paying you 100k is going to offer 82k as a housing allowance.
There will be internal considerations. For instance senior management, especially if they are expats ,might not want it established that a cheaper place can be found in Taipei. A lot of this stuff goes on in big companies.
The place I work gives me almost no benefits whatsoever except salary and standard bonuses. I did get a home internet allowance but local management (You can guess…) decided that was a perk too much, cost savings were there to be made, and cut it.
Do you know where I could find that officially (ideally in English, as Chinese legalize is a pain)? The contract I just signed said that I could take “up to ten unpaid days off per year, per the Labor Standards Act”. I wasn’t complaining cuz they’re letting me take some serious paid time off for grad school, but I’m not a fan of employers who cite laws that aren’t the law.
…but they have done? 
This forum is funny, someone says he gets 82k extra monthly for accommodation, which is hard to believe, someone replies “great, if I was you I would rent a 15k bedroom”.
Why is 82k hard to believe? It could easily happen in a foreign company that has a scale for overseas employees (East Asian housing allowance). The 15k rent post you are referring to is I believe someone who doesn’t know how big companies work - particularly in accounting.
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Ok, I started searching, let’s see, we have a couple of places for 150k, lemme look in Zhongshan for over 40k
Mmm, no swimming pool
I am not impressed. Let’s see Xinyi.
Oh, now you’re talking.
Yep, me likey.
This has potential. Alas, no swimming pool yet.
82k extra per month when the base salary is 100k doesn’t make sense, especially for someone who is 27 yo with 2 years experience, and especially when the guy is single and will live alone, adding to that in a city like Taipei, we are not talking about Singapore or Tokyo.
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No, it doesn’t make sense if you’re only thinking about Taiwan. Big organisations don’t set up overseas allowances specific to every country (recognised country or otherwise).
To be frank, all the companies I have worked with (average smaller one had 13,000 employees, biggest one around 450.000) have exactly different policies and allowances for each and every individual country they can relocate an employee, plus multipliers/dividers for adapting the salary to cost of living.
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OK. I’m an English teacher so don’t know. I’d assume housing allowance would be comparable to the home country.
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? 
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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