2020 will remain a year that many of us will remember for so many reasons since it probably did not turn out like originally planned. For us as nomads, we will remember this year as the year where we had to pause nomading, cancel our plans to live in 10 countries, and be grounded in one country. Luckily for us, that country was Taiwan where we’ve been able to safely make our temporary residence until the world recovers from the pandemic. It would have been quite hard for us to expect such a great outcome, especially as we rushed out of Bali, Indonesia to come find shelter here in Taiwan.

We are very grateful for the outstanding work that Taiwan has done to keep all its residents safe during this unprecedented global pandemic and we are also grateful that we as nomads can choose where we want to stay.

In this article, we won’t go over all the wonders of Taiwan that we already covered at length (if you are new to our blog, make sure to check out our “stuck in Taiwan” blog post for some great insights about Taiwan and what kept us busy in 2020).

Instead, today we will be digging into our expenses in Taiwan – during the pandemic for the past 9 months. Are you ready to dig into our numbers? 

Overall spending

While most people were able to reduce their spend for 2020 due to the lack of entertainment, international transportation, and overall travel expenses, we did not really get affected by the pandemic here (read more about how Taiwan has been handling the pandemic). So besides our 2 weeks quarantine, we pretty much kept our slow travel activities as usual.



How much did we spend in Taiwan? Let’s start with the big picture before digging into the details. We arrived in Taiwan on March 16th and I calculated our spending as of December 6th, which is 265 days or nearly 9 months (8.85 to be exact). Here is a top-level breakdown of our spending (as a couple)

Plane aside, we did travel to all of these places (and their surrounding in 2020)
Our Spending Overall in Taiwan for 2020

Over these 9 months, the two of us spent a total of $18,522 in Taiwan (or ~$25 K / year if we adjusted this number over a 12 month period). This makes Taiwan quite an affordable country to live, especially for the high quality of life and access to great activities for both city folks and nature lovers.

Notes:
– Why are we distinguishing between total cost and living cost? We have this split because we like to track living costs on its own as we are building a cost of living index in each country we visit so we have an idea what our budget would be if we would like to spend an extended period of time in a city we fall in love with).
– What are non-living expenses? They are pretty much what you would expect, expenses that are not related to the specific place you are staying at (like travel gear we keep with us, international transportation, gifts to others…). We will cover this later!  

Spending per category

Let’s take a look at how we spent $18,500 USD during these 9 months in Taiwan by breaking it down into 18 spending categories from the largest to the smallest one:

While most of our income have been largely spent between the big three: accommodation + food + transportation, it is interesting to notice how much each of these categories represent towards our total spend:

CategoryTotal Spend% of Grand Total
Accommodation$9,32350.3%
Food
(Groceries + Dining out + Food Delivery + Snacks)
$1,965+$1,667+$390+$368
=$4,390
23.7%
Transportation (Local + Intercity)$1,070+$428
=$1,498
8.1%
$15,21982.2%
Our big Three spending category make for more than 80% of our total spend


We managed to spend 50% of our budget on accommodation (which is a first for us, as we usually are closer to a 33% in accomodation). Also the top three represent more than 80% of our spending, which is why we like to focus on optimizing these rather than tracking closely every single category. Actually we haven’t really looked much at our budget this year, besides making sure we get our accomodation under control and that spending is within reason.

Let’s look at our top spending categories:

Accommodation: $9,323 over the period (or ~$1,123 / month)

Our monthly accommodation budget of ~$1,123 / month is way less than what we used to pay on rent back in San Francisco, and it is still lower than the average rent in the USA. From our observation, this is probably average for living in the center of Taipei. You can definitely find cheaper if you sign a lease or live a bit outside of the city but may also compromise on things like furniture, kitchen, and lighting. You can also definitely go higher end and stay in newer buildings with a reception area or get multiple bedrooms. Where you live will be the biggest contributor to your overall spend.

