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 
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I’ve heard that occasionally happens here…
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Trolling would be pretty sad 
- 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 
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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.
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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
Just look at the examples in my post above. In every price range it takes work to find apartments here that are clean, don’t have a Kafkaesque layout and aren’t being used as storage for the furniture of the landlord’s great great great great great uncle who lived during the Qing dynasty. Higher price gets you more space and better location but not necessarily higheroverall quality.
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One day, I will win the lottery and I will start destroying every s***hole form of housing in the city of Taipei (That pretty much means the whole city…). I will rebuild apartments that actually have windows and sensible layouts. None of the plastic diamonds and crap looking fake marble or whatever walls. There will be cooking spaces, even in the 10 ping apartments. They will be apartments in the US sense of the word – you rent the space in the building from the central office which manages everything in the building, not from random slumlords who don’t even know where their own properties are. Somehow, I’d have an amazing management team. And there would be no adding windows to balconies or putting bedrooms where the kitchen was. What there is is what you get. But no one would be on board with that because 99% of the problem with housing here is that the first build was an investment, not for housing, and the next person to move in just has to deal with the mess and passes that on to the next unfortunate soul who thinks moving in is a good idea. So a solely “for rentals only” apartment complex, no matter how much it might appeal to Mr. 90k/month (or the rest of us just looking for a space that makes any sense at all), is mostly out of the question in this market
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The single most annoying thing about local landlords.
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You wanna destroy the soul and charm of the city? 
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