Taiwan Life Calculator
Self-checks for financial health and stress, with every number marked as official or estimated
Tap the image to open the tool ↗Everyone has wondered where their income puts them. Plenty of ranking calculators promise an answer, but most hand you one vague percentage, never say where it came from, and quietly treat salary, taxable income and wealth as the same thing. The Taiwan Life Calculator keeps the numbers that can be matched against official percentile data apart from the ones that can only be graded by ratio or estimated. This page covers its two calculators, how each score is produced, and which numbers should not be read as a ranking.
The calculators are in Traditional Chinese and use Taiwan's official statistics, so they are most meaningful if your income and assets are in Taiwan.
Open the Taiwan Life Calculator ↗
Two calculators
- Financial health calculator: from your income, assets, debt, property and monthly spending, it scores five areas (earning power, net worth, leverage and risk, cash flow and safety, and freedom), combines them into a financial health score from 0 to 100, and maps that score to a named stage.
- Stress calculator: 28 self-report questions split between external stressors and internal resources, producing a stress index and a report.
Both are custom scores. Neither is an official nationwide percentile ranking or a clinical diagnosis, and both are meant for self-reflection only.
How the five financial areas are scored
Only two of the five areas are real percentiles against official data. The other three are graded by ratio:
| Area | Weight | How it is calculated | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earning power | 18% | Annualised monthly salary plus yearly passive income, against the DGBAS percentiles for employee earnings, by age group | Official percentile, capped at 99.99 |
| Net worth | 24% | Cash, investments and home equity minus other debt, against the household net worth percentiles in the DGBAS household wealth distribution statistics | Official percentile |
| Leverage and risk | 18% | Debt to assets, monthly repayments to income and property concentration, with thresholds taken from the central bank and the Ministry of the Interior | Graded by ratio; there is no official percentile data for these personal ratios |
| Cash flow and safety | 20% | Monthly surplus rate and how many months your cash covers, with 3 to 6 months as the target range | Graded by ratio and months |
| Freedom | 20% | FIRE progress using the 4% rule, months of runway and cash flow self-sufficiency | Entirely estimated |
The five scores are weighted into the financial health score, which is then mapped to a named stage. The score is custom, so 58 does not mean you are ahead of 58% of people. Numbers marked EST on screen are estimates, and the ⓘ next to each item explains the method and the year of the data.
Two more figures are shown but not scored: the house price to income ratio and the mortgage burden ratio for your county or city, from the Ministry of the Interior's housing affordability indicators.
Earning power and net worth compare against different groups
These two are the easiest to misread, because they are measured against different populations:
- Earning power compares a person's yearly flow: how much you earn, against the earnings of employees in your age group.
- Net worth compares a household's stock: how much you own, against the net worth of households across Taiwan. Official wealth statistics are collected per household, so that is the default; there is also a personal estimate mode, but that is extrapolated rather than official.
A high earning percentile next to a low net worth percentile is not a contradiction. It is typical early in a career, before assets have had time to build up. Read the two separately rather than averaging them into one ranking.
What a percentile means
A percentile of 95 means you are ahead of 95% of the comparison group, roughly fifth out of a hundred. It only applies to earning power and net worth, the two areas with official percentile data.
The official data thins out near the top, so the tool caps percentiles at 99.99 and marks anything without official point data as an estimate. Treat numbers near the top as a sense of scale, not an exact position.
The stress calculator
Stress is not just the sum of what is pressing on you; it is the tension between external pressure and internal resources, and the questions are split the same way:
- External stressors: work, money, major life changes, and relationships and family.
- Internal resources: resilience, emotional regulation, social support and physical reserves.
Two questions ask for real numbers, weekly working hours and nightly sleep, with bands anchored to Taiwan's labour law, official working hour statistics and professional consensus on sleep duration, although the scoring curve is still custom. The questions are original, it is a self-report tool rather than a clinical diagnosis, and when the score is high the tool suggests a follow-up screening such as PHQ-9 or GAD-7.
How to use it
- Open the financial health calculator and choose your gender, age group and region.
- Enter your monthly salary, passive income, investments, cash and monthly spending, and, if you own a home, the county or city, the number of properties, their value and the mortgage balance.
- The financial health score, the stage and the five axis radar chart update on the right as you type.
- To keep a result, copy the link or download the result image. You only need to sign in to save it to your own history or to view the overall statistics report.
Questions people ask
Does it store my income and assets? Not unless you sign in. The calculation runs in your browser. Only when you sign in with Google and tick the consent box is that calculation saved to the server, de-identified and used for the overall statistics, and you can delete it from your history. Your email address is stored only as an irreversible hash. See the privacy notice (in Chinese).
What is the overall statistics report? Once at least 20 results have been saved with consent, the system aggregates the results once a day and shows the overall distribution of each area as averages, medians and percentiles, never individual records. You need to be signed in and to have saved at least one calculation to view it. It is a self-selected sample, not official statistics.
My friend earns about the same but gets a different earning power score. Why? Earning power is compared within age groups, and the same salary sits very differently among 25 year olds than among 50 year olds. Passive income also changes the result.
Is this investment advice? No. The scores and estimates come from official statistics and the numbers you enter, to help you understand where you stand, and they are not investment or financial advice. See the Disclaimer.
Once you know where you stand, the money and work calculators can project long term growth and a FIRE target, or go back to all tools.