In our case, we did not sign up for a 6-month lease because we wanted the flexibility to explore the island at our own slow travel pace. But while exclusively relying on Airbnb in 2020, we’ve been able to negotiate great rent as the number of tourists has obviously been lower this year. That being said, a lot of locals could not travel internationally as well so the island has been quite busy with local travel.

Here are a few pictures of some of the places we’ve stayed at along with the Airbnb apartments if you want more information about each of them.

Here is our favorite Airbnb we stayed at since we’ve been in Taiwan:

And here is the entire list of places we’ve booked in 2020 (so far)

Note: If you want to know more about how we negotiate our Airbnb rental, read our Ultimate Guide to Save Money with AirBnB!! 

Food: $4,390 over the period (or ~$383 / month)

Have you tried Taiwanese food? It is really good and we definitely did not miss out on trying as much as we could, mostly at crowded night markets and a few restaurants. Let’s look at how much we spent eating out at a proper restaurant, at the street markets and how much we spent cooking at home. 

Restaurant dining: $1,67 over the period (or $89 / month)

We have been going out to eat at a restaurant 172 times! Which means we’ve been eating out at least every other day on average (over the 265 day period). This is less than $10 USD for the two of us on average (and we have been at some fine dining places so you can assume that our daily average is much lower than that as food is really affordable here).  

Food delivery + eating out at street markets: $390 over the period (or $83 / month)

This covers 99 expenses that were split between our 2 weeks quarantine food deliveries (13 deliveries for a total of ~$150) and street food (86 expenses for a total of ~$250). This makes our average purchase at the street/night markets less than $3! Way to go Taiwan and your amazing and clean street food.

Treats at coffee shops: $368 over the period (or 23 / months)

This is mostly the occasional tea or snacks we will get at a coffee shop while hanging out with friends or Mr. NN’s pearl milk tea obsession! During that period, I’ve had 69 of these yummy drinks – at $1.5 a pop they are hard to resist (and ordering them sugar-free has been so far helping preserve my waistline).

I just can’t resist that drink!

Eating in: $1,965 over the period (or $188 / month)

While it is really easy here to eat out ALL THE TIME, We prioritize our health above all so we also make sure to eat at home as much as possible. This helps balance out when we fast travel and eat out every single meal because we often don’t have a kitchen. When we cook, we love going to the local traditional market (with our zero waste kit) to enjoy great and really affordable produce to eat in season and enjoy really yummy food.

ADD SOME FOOD PICTURES 

Transportation: $1498 over the period (or $136 / month)

Taiwan has some of the best public transportation (city bikes, subway, buses, train, high-speed rail) we’ve used at their price point. It is like being in Japan but paying a fraction of the cost! We exclusively use public transportation and it is really convenient and affordable here in Taiwan.

Entertainment: $737 over the period (or $62 / month)

This is mostly for some rentals, guided tours and scuba diving and as you can see, it isn’t much. Our most common activities in Taiwan so far have been focusing on hiking and river tracing. Both activities are free besides the initial cost of gear and paying for public transportation, which make us pretty lean on this budget category.   

International Health Insurance: nearly $0

You might have noticed that we did not spend anything on health insurance this year. It turns out that we prepaid our International Health Insurance in July 2019 that ran until July 1st 2020. Since healthcare in Taiwan is pretty cheap (read our true cost of healthcare as nomads), we decided to save $3K in coverage that should be more than we need as long as we stay in Taiwan. We can also later subscribe to the national health care which is really good.

Spending per destination

Let’s now take a look at all the places we’ve visited while in Taiwan. We’ve put together the cost of living for each of the places with the daily budget. This cost of living represented is per person so we can normalize the data across destinations.

Spending per month

When the pandemic hit, we were really nervous financially and set ourselves a budget of $1,500 a month that we did not accomplish although it’s doable in Taiwan. In the end, we did not have to worry about getting through a financial crisis so we still feel quite good finishing the year under our year 1 and year 2 of travel. It’s hard to make future plans but we got a 3-year residency to stay in Taiwan for the foreseeable future.

