Once a month my credit card statement drops on the mat, and I get a chance to peruse my spending that previous month. Actually, this month’s spending was quite minimal and mostly anticipated.
(All Currencies: NTD).
First, we had a nice meal at the beginning of our annual break. That came in at $1518 for two, including a buffet, a nicely prepared main course, and 10% service charge. The restaurant is called Dante’s and is located inside the campus of Taipei National University of the Arts! They serve Italian, French and American style cooking with fresh local and imported ingredients. On Saturdays, they are SUPER busy, and the staff need a bit of politeness training… but we go for the food anyway! We’ll go there if you visit me in Tamsui!
Second item on the list was an odd one: a 2-year domain purchase of my business site in Chinese. This was provided by UnicodeDN and cost me the grand sum of $1314. I’m now thinking of adding another with another variation of our company name.
Third is our regular payment: a combined life insurance and investment product from Cigna. I counselled my wife NOT to buy this, but she didn’t buy it for the obvious reasons. She felt that she was helping her sister go through a rough patch! And indeed her sister has done fabulously and gone on to become a local financial adviser, having passed some tough exams (and that’s one thing Taiwanese are good at: setting exams!). We are definitely not making a lot of money out of this one, as in general, such products don’t offer good value: there are just too many ways to take commissions, including a standard commission, unit transfer fees, I’m sure there’s a currency commission, and, most certainly, there is a credit card fee, of course! In fact, once you consider all of this, I’m surprised that we don’t OWE Cigna money for this product.
Fourth and Fifth payments are for two nights in different hotels while we had a three-day trip to some of the mountains around Lala Mountain in Taoyuen County. I’ve included a You-Tube video for you to get some idea what the area is like. Though the first night we stayed at a hotel near the Yi-lan, in a tourist zone area. Quite pleasant on the East Coast overall, I have to say. Then we drove up to the LaLa Mountain area where we stayed at another hotel called MingChih National Forestry Resort. Neither of these was particularly cheap. But getting a chance to stay there was wonderful, and we were lucky to get a vacancy on the spot. We had a little cabin with NO airconditioning… it was VERY cool outside, in fact about 21C, compared to down on the plains where the temperature and humidity were much higher. Total cost: $6170 for both nights.
There were no penalties or interest charges to pay off this month, either. That left us with the grand total of $11,002 to pay on our credit card, or we could pay the minimum balance of $1100. We also earned 551 bonus points to add to our total. Naturally, we paid it off entirely. A quick look at the calculator below showed us why: we saved about $606 doing this, and it would have been paid off in a year exactly.
How was your August Credit Card spending? Did you spend wisely or blow your budget? Did you pay it off at once or slowly? Use the calculator to find out how much you would spend. Don’t worry, you can simply ignore the British Pound sign and assume dollars or euros.
We achieved an amazing 80% on that scale, once I tell you the story, you’ll understand. Perhaps then you’ll see what we did wrong… and why things are better now…
o explain, The Language School Business in Taiwan is a fiercely competitive business with numerous chains and independents. Of course, we are the latter category. There are also a lot of crossover businesses, schools who provide other services that also provide language teaching. This can be done in a number of ways: after-school classes with English, kindergarten with English, English and other subjects, and general cram schools. Schools can also be categorized by the age of students, e.g. children and adults, kindergarten and children, children and teenagers. So there are a number of ways to look at the market. There are of course language schools that teach a number of languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
Our school has focused on solely teaching English to children aged 6 to 16. We don’t mix our products with anything else. This has been both good and bad, but it makes us different from almost all of the schools in the immediate area who teach English, and from most of the schools in the surrounding area. We have achieved a good reputation for that subject teaching alone, BUT we sometimes lose students because we don’t offer after school care, or kindergarten, or whatever. Some parents really need the convenience of multi-service schools. However, we excel at preparing students for standard examinations in EFL (which are not compulsory), and we teach students to USE the language (you have no idea how rare that is in Taiwan!).
Challenges
A good example to illustrate: if a book has 100 pages, then it’s upper price tends to be restricted to about NT$200 or thereabouts (because that’s how much it costs to photocopy a page). Additional value can be extracted by adding color for the children, and CDs and so on. But in general, it can be very difficult to get purchasers to appreciate why a 50-page book costs more than a reasonable amount, almost regardless of what’s in the book.
In addition, from being a largely homegrown market with staples, like Hess Kindergartens, Joy Schools, Kojen, and a few others, increasingly foreign competitors are entering the marketplace, such as Shane Schools (from Japan), Geos (from Japan), PopularKids (from Singapore), etc.. Suffice to say, the international chains have few advantages in the local market, except perhaps deeper pockets than local companies. Local chains also operate in the same environment. All of them face the same typical problems. Therefore, in many areas of Taipei City and County, and around the island, local independent (or boutique) schools do well because they can compete very effectively on Quality of Service.