Korean Pension Refund Request Process (airport pickup)

*The information contained in this post is current as of March 2023.

*This post does not explain what the Korean pension is or how it works. This only explains how to request and receive your pension refund.

I recently moved back to the US after five years of living in Seoul, South Korea. I worked for the entire five years I lived in Korea and built up a decently sized pension. As the US has a pension agreement with South Korea, I was able to receive a full refund of my Korean pension when I left, which I picked up at Incheon Airport on the day I left.

The refund process was a bit confusing and the pickup was more time consuming than I expected, so I wanted to share my experience and give tips to make the process easier.

How-to:

1) Check if your home country and South Korea have a pension agreement.

*Photo taken from the National Pension Service website (click the link to see the most current list) 

2) Buy your one-way plane ticket!

In order to quality for the refund, you must be planning on leaving South Korea indefinitely aka you cannot have a return ticket. You can request your refund up to 30 days before leaving the country.

3) Print out a copy of your flight itinerary*

*It is important that you have a physical copy of your flight itinerary! A screenshot or picture on your phone will not be accepted.

4) Gather the proper identification and bank documents

You will need your passport, Alien Registration Card (ARC), and your Korean bank book*

*The bank book is technically optional, but the NPS worker may request to see it and/or make a copy of it so it is better to bring it if you have one!

5) Visit the closest NPS office with all your documentation

Search for either 국민연금 on Kakao/Naver maps or visit the NPS site to find the nearest NPS office. The Ansan Center for Foreigners is supposedly more foreigner-friendly, however, you do not need to visit the Ansan office to apply for your refund. You may apply at any office.

6) Apply for your refund

At the NPS office, give the worker your documentation (passport, ARC, bank book, and copy of your flight itinerary). They will give you the refund application form for you to fill out.

*Photo from Reddit

The refund application form will ask you how you'd like to receive your refund. You have three options: airport pickup, transfer to a Korean account, or transfer to a foreign account.

• Airport pickup*
• Given only in foreign currency (US dollars, Japanese yen, etc.)
• Given in cash
• Subject to airport currency exchange fees (2.5% as of March '23)
• Received the day you leave Korea (flight date)
• Transfer to Korean account
• Transferred directly to the Korean bank account you provide in your application form
• Estimated to arrive 4-6 weeks after you leave Korea
• Transfer to US account
• Transferred directly to the foreign bank account you provide in your application form
• Subject to current currency exchange rates
• Estimated to arrive 4-6 weeks after you leave Korea

Some people have mentioned receiving their pension refunds as quickly as 2 weeks after leaving Korea, but it is not guaranteed you will receive the refund that quickly.

I chose airport pickup so I could receive the money (in cash) straight away. I lost about 2.5% to the airport currency exchange rate, but I wanted to be able to deposit it into my US account straight away when I returned. There are pros and cons to each method.

7) Receive your "Certificate of Acceptance of Application for Lump-sum Refund"

After your application is completed at the NPS office, you will be given a confirmation paper. It will contain the following:

• Reference number
• Beneficiary's name (your name)
• Total number of months contributed
• Total amount paid
• This is not the amount you will receive
• Receiving bank
• 공항지급 if you are doing airport pickup
• Account number
• 공항방문수령 if you are doing airport pickup
• Date of eligibility
• This is your flight date

Do not lose this paper. You will need this paper if you are doing the airport pickup.

If you choose airport pickup, you will also receive a paper with instructions on how to pickup your pension refund in the airport.

The following steps are only applicable if you are doing airport pickup

8) Visit the Incheon Airport NPS counter the day of your flight

I ended up having to run around to do everything, so follow these steps so you don't make the same mistake!

• Get to the airport 4 hours early (or possibly earlier if your flight is in the evening)
• This is 1 hour earlier than the typical recommendation of 3 hours for international flights
• Check your bags first unless you are traveling with light luggage or have someone who can wait with your bags

The NPS counter is in Terminal 1 on the 1st floor next to Exit 2. Give the person at the counter the Certificate of Acceptance of Application for Lump-sum Refund and your passport.

They will give you a "Declaration of Currency or Monetary Instruments". Do not lose this paper.