Here is our month by month spending: (note that March and December are only partial months).

How much does it cost to live in various cities in Taiwan?

While Taipei is by far the most expensive city, from our time spent exploring other cities on both east and west coast, here are our estimated yearly cost of living in each of these locations.

As we are tracking living costs in each country we’ve been traveling to, we can estimate what a full year of living in the country would be like. 

As you can see from the list above, most of the places in Taiwan are cheaper than Taipei. One remark: Ludao (which is also called Green Island) is an island where we stayed just a week that has pricey accommodation. And we also spent on a few dives which put it at the top of the list but real cost of living there would be much lower than this estimation.    

Want more details?

If you are interested to get more details about the budget related to the place we’ve visited in Taiwan, please take a look at both our destination reports,  weekend guides and day trip guides. When possible we also share detailed spreadsheets with both consolidated and line by line items of what we’ve spent.

Note: All of the screenshots in this article came from our FREE Travel tool that we launched in late 2019. By signing-up, you will gain full access to all of our expenses and also be able to use the tool to track all of your travel expenses.

Our bottom line

So did we break the bank in Taiwan during the pandemic? Well, we are really grateful to have chosen Taiwan to shelter during the pandemic and while we did spend more than our original budget, we did explore quite a lot so we don’t really feel that we broke the bank in 2020. We ended up being overly conservative with our original budget and in the end, we are happy our spend is within range of our previous years’ travel while enjoying a high quality of life.

Since we don’t know when international travel will resume, we will happily spend most (or all of?) 2021 in Taiwan exploring all of its wonders and it’s amazing food

So this is about it on our spending in Taiwan for 2020. What do you think? Does that budget align with your expectations from what we’ve been able to do? We would love to hear from you, so please leave us a comment in the comment section below.


Mr. Nomad Numbers

We are a couple who travel the world and want to inspire people to think differently about the life they can design for themselves through our journey.

10 Comments

K · December 7, 2020 at 7:23 pm

Hey Mr. and Mrs. NN! K here from Chautauqua. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying your Taiwan updates this year… with a moderate amount of envy. 😉

One question about your decision to let health insurance lapse: If you’re still paying taxes in the US, have you considered the implications for ACA penalties? With your FI income, it may be much cheaper to get on a subsidized Covered California (Obamacare) plan rather than pay the penalty. Plus then you’ll be covered when you visit the US.

In case it’s helpful, my friend Ariana helps people sign up for Covered CA for free: https://askariana.com/

    Mr. Nomad Numbers · December 8, 2020 at 10:29 am

    Hi K! Glad to hear back and glad that you have been enjoying our updates! As for the ACA, this is a good point. For us, we plan to become Taiwan residents (from a tax reporting standpoint) now that we have been living in Taiwan for more than 183 days. We will still file tax in the USA because we have to, but we don’t plan to claim residency in California anymore (as long as we are Taiwanese residents). This means that we should not need coverage for health insurance, right? Also, as far as ACA penalties are concerns, I thought those penalities went away last year in California? Are we missing something? Do you think we should still keep coverage while resident outside of the state? It’s great to hear that you friends can provide people with free coverage!

FIRECracker · December 8, 2020 at 1:13 am

Well done, guys! Love Taiwan and super jealous that you got to ride out the pandemic in such an amazing place. My mouth is watering just thinking about all my favorite night market snacks in Tainan. Great job getting your budget to be so low! We spent very little this year too but only because everything is closed! You still managed to do it with everything open in Taiwan. I’m impressed.

