• A hagwon salary compares very favorably to Korean per capita income (as of 2006, $17,690).

• Your housing and airfare are paid.

• Korea's cost of living is low.

• Taxes and insurance are ridiculously cheap, especially for foreigners.

In fact, the native English speakers are usually the highest-paid teachers in a hagwon. Even with ESL certification and years of experience, a Korean-born (or Korean-American) hagwon teacher will typically earn about half what you will. (Yes, this can have an effect on the way your relationships work, or don't, with them.)

In sum, a Korean hagwon salary is a fair bit more money than you're likely to get in most other Asian countries, partly because native English teachers are so much in demand in Korea.

You won't have to spend much of that salary to live there. Korean food is mostly cheap; just learn to cook Korean and shop at the traditional market. Even if you can't (or don't want to) cook, every block of every town seems to have an endless supply of Korean chain restaurants and street vendors where you can get a meal for less than US$5. Clothes are very good (and admittedly on the pricey side) at the department stores, but cheap at the bazaars, markets, and street vendors. Appliances and electronics used to be expensive, but mass marketing, competition, and the ever-increasing China outsourcing have all driven prices down a lot in the last few years. You'll probably have to pay your own utilities for your apartment, but they're generally less than what you'd pay in most parts of the US. The actual rent most likely won't matter to you, even if you live in Seoul. The hagwon will put you up or cover your costs. If the one you're looking at doesn't, look elsewhere.

Although market "reforms" required as a result of the 1997-1998 IMF bailout have eroded South Korea's social safety net, the government still keeps a lot of life's basics relatively affordable for the sake of low-income Koreans. A bus or subway ride is about 1000 won (about US$1 -- some rides cost more in Seoul). There are government price controls and management schemes on quite a few essentials, from medicines to petroleum.

Not much comes out of your pay envelope, either. Korean income taxes for foreigners run about 3 - 7 percent. You also pay 4 - 5 percent into the national pension fund (matched by your employer). Korea has universal single-payer public health insurance; this takes another 4 - 5 percent of your salary, but your hagwon may pay all or part of this (check your contract). You can waive the health insurance if you have your own private insurance, but Korea's is unbelievably cheap by world standards, and the coverage is quite respectable.

Think about that: you'll typically get to keep about 85 - 90 percent of your salary. In the US a good one-quarter to one-third of your paycheck goes for taxes, Social Security, and insurance -- to say nothing of what most Europeans pay.

In most cases you won't have to pay any tax on your Korean earnings in your home country. For US citizens, the IRS says that if you're physically living outside the US for at least 330 days of the tax year, anything you earn (up to US$80,000) is yours, tax-free. Even if you came to Korea in, say, July, you may still be able to claim this exemption by tinkering with the dates of your tax year. In that case you'll most likely want to get some help from a good tax accountant.

So, while the salary itself may not sound sensational, it goes a long way. Unless you're a real spendthrift, it's not at all hard to bank a nice percentage of your salary while you're in Korea.

You may have read that hagwons will give you a bonus of one month's salary when you go home. Note, this is not a yearly bonus, it's a severance bonus. It doesn't kick in until you've worked in the same job for a full year, and it doesn't pay off until you leave the job for good. After the first year, though, your bonus keeps building month by month. So if you leave after 18 months, your bonus amounts to a month and a half's worth of salary.

There is in fact a Korean law that requires a severance bonus for all full time employees. There's also a catch. Make that three of them.

First, if you don't work a full year, no bonus, period. Watch out for a contract termination that's a day or a week short of a full year.

Also, the Korean courts have ruled that if you aren't actually in the classroom for at least 40 hours a week, which is actually pretty rare for foreign hagwon teachers, you're not really full-time and thus you're not eligible for a severance bonus. Some hagwon directors apparently think that preparing lesson plans and grading papers isn't real work, and I guess the Korean legal system agrees.

Finally, even if you teach an actual 40 hours per week, you can still miss out if your hagwon is very small. The law doesn't require businesses with fewer than six employees (including Koreans) to pay the bonus.

Some hagwons pay it. Some don't. Ask the hagwon director about this before you sign on, but I don't think you should let it be a deal-breaker. Don't count on it, and if you get a severance bonus, consider it "found money."