9) Visit the Woori Bank Foreign Exchange booth 

Terminal 1:

• Less than USD 10,000 (9AM-9PM)
• The booth is in front of Counter J on the 3rd floor across from security (not towards the exits)
• It is a small stand-alone booth (not a built-in counter)
• More than USD 10,000 (9AM-4PM)
• Woori Bank Airport Finance Center on B1

Terminal 2:

• Less than USD 10,000 (9AM-9PM)
• The booth is in front of Counter A on the 3rd floor across from security
• More than USD 10,000 (9AM-4PM)
• Woori Bank Terminal 2 Business Office on B1

Give the worker the Declaration of Currency or Monetary Instruments and your passport. They may ask to see your boarding pass to confirm you are actually leaving.

They will then verify the total amount you are to receive and will give you a receipt that states:

• A. Total refund amount (KRW)
• B. Total value in chosen foreign currency (USD)
• C. Exchange rate on that day (KRW)
• D. Total value from foreign currency to KRW (USD->KRW)
• E. Difference between A & D

Important! Make sure the date of departure is visible on your boarding pass. If it's not, they will not give you the refund receipt (국민연금 공항지급 명세표) which you need to actually collect your cash.

10) Go through security

11) Go to gate the Woori foreign currency counter next to Gate 25

This is a tiny counter kind of hidden in a sort of cubby near a stairway. Give the worker the 국민연금 공항지급 명세표 receipt you received in step 9.

They will count and then give you the cash.

12) Go to your gate and finally relax!

It's a lot of steps, but it's worth it to get that cash!

Important Notes:

1) If you choose airport pickup, make sure to look up whether or not you need to declare the cash when you land in your home country. (In the case of the US, anything up to USD 10,000 does not need to be declared.)

2) According to the NPS worker I spoke to, there are (very) rare instances where the airport may not have the full amount of the refund in cash on hand (usually only if the refund is extremely large). In this case, you will receive whatever cash they have on hand and transfer the remaining balance to the bank account provided on your application form.

3) Make sure that you have a way to store the cash safely! It's recommended to either separate your cash and put in several different places throughout your luggage or to keep it in a bag either under your shirt or jacket or otherwise close to your body.

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Thanks for reading! I hope this post was helpful to you. Feel free to leave any questions you might have in the comments, and I will try to answer as best I can.

#WorkingInKorea | How to Find Non-Teaching Jobs in Korea + What to Expect

How to get non-teaching jobs in Korea, is a question that I see all over the Internet. People who are on the job hunt for non-teaching careers often find themselves stuck when it comes to finding professional opportunities here. Teaching English is definitely an easy way to get your feet on the ground in Korea since many schools sponsor some of the moving costs if you sign a one-year (extendable) contract. However, not everyone is interested in teaching English and/or qualified to do so.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible to find job opportunities here in Korea. There are many foreigners who transferred to Korea to work at the Korean branch of their company, but there are also quite a number of foreigners who work in Korea that got their jobs after moving to Korea. I am one of the latter. I'm currently interning at a marketing agency, I previously interned at a skincare company, and I also have been contracted by a tourism and culture-related non-profit.

I've compiled some tips to hopefully help others who are going through this same job hunting process!

Side note: every individual's job hunting experience is going to be different. There's no magical formula to land you jobs, and finding a job does take some amount of time whether that's a week or a few months. So, please remember that the advice I give is purely advice.

---

I. Use Your Resources

Take full advantage of job hunting websites (for those that can read and understand some Korean already), LinkedIn, Facebook groups, recruiters, and even Craigslist. Many Korean companies that are searching for foreign workers post ads on non-traditional job hunting sites hoping to reach a wider audience.

Check these sites several times per week to make sure you are up to date on all postings!

Specific note on Craigslist: on the home page, click on "Jobs" and then filter out "Education/Teaching" to look at all non-education jobs. Also filter out any other categories that are not specifically what you're looking for. However, beware of some the shady job ads. If the poster hasn't included any identifiable information about the company, such as the name/address/contact information (aka something you could find by Googling them), keep scrolling!

Here are some links to the top Korean job sites!

Saramin

JobKorea

Incruit

#ThoughtsInKorea | Waiting: Being content when you feel anything but

My Myers-Briggs personality type is INTJ. The T stands for "thinking". The opposite of which is "feeling". The difference is, essentially, how you process emotions. In simple terms, Feelers generally have extroverted emotions, though that doesn't mean they are extroverted. Feelers' actions are led by their emotions. This is not a bad thing. At its best, it could be someone who's changing the world through passionate emotion for a human-rights cause or compassionately caring for the sick and poor. Thinkers generally have introverted emotions, and in extreme cases, can be seen as Spock-like people without feelings, which is not saying Thinkers don't feel anything.

