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Five categories, five guides each — 25 practical walkthroughs for settling into life in Korea.
Start here
The five guides new arrivals search for first.
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Getting Your Alien Registration Card (ARC) — Step by Step
The ARC unlocks almost everything else — banking, phone, health insurance. Here's who needs it, what to bring, and how the appointment works.
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How to Open a Bank Account in Korea as a Foreigner
What documents you need, which banks are foreigner-friendly, and why the order you do things in (ARC first or account first) matters.
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Jeonse vs Wolse — Korea's Rental Deposit System Explained
A huge lump-sum deposit instead of monthly rent? We break down how jeonse and wolse work, the risks, and which fits your situation.
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National Health Insurance for Foreign Residents
Most long-term residents are required to enroll. Here's how premiums are set, what's covered, and what happens if you don't pay.
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Getting a SIM Card in Korea — Tourist and Resident Options
Prepaid for short stays, postpaid once you have an ARC. The difference, where to buy, and why identity verification trips people up.
Korea living calculators
Convert a jeonse deposit into an equivalent monthly rent, and estimate your monthly take-home pay after deductions.
Formula: monthly rent = (jeonse deposit − kept deposit) × conversion rate ÷ 12. The legal conversion-rate ceiling moves with the Bank of Korea base rate, so landlords and tenants negotiate within it. Use this as a comparison tool, not a binding quote.
Rough estimate using the employee share of the four major insurances plus a simplified income-tax calculation. Your real payslip depends on non-taxable allowances, exact dependent deductions and your employer's payroll. Treat the result as a ballpark, not tax advice.
What Freepia is for
Freepia is a plain-English guide for the everyday paperwork and logistics of living in Korea. Most information for foreigners is scattered across government PDFs, outdated forum threads and word-of-mouth — and a lot of it assumes you already read Korean. We pull the recurring questions into one place and answer them the way a friend who has already been through it would: what the thing is, why it matters, what to bring, and where it usually goes wrong.
How is the information checked?
For anything where accuracy matters — visa rules, insurance enrollment, tax, deposit protection — we start from primary sources such as Korea Immigration Service (hikorea.go.kr), the National Health Insurance Service, the National Tax Service and official city or district guidance, and we point you to where to confirm the current figure. Rules, fees and rates change, so each guide notes that it reflects the situation at the time of writing. Freepia is an information site, not a law firm or licensed agent — for binding decisions, confirm with the relevant office. You can read more about how we work on the About page.
How to use the site
New arrivals usually start with the Alien Registration Card, because it unlocks the bank account, phone contract and health insurance that follow. From there, the Housing and Banking sections cover the biggest money decisions. The calculators above let you compare a jeonse deposit against monthly rent and estimate your take-home pay, and common questions are gathered in the FAQ.
Our writing principles
- Written for foreigners, not translated for them — we explain the Korean term and the assumption behind it, not just the English label.
- Point to the source — for fees, rates and rules that change, we say where to verify the current number.
- Honest about the hard parts — where a process commonly fails or costs more than expected, we say so.