Curious about some costs in Taipei

I’ve googled a few questions I have about costs in Taiwan but found conflicting and/or insufficient answers, so I decided to ask here. I’m wondering about the costs of:

1 Monthly or other long-term metro/transport card in Taipei. I’ll be a student at the NTNU Mandarin Training Center, so will I get a student price?

  1. Cost for cell phone plan (probably pay as you go, whatever is cheapest).
  2. Average cost for internet in an apartment.
  3. Cost for apartment utilities (electricity, water etc.)
  4. Any other major non-obvious costs

Thanks.

Easycard - there is some fairly odd limited discount for students, but the MRT is cheap and the buses are shockingly cheap. I was there for a month and went through about 1200 TWD in credit on it - that was spending all day on MRT’s and buses basically, as I had no job or whatever.

https://www.easycard.com.tw/en/easycard?cls=1521769569&id=1521771333

FarEastOne do a one month rolling pay-in-advance contract thing, It’s 1000 TWD for a month, and totally unlimited calls and data. All you need is your passport (foreign is fine), address in Taiwan and when you are leaving.

No idea about the rest of it, but if you have unlimited mobile internet, I would hotspot that if I was a student.

Important to look into the medical registration situation, you don’t want to be on the arse end of dealing with that.

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When I did a forum search

https://tw.forumosa.com/search?context=topic&context_id=187933&q=Cost%20of%20living%20taipei&skip_context=true

Best of Luck

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MRT fare can be found here. No student price, iirc.

Bus is 15NTD for one ride. Student price is 12NTD. You should pay twice for long distance.

Ubike is 10NTD per 30 min within the first 4 hours. 20NTD per 30 min between 4 to 8 hours. 40NTD per 30min after 8 hours. First 30min is free if you start from new taipei city, 5NTD if you start from Taipei.

monthly pass is $1280NTD for MRT and bus, and 30min / day ubike in Taipei.

Taxi is 150 ~ 300NTD for most transportation within Taipei. About 1200NTD from Taoyuan airport to Taipei main station?

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Depends if you need unlimited data or not. Taiwan Mobile (台灣大哥大) prepaid is 1000nt for 6 months with 36gb.

GT4G offers a monthly term with unlimited 4G for $299/m no contract.

t-star is 288 unlimeted internet data for student < 25 or 388 no-student for a year contract. The non-obvious costs would be the sh*t NTNU MTC is, if you don’t like teacher swap until you find a good teacher, but still, they get lazy after a few weeks.

Cell Phone - 899 For FET Unlimited Data pre-paid. I never really made personal calls in TW and work calls were done through my work phone.

Transport - 1280 per month card works well, depends on how much you travel though for it to be worth it.

Internet - I was paying something like 835 a month for home internet through Hi-Net, speed was great, 60 download, 20 upload.

Utilities - varies a lot, obviously Electricity gets higher in Summer due to Air Conditioning running a fair bit.

Sorry, is this in American dollars or ntd? Also I’m assuming it’s 388 per month?

yes 388 nt per month