The Thinking vs Feeling is often scored as a percentage, so you could fall anywhere within that range. There are a lot of other factors that can determine where you're scored, including even your mood during the time you're taking the test. I'm scored about 70% towards Thinking.

My entire life, I've been an introverted feeler. In short, I've never liked to express emotions around other people, because it makes me uncomfortable. For a time, I didn't even know if I knew how to feel any emotion at all. There were days where I would just sit and wonder if I'd ever really been happy or if I'd ever really been sad or angry or anything at all. When my family had to put down the dog I'd grown up with, I didn't cry one tear, though I thought I should since it was supposed to be a sad time. When the youngest of my older brothers left home in bad circumstances, I cried, and the next day I was "fine", which really just meant I ignored everything that had to do with him.

Through counseling, I finally realized that it wasn't that I didn't feel things. Rather, I felt things very strongly and very deeply, but I was bottling everything up inside, and I wasn't allowing myself to feel anything, because I despised feeling emotions that much. As I've continued to mature and grow spiritually, I've learned that it's okay to openly express my emotions, though it's still not exactly natural to me.

But what does this have to do with the title of this post? Well... In short, I have cried and internally raged more times in the last six months than I have in my entire life. I have pleaded with God for signs and open doors, and I have begged for relief from the misery of overwhelming emotion. I don't think there are many people who enjoy crying themselves to sleep because they never got a response to an application for their dream job.

The last six months have been a period of intense, emotional waiting. I've had a deep feeling of discontentment, and though I'd prefer that the waiting would have ended right after it started, it didn't. In fact, I'm still waiting. I'm working part-time while spending hours applying for jobs I'll never even get the courtesy of a rejection e-mail from. I'm reading my Bible and praying for signs as I go to sleep only to wake up with nothing. I've gone through intense spiritual depression but also spiritual conviction about God's timing and God's plan. But that doesn't mean waiting is any easier.

I've been trying to figure out where the line between reading too much into what I want (i.e. taking something as a "sign" it's supposed to happen when it's actually not) and discerning the timing of God's plan for my life. When you strongly desire something, it's easy to decide it's part of God's plan for your life. Why else would you have this intense desire for a particular job or a particular country if it wasn't planted there by God Himself?

For a number of months now, I've been thinking about moving to Korea permanently/indefinitely. I've been praying for jobs that would make use of my expensive 4-year degree (hello, student loans!) and for a clear answer.

-I prayed for a sign of snow, and I woke up to down-pouring rain. Was that a "maybe"? Rain is liquid snow, after all.
-I saw a job posting on LinkedIn for my absolute dream job. I applied, but I never heard back. Was that a "no" sign?
-I have had 8 different people message me separately in the past 3 months asking if I'm going to Korea this year. Were those "yes" signs?
-I helped a girl from the university that I graduated from, also an adoptee, work through her visa application and paperwork so she could do the same exchange program that I did in 2016. Was this a hopeful sign?

All I can say is, I don't know. But what would waiting truly be if we knew? It wouldn't truly be waiting. Waiting requires longing. Waiting requires patience. Waiting requires trust that something is going to happen eventually. The word "waiting" is a noun, not an action verb, though it implies action: a gerund.

Waiting (n): the action of staying where one is or delaying action until a particular time or until something else happens

Focus in on "until something else happens". For waiting to end, something has to happen. The question is, what is that "something"?

#ThoughtsInKorea - Why Diversity in Media Matters

In the last few years, there has been a big push for more racial diversity in Western media. This isn't a new topic to most people. There have been cries for representation for years, but usually when you do see racially diverse characters in media, the stereotypes pressed upon those characters are so clear that it's almost painful to watch. The push for inclusivity has been only semi-successful so far, though some progress has been made. There is still quite a ways to go, however, before minorities can say they are being truthfully represented.

I was lucky enough to be introduced rather early to media that wasn't Western made. The greatest example would be the first time I listened to Yoon Mi-rae, otherwise known as Tasha. It was 2007, and she had just released the music video for her hit song 'Black Happiness'; one of the songs that would help put her on the map in South Korean media. I was 10 at the time, and though I didn't understand anything she was saying, I thought she was amazing. In my eyes, she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Today, I still consider her so. This song would later play a huge role in the beginning of my road to self-discovery and introduction to the entertainment world outside of the purely black and white Western media.

