[quote=“Icon, post:18, topic:155018, full:true”]BTW, bobyguards also get pretty niffty packages.
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Yeah, I’m kind of torn here.
I’m not sure if Tía is talking about protection for her little ratdog Bobby, or some means of defending her pechos.
In the US, from 1895 to 2014, the average rate of appreciation on home ownership, adjusted for inflation, is 1.85% which is pretty terrible. So as a regular investment, it stinks.
Yeah but remember who are actually expats: White western people, everybody else are immigrants.
In another survey, Taipei is firmly in the middle.
That report is remarkably bad. If you check the social security indice you’d see that Athens and Caracas are on top while Stockholm is in the bottom. It’s ridiculous.
I thought it was a bit odd that a dry cleaning company would take on a subject like that. 
The next time somebody tries to conduct one of these bullshit surveys, let’s game the system and propel South Sudan to no. 1.
Or even North Pingdong?
North Pingdong…
They got a lotta nice girls-ah
As Billy Gibbons would say…
The 2017 Internations expat report (their 2016 report is what this topic was originally about) did get published a week ago and they ranked Taiwan the 4th best expat destination after Mexico and some random place like Bahrain.
Taiwan doesn’t even make top 10 in a legitimate survey. HSBC has been conducting this survey for many years and is recognized as expert.
http://www.hsbc.com/news-and-insight/media-resources/media-releases/2017/hsbc-expat-explorer-2017
I almost did a morning coffee spit take at the mention of “HSBC” and “expert” in the same sentence. But to be fair, their report indeed appears to be solid. At least it shows their methodology including the number of respondents and what they do for a living, unlike the mysterious Internations thing.
Taiwan comes in at No. 18 in the HSBC report, which sounds more realistic.
Takeaways from the Taiwan page are that it sucks for economics (low pay and mainly teaching jobs), which rings true, but that it ranks higher than most countries as a planned retirement destination for working expats. I suspect the cheap cost of living and the fact that most of the respondents are males from North America and Europe might have something to do with the latter point. But it sounds about right.
As voted for by…Taiwanese every year. 
i think there is selection bias in this survey.
if you are an expat with a company package covering fancy international school for kids, 90,000 nt rent allowance, and an EU salary, Taiwan is heaven.
if you are just a mere “foreigner” living here and paying for everything out of pocket, its nice, but not world’s number 1.
