When I was planning to move from UK to Taiwan over three years ago, I didn't have much idea about what life would be like out here. I had been to the capital Taipei a few times before, and that was it. This time, I wasn't even going to be staying at Taipei. I planned to stay at a city called Taichung 160km down south, a city that I've never been before and knew nothing about. In fact, I knew very little about Taiwan itself. Moving here just seemed like a nice thing to do. Quite a big decision to make based on gut feel, I guess.
For those who know little or nothing about Taiwan like me, let me give you a bit of quick overview. This is what it looks like when you overlay the UK over it. UK is about 7 times larger than Taiwan (243,610 sq km vs 35,980 sq km) and has roughly 2.5 time more population (64m vs 24m). Here's another interesting fact I found out since I I arrived in Taiwan. UK has around 130 -140 universities, depending on the definition. And guess how many Taiwan has? Give or take 160!!!
Credit : https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com
Another thing that I didn't know, and was kinda important, was the cost of living. Based on intuition, I figured it would be cheaper, just because London is London, and Taiwan is in Asia. But how accurate was my intuition, and if so, how much cheaper? I'm a spreadsheet person and needed facts to build my 40 year plan (yup, I really did that when I made my move). That's when I found this really useful website called Numbeo.
It compares the cost of living (in addition to other metrics) for a basket of products and services for diffferent cities in different countries. And the beauty of it, is that it is based on data submitted by the users, so it is real up to date data, and not government compiled data which may be a few months out of date. Of course, the downside of this is that you tend to get quite accurate data for big popular cities, but for less popular cities they data may not be that accurate. For example, there were only 52 contibutions over the past 18 months for Taichung. Nevertheless, it gave me a base to work on. I was happy to see that my intuition was accurate the and parity big enough to justify my move. I can't remember the exact figure three years ago, but it was something like 50% cheaper. The latest data says its 55% cheaper.
Now I had all the data in hand, I built my 40 year plan and found that I could survive quiet comfortably in Taiwan after I quit my job. Actually, at that stage, I was a bit fed up with work and was going to quit anyway. So I packed what was left in my life into these two packages and the suitcases above, and started a new life.
Luckily the numbers worked for me. If not I would have to find a job in Taiwan, or hope for Steem to moon - not that I knew about Steem three years ago. If I did, I probably would be a whale by now and not have pray and hope for a whale upvote everytime I press the publish button 😓
Let the praying start now.
Check out all my travel posts here on Steemit Worldmap, and also my latest project @LadiesOfAsia where we share fun and cultural diversity across Asia Pacific.
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