Thursday, January 7, 2016

Contracts and Apartments

“Love all but trust few.”
-William Shakespeare  
Our school

Lessons Learned
-       Be very careful with your working contract. The wording can be misleading and you might be getting something totally different to what you expect
-      -  In Taiwan you typically paid the first month’s rent and the last two months’ rent. Contracts typically last for a year and if they are broken you may not get that money back.  

This is going to be a post about the things that are less positive and what better place to start than to talk about our job. We work at a cram school called American Eagle Institute. I guess it is a well-known school here in Taiwan and it seemed like a good place to work. To be honest it is not that horrible but we ran into a couple surprises when we first arrived in the country. Looking at our contract initially I read that our “employer will prepare accommodation with a rent of NT 10,000 (about $300 USD) per month…” We assumed that we would be provided a stipend on top of our monthly wage. After we arrived to Taiwan and when we were looking at our first apartment with our recruiter I asked her about the NT 10,000 and said that since my fiancée and I will be getting this money it shouldn’t be a problem to pay a little extra to get a nicer place. She paused for a minute and said that we won’t get that money and American Eagle should take that part out of the contract because it is confusing.  At this time we just arrived to the country and were scraping together our money to get here and now we learn that we aren’t getting the rent stipend that we thought we would. There was nothing we could do but ask the recruiter to ask if we could look at cheaper places.

At the time we were staying with another foreigner in Taoyuan City about an hour away and we were starting work in one day. This meant that we had to find an apartment in one day. So, I went on 591.com.tw (probably the best site to find apartments in Taiwan but you need to use Google Chrome to translate). I found one small reasonably priced place and sent a link to our recruiter in hopes that we would find something soon.
The next day we went to the hospital to get our health check done. This is a requirement for your Alien Registration Card or ARC. This is a standard piece of documentation and the process is similar in many countries. Basically you are required to get a chest x-ray to check to see if you have TB, an eye exam and a blood test to see if you have HIV / AIDS.

The view of the outside

The entrance of our home 
After the health check we went to look at an apartment that cost 14,000 NT a month, plus a 7,000 NT realtor's fee. That's where we found out that the wording in the contract was a bit deceiving, which was really a bummer because as we found that out, we were standing in a beautiful apartment, on the 7th floor, with an amazing balcony with a garden. It was ideal. Of course we could not afford it, and we left reluctantly. By this point our recruiter had only lined up more expensive places, so we were disappointed with the whole process. We next went to an apartment quite far away from the school, about 3 miles away. That doesn't sound far compared to commute times in the US but at that point we didn't have a scooter and had no idea how to use the buses. There are no sidewalks here, at least where we live. A bit discouraging. We went in a little more optimistic though since the apartment was 9,000 NT. The apartment was not in a new building. The view was the only good thing. The kitchen was very very bare.

The next day we went to look at another apartment, but at this point our recruiter had not looked into anything cheaper as we had requested. The next apartment took a while to find but eventually we got there. The place looked okay at first glance. It had plenty of room and looked fairly clean. It was a little noisy because it was next to a busy road that has a constant flow of large shipping trucks and scooters that have defining exhaust. The place was 11,000 NT (about $320). Since we started work the next day and the recruiter didn’t have any time to show us any more places so we had to settle for something that was not quite ideal and sign a year contract for this apartment. While we were signing our contract we learned that in Taiwan you paid three months of rent in advance not just two. Also, rental contracts are one year and if you break your contract you might not get that money back. While making this agreement you finalize the agreement by fingerprinting each page with red ink. This is done in combination with your signature. It was basically one of the most official rental contracts I have ever signed.
Our contract for the apartment



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