Hacking Student Loan Debt via Geoarbitrage
12-12-2013, 12:59 AM
I wanted to write some additional things about the actual financials of teaching English in Taiwan.
There are three main ways you can be in the country legally that would pertain to teaching English. You can get a visa/work permit through a job, you can eventually get permanent residency or you can have a marriage visa.
Most people would fall into the first category. In order to do this, you need to work a particular number of hours (I think it's 14/week) at a specific location. This location will appear on your identity card. This would mean that if you were caught working at another location, you could be deported. Supposedly, you can add an additional two places, for a total number of 32 hours/week. Again, anything not on your card is illegal.
How likely is it that you would get caught? How long is a piece of string? People do get caught, perhaps not often (most English teaching businesses are cutting corners and bribing the local cops, but occasionally someone pisses someone off or a local politician decides that it's time for a blitz). Maybe it would never happen to you, but maybe it would and that would throw your life into complete disorder.
All of this said, due to the hours involved (most language schools -- also known as cram schools or buxibans) classes are in the evenings, most likely from 4pm onwards (there are some earlier than that). This is true whether you're teaching kids or adults (not such a big segment of the market here). That means you could fit in 4 hours x 6 days (Saturday mornings) = 24 hours/week.
The market rate is 600-700NTD/hour. Higher hourly rates are fairly uncommon, lower hourly rates are somewhat common, especially the father south you go. 1USD = 29.6NTD (call it 30).
700NTD x 24 hours x 4.3 weeks = 72,240NTD/month
For the first 183 days of your first year, tax is about 20% (you would get some back if you didn't earn over a certain amount for the entire year). After that, it's about 5%.
So, for the first six months, you'd be looking at 72,240NTD x 80% = 57,793NTD/month.
Some caveats. Any time you don't work is time you don't get paid. National holidays, typhoon days, if you're sick, if you take a vacation, etc. mean lost income. Some jobs give certain bonuses (e.g. if all of your students sign up for the next course), but pretty much what you see is what you get. Many jobs also require unpaid overtime (yep, on a wage!) in the form of preparation, marking, doing demonstrations for prospective clients, end of year/Christmas/Halloween performances, etc. They will hold your legal status/work permit over your head like a sword for all of this. If you quit or are fired, you have two weeks to get another job that will sponsor your work permit.
Cost of living can vary tremendously, but to live a basic life (not excessive partying, no travel and no expensive hobbies), you're looking at about 25,000NTD/month, possibly more.
Here are some basic breakdowns of that:
Accommodation
Living in Taipei, 15,000NTD will get you a one person dog box. Outside of Taipei, it will get you a 2-3 bedroom apartment (so you could share) in a city. In a town/the countryside, you could pay anywhere from 3,000NTD-10,000NTD for your own house.
Food
This really depends upon what you want to eat. If you want to cook for yourself using local ingredients, you could get out of this for 200-300NTD/day. Meat, dairy and anything imported is going to run this up a lot.
People will tell you that you can eat out and pay 60NTD/meal. That's nonsense. Firstly, you'd have to be a skinny Asian chick to pay that. Secondly, eating out is crap here anyway for anything less than a few hundred per meal. It's going to be white rice and some unidentifiable, additive laden concoction (hence why the average person looks like shit here). If you're paleo, forget it, though local produce (when it's not full of chemicals) can be good value. Eating at any western establishment, you're still going to get fairly low quality food, but it's going to be way more expensive (300NTD+/meal).
So, you're looking at 6,000-9,000NTD/month for food if you don't want to eat absolute crap.
Utilities
Internet will cost you somewhere around 700-1,000/month. You could get out of a phone bill for about 300NTD/month. Water, electricity, gas are dirt cheap.
Transportation
Only Taipei and Gaoxiong/Kaohsiung (second largest city in the far south) have subway systems. Taipei's costs 20NTD-30NTD (I think, I don't use it that frequently) per one way trip. There is a national rail network that charges by distance. To go from one end of the island to the other you're looking at about 800NTD, if I remember correctly. There are also local buses (18NTD per one way trip, but it's been a while since I used one) and long distance buses that are slightly cheaper than the national railway. Getting around by public transport, especially outside of Taipei (the MRT -- subway, is good if where you want to go is near a station), is a major hassle. Taxis cost about 150NTD for 5-10km, depending upon traffic levels.
Most people get scooters, which can be picked up second hand from 5,000NTD+. Petrol is about 33NTD/litre. Scooters are a deathtrap though. I really wouldn't recommend riding one. I have had a couple of bad accidents. I now exclusively drive a car. It costs a few thousand per year for on road costs, and I picked it up for 50,000NTD, plus some repairs that took it up to 60,000NTD or so. (It's a basic Ford sedan.) You woudn't really want to run a car in most cities of Taiwan though. Traffic is infuriating at times.
Healthcare
I should have mentioned this above. Basically, it's deducted from your pay along with your tax, and your employer and the government pay most of it. It will cost you about 700-1,000NTD/month, depending upon how much you earn. A trip to a clinic or a check up at a dentist is 100-150NTD, which includes medicine. A non-emergency hospital consultation is 440NTD. Going to the emergency room costs about 700-900NTD (I can't remember exactly). Most non-cosmetic stuff is covered by the above and the quality of treatment is generally fairly good as many doctors, and most dentists, train overseas at some point. Some things are lacking (especially in areas such as sports medicine).
I'm not going to do a full break down of costs, but you can see that 25,000NTD/month is not unreasonable. Basically, anything imported is going to be more expensive than in the West. Just one quick word on this. Gyms are not great here and tend to be expensive and full of utter wankers doing bizarre things and hogging equipment. There isn't a proper gym culture here. Setting up your own home gym would cost multiples of what it would in the West unless you improvise. Supplements and so on are supposedly hideously expensive, though I can't say from experience.
So, you could save 57,793NTD - 25,000NTD = 22,793NTD/month. Not much, right?
Most people end up supplementing that working at a kindergarten in the mornings (the dreaded split shift which leads to a rather antisocial lifestyle). You could probably get up to another 15 hours/week working kindergarten. So, 700 x 15 x 4.3 x 0.8 = 36,120NTD/month.
However, working at kindergarten is illegal and would get you deported if you got caught. Again, it does happen, and it's a bit of a cliche of foreign workers hearing that an inspection is occurring and having to hide on the roof or climb down a fire escape.
There is a whole lot more about the ESL industry here (these are not the only options, but they constitute 90% of what's available, especially for newbies), but this is just a taster.
Under ideal conditions (i.e. no unpaid overtime, no time off, etc.), you could save about 2,000USD/month in the first six months for 39 hours of teaching each week, but you'd be running the risk of deportation to do so. Is that a good deal? That's for you to decide, but it's not to me, which is why I only did it for a very short time many years ago.
The tales of big money you have likely heard either consist of people working in particular niches, running their own show, or cutting a lot of corners, working a lot of illegal hours and leading fairly crappy lives.