How much money does a family need per month in Taiwan if they have two kids? Basically just a household with 2 adults and 2 kids living an ordinary life.
Wow this one has been done to death on here.
It really depends on so many factors.
How old are your kids?
What stage in schooling are they at?
Do you plan on having a car?
Renting or home ownership?
How much debt do you have?
What sort of health issues do your family members have?
Can you be content eating local food or do you need food closer to what you eat from your home country?
Etc etc etc
I would say nothing less than 150,000 per month. That should be enough for a modest home, tuition for school, monthly parking fee, car payment, food, phone / internet, utilities and a tiny savings.
Newborns.
No need for a car.
Renting.
No debt.
No health issues.
Eating mostly local food.
Good friend of mine just found out he’s having twins and we are trying to work some things out.
Planning on Pre-K? Add tuition to your costs. No Pre-K and a daytime Nanny instead? Add 16 to 20K.
Given your answers, I’d lower it to 100,000 a month
Plenty of support from his wife’s family.
Thanks for the info.
FYI, mine is a family of 4. One newborn, one under 5 and in Pre-K, a dog, and we both work (edit: My wife and I, not the dog). We own our home and car. We get by okay with roughly 130,000 a month. Our savings is quite modest and we would like to increase our income to 150K to pad our savings for the future. But, 130K allows us to live comfortably yet modestly.
There’s appropriate and then there’s realistic. For many people those numbers aren’t realistic in Taiwan.
You can live okay on much less than those numbers outside of Taipei.
The average household income of a family of four is 1.6 million per annum so you can say it’s 1.6 million.
If you are talking about locals, they have family money to help and homes to share.
Foreigners have nothing but what they bring and earn. Anything less than what I said is really pushing it. You would be scraping by with little to no savings.
20,000 to 30,000 a month for a modest home in any major city (which is where the work is) leaves you with 70,000 a month for food, utilities, transportation, child care costs, entertainment, emergency funds and savings for retirement, etc. It goes fast. And that is all before tax.
Locals can make do with less because they have relations here as a safety and support net.
Our kids are also very young. Family of four. No car. No tuition. We live very frugally.
I’ve posted our budget before.
Ideally, we try to shoot for spending $50k/month but that never happens. Still working on that. The lowest we’ve actually spent is $67k. But we more often than not exceed $70k. Our income is just over $100k after tax.