9 months Stuck in Taiwan during the pandemic – Did we break the bank?

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)

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:

Category	Total Spend	% of Grand Total
Accommodation	$9,323	50.3%
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%
	$15,219	82.2%

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)

• Airbnb April (in Ximen district)
• Airbnb May (in Ximen district)
• Airbnb June in Hualien
• Airbnb June in Kaohsiung
• Airbnb June in Taichung
• Airbnb July-September in Taipei
• Airbnb October in Tainan

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).

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.