    Mr. Nomad Numbers · December 8, 2020 at 10:34 am

    Great to hear from you, Kristy! Keep in mind that this budget only covers 9 months of the year. That being said, with the first 3 months spent in Southeast Asia, we definitely expect to be below what we spent last year. We should probably be closer to 25K (USD) than the 30K (USD) we spent during our 2nd year of nomadic travel. As you know, it is really hard to spend a lot of money in SEA, and the same applies to Taiwan as well. As you’ve noticed 50% of our budget goes to accommodation which shows that everything else here is really cheap – while being very good too! The public infrastructure for example is a good example of that. We definitely love Taiwan and won’t mind keep exploring the country in 2021!

    Minh Pham · December 18, 2020 at 2:09 pm

    Hello!

    Thanks so much for the breakdown, I found it informative and also eye opening as we are also in a similar situation. We (husband, two boys, and I) are also slow traveling through Asia when Covid hit and have been ‘stuck’ in Taiwan since February. Taiwan has been great to us and we are so thankful that we are safe and able to enjoy the freedom to live a normal life!

    I also wanted to share our expenses as a family of four to give some perspectives. This is an average based o. Our 10 months here living in Taipei (3mos), Kaohsiung (3 months), Taichung (2 months), 2 mons traveling around the entire island staying mainly at hotels.

    Accommodation : 2 bedrooms/1 bath apartment @ avg 1,500/mo, hotels are usually $60ish per night (outlier was Sun Moon Lake @$150 per night)

    School Fees (private bilingual preschool) : avg $800/mo per child. 2 months when traveled we didn’t pay school fees otherwise they attended school.

    Kids Entertainment: indoor play area is costly in Taiwan, expect to pay $17 per child and $6 per adult. Taiwan is super hot or rains alot during the winter months so we ended up taking them to a play areas once a week. Amusement and water parks are about $20 per person. Museums are very cheap in Taiwan, under $5 per person.

    Food / Snack /Bubble Tea: this is an expense that is much higher than I thought and comparing our cost with yours this is where the biggest difference in our experience. We are averaging $71 per day on food. Realistically, if you enjoy international cuisine (pasta, pizza, Japanese Korean, Thai) a meal for two will be around 1,200 ntd or $42 usd. Taiwanese food will be about $20 (3 entrees). Fruits like grapes, apples, strawberries, blueberries are more expensive here due to being imported. Cheese and milk is also more expensive than back in Seattle. Most of our meals are eaten out besides breakfast so this put our food cost much higher as.

    Transportation : we rents a scooter monthly for avg of $200/mo, gas cost $30/mo. Car rental for $275 /wk including one way drop off fees.

    Gym membership : $60/mo per person (no sign up fee and no 12 months commitment)

    Total cost per month is around $6,000. More when we were traveling around. Our total cost since coming here is at $72,000.

    Hoping to provide a realistic report on what to expect to pay living in Taiwan and enjoy eating out ALOT and have children.

      Mr. Nomad Numbers · December 19, 2020 at 12:59 pm

      Thank you Minh for visiting our blog and sharing your expenses. This will be really useful for other readers that also plan to travel with a family! You guys are definitely spending more than we do but you also have a family and are definitely truly enjoying the food scene here!

      An average of $1,500 / month for a 2BR/1BA apartment seems really good! Did you manage to also get a proper kitchen? This was one of our big challenges at the beginning (as we love cooking) but we then figured out what to look for 🙂

      As for our food, we have been practicing Intermittent Fasting for many years so never eat breakfast. That being said, we do end up eating pretty much the same amount of calories so not sure how much this reduces our food budget. We also like to rely on seasonal/local produce which might reduce our bill and love the local Taiwanese food, which is definitely really cheap.

Impersonal Finances · December 17, 2020 at 7:42 am

Seems like there are worse places to be stuck for the pandemic! Great to be in a place where good food is so cheap. What was this fancy bar that you spent a whole $1.83 for the year!?

    Mr. Nomad Numbers · December 17, 2020 at 8:36 am

    Thanks for your comment! These $1.83 were spent on an alcoholic beverage (a rarety in the NN’s household) at the fancy 7-Eleven you might have heard about 🙂

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