Curious about this since I’m trying to keep a budget… since we’re in Taiwan, we can talk money straight up point blank right?
Living costs tend to be ~ $30k
Rent - 8k (live in New Taipei)
Utilities -3k
Food - 10k
Other - 4 to 10k
Savings: Lucky to make 20-35k a month post tax
How about the other Forumosans? How does that compare to abroad(more interested in savings post tax,post expenses) ?
We’ve had discussions like this and someone inevitably says “you pay too much” and the next person says “you are living a crappy life if you don’t spend US$5,000 on fresh organic fruit from less than 1 food mile away.” But I’ll play ball.
Rent: 7,000
Food: 10,000 ±
Utilities: under 1,000
Phone: 1,200
Transport: 1,000 ±
Total: I don’t know, you tell me. I’m bad at math.
Rent: 33,000
food/meals out : 20,000
UK House costs: 40,000
Rally car costs : 40,000
holidays : 20,000
mobile: 3000
fuel: 3000
Electric/Gas Avg: 4000 (over the year)
probably forgotten some items…trying my best to save 50,000 a month but some months difficult.
[quote=“Hokwongwei”]We’ve had discussions like this and someone inevitably says “you pay too much” and the next person says “you are living a crappy life if you don’t spend US$5,000 on fresh organic fruit from less than 1 food mile away.” But I’ll play ball.
Rent: 7,000
Food: 10,000 ±
Utilities: under 1,000
Phone: 1,200
Transport: 1,000 ±
Total: I don’t know, you tell me. I’m bad at math.[/quote]
Thanks for putting it in perspective… just wondering if I’m getting poorer or richer and why.
I save about 60-70% of my paycheck each month…definitely one of the benefits of living in Taiwan.
Ahh, I just realized my situation’s kind of special, so take my numbers as a single guy’s numbers. The wife and I haven’t moved in together yet (believe me, we’re working on a solution) so we’re still doing our own separate living expenses. When we live together it could either go up or down, I really don’t know.
As a family of two that’s about to be three,one working and one stay at home we live well and save aprox nt$100,000 a month. It’s the only point of being in this country for us as we could not save anything back home with only one working
Yeah, we are in the same boat with only 1 working and two young kids, living in a decent 3bd apartment with security near a subway stop , I can still save a bunch of money, maybe 70k if we don’t take overseas vacation too much. That’s actually very impressive compared to people living back in Western Europe (but our lifestyle is not amazing either). However it’s really not easy to get a high paying job here even if you have good experience as many international companies don’t have a base here. I was also underpaid for many years so it all balances out.
The equation turns on its head when kids are older and if both parents work, cos women mostly make shit money here whereas there are many high paid women in the West. We would probably also have moved at this stage if I knew I could save overseas.
Rent: Too much (26k)
Tax: Too much
Food intake: Increasing daily (must be 20k)
Energy use: 10 MW (elec/gas/water/cable/internet/phones 6k)
Clothing and Incidentals: Constant shopping (don’t know)
Drink intake: Increasing daily (3k)
Car (3k)
Alcohol drink intake: Increasing even more daily (7-11 - 1k)
Classes:(7k)
Holidays (what are they)
Insurance costs: (8k)
Savings…at least I’m not drinking bar beer…yet!
I very much doubt we will be in Taiwan by that point, even tho she is the one with the good job already.
I’m not going to lie, that number made me jaw drop just a little bit.
I can think of a lot of expats who would be saving a LOT more. The whole thing is that if you get even a slightly good income in your home country and then get paid that income to come to Taiwan then the low cost of living let’s you save a lot of it. If you come to Taiwan and try to get a local job earning a local income then that is not easy. It often seems to get forgotten on this site that not everyone is a English teacher
I lived on about 20 thou and saved around 20 thou before my boyfriend moved here (splitting rent/costs) and before I quit my job (I’m now going into business for myself, APRC and open work permit in hand) and now hoping to save a lot more because I’ll be making a lot more.
I’m English but I say “math” because I don’t know how to say “maths”. Your tongue has to be in one place for “th” and a totally different place for “s”. How do you do it? This isn’t a joke, I seriously can’t figure it out.
I saved literally nothing for the first ten years (!) I lived here. That has changed dramatically in the last year, but I don’t want to jinx it by boasting.
I feel like generally the question shouldn’t be “how can I spend less?”, but “how can I earn more?”.
Yes how can one earn more is the key in a country like Taiwan, which is already fairly low cost.
That seems a bit unnecessarily harsh. I’m not an English teacher, but I work at a (very) local organization and therefore don’t have a great salary, though it’s a measure higher than local pay. You save much more each month than I even get paid. 
It was not intended to be harsh, I’m sorry you took it that way.
I’m constantly amazed how low local incomes are, it seems to me a very hard place for people to get ahead unless they have the good fortune to be In a expat work situation.
Eg I was talking to a local friend about how she would like to visit my country but when we started working out costs a three week holiday would have taken over five years dedicated saving.
Another friend,a abc who has what would be considered a very good local job but with his level of education would earn maybe four or five times as much in most western country’s-if not more. The cost of living is not THAT much cheeper in Taiwan.
Everyone has to make there own call about Taiwan. Is it a cool place for a extended working holiday? I personally would say yes.
Is it somewhere I would shift to make a new start in life, personally it’s not.
Other people will have other opinions, and finding them out is both interesting and educational.
Yep, I thought that post was a bit of order. Anybody saving more than 100k/mth on a salary in Taiwan, no matter foreigner or local, is really an outlier. Plenty of business people do it, but that’s different.
I’m not sure what your saying with this?
Maybe a outlier but is it really that hard to imagine getting paid a western middle class income while living in Taiwan allowing you to save such a amount?
It’s just hard to imagine getting paid a Western income while living in Taiwan at all. I’ve never personally met anyone on the “expat” package, so you guys are kind of like mythical creatures to me, especially since I have a surprisingly large number of friends who work at major foreign companies that employ absolutely zero foreigners.
I can only speak to my experience and the people I spoke to a few weeks ago. But when I spoke to the large companies here, they couldn’t bring in expats with “just a high salary” because that would undermine their entire system of compensation and create insane jealousy. You would be brought in as a random high level or whatever, which would pay well for Taiwan but nonetheless a Taiwanese salary so your counterparts think you get paid a solid, but not ridiculous salary. Say that ends up being 30,000 US a year. But then they write into your contract a special consideration bonus of one year salary at the middle of each year, which makes it 60,000 US, and then you can get options and profit sharing with a minimum guarantee of one years salary as well, ending up at 90k (at least), then you get year end bonuses with another half years salary bringing you up to 105k, then they cover your housing and transportation costs, bringing the value up to 110k, education for kids (if any), vacation/travel stipends, and so forth and so on. So a normal month would only have a Taiwanese salary of like 80kNT or something, but then a few times a year you get a massive influx of 1M NT. The Taiwanese counterparts, so long as you and HR keep quiet, dont’ know anything about the “expat package.”