Yoon Mi-rae's mother is Korean, and her father is Black. During her childhood, she was bullied and harassed for her mixed race in both the USA where she was raised and later in South Korea where she would end up overcoming the odds and building her career as the country's most successful and popular female rapper. Her song 'Black Happiness' is about her experience growing up being rejected by two different racial communities for being of mixed race, something she had no control over. This video was the first time I had ever seen a Korean person, or even really an Asian person, being portrayed as someone cool and unique; someone you would want to emulate.

Unlike Yoon Mi-rae, I was adopted as a baby from South Korea and grew up with a Korean adoptee sister and three other Korean adoptee friends. While I always knew I looked different, for the early years of my life, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that people viewed me as different purely because of my looks. I was home-schooled for most of grade school, but after starting college in 2012, I was taken aback from constantly being asked questions like the following:

1. "Where are you from?"
   "No, where are you really from?" or "Oh, well, where are your parents from?"
2. "Oh, you're from Korea? How do you say _____ in Korean?"
3. "I heard that Chinese people eat dogs. Is that true? Have you ever eaten dog?"
4. "Wow, you look just like that girl from Suite Life of Zack an Cody!"

Do any of these sound familiar? Or have you ever asked someone these questions? I learned to be really good at hiding what I was really thinking when I was being asked these questions that I would prefer to never hear again. But throw these questions about my race on top of the ones I was already asked all the time because I am adopted, the child of a pastor, and home-schooled, and you have a perfectly confused (and thoroughly annoyed) young person with no idea where she belonged.

Though Yoon Mi-rae lived a life completely different from mine, I realized that I could still identify with her struggles. I held on to the same hope that she did that I could someday be able to find acceptance and use the hard times I faced to push beyond the stereotypes of my race. Following along with her success in the South Korean entertainment industry made me want to be like her that much more. I wanted to see more people like her, people who looked like me, and people who experienced the same things I did.

After discovering 'Black Happiness', I quickly thrust myself fully into the world of Korean entertainment. I loved listening to Korean pop songs and watching the videos of perfectly made up Korean idols dancing and singing their way across big stages with flashy lights and coordinating outfits. It was different, and I was obsessed, to put it simply. I was completely mesmerized.

It's easy to look at young people, and not-so-young people, and laugh at their obsession with singers, artists, movie/TV actors, fictional characters, etc. It seems silly that people are willing to dedicate so much time from their lives to people they don't know and probably will never meet. While I do laugh at myself now for being so invested in the lives of Korean idols and entertainers, I also look back thinking about how lucky I was to have access to YouTube, and later the general internet, during a time when being Asian wasn't desirable or something that people envied in the West. Perhaps one of the reasons I was so thoroughly invested in the lives of people that lived on the other side of the world was because there was no one at home that was like me to look up to.

I had the privilege of seeing Yoon Mi-rae live in concert in Seoul, South Korea this past summer. It had been ten years in the making, but I remember standing there in the crowd thinking, "This is it. I'm really going to see her live." I was shaking. Even though I wasn't close to the stage, it was the mere fact that I was about to see, in person, someone I had admired for so long that overwhelmed me. When she came onto the stage, my heart was pounding. She performed 'Black Happiness', a song about her struggle for acceptance, while being cheered on by a hoard of adoring fans: people who didn't care what she looked like. I will never forget it. After the show ended, I immediately turned to my friend and burst into tears. I left the venue still crying, and those who know me know that I'm not someone who cries easily.

I know I will most likely never meet Yoon Mi-rae. She'll most likely never know what she means to me, and that's okay. She doesn't have to, because irregardless, I will be forever grateful to her for pushing through the hardships she faced to be who she is today. Without her courage, I may not have become the person that I am today. I may not have ever traveled to South Korea on my own and met the amazing people that I did. I may not have ever started learning Korean. But most importantly, I may not have ever met my birth family, something that will continue to change the dynamic of my life forever.

All this to say, this is why diversity in media is so important, for young people especially. It’s so important to be able to look up to people that are more than glorified props or the brunt of a low-reaching joke. The media is extremely powerful in persuading how people should be viewed, which makes it that much more important to show the beautiful diversity that is present not only in the USA but also around the world. Different people all have something unique to offer, and that's what I hope the world will continue to learn.

Of course, there are non-Asians that I look up to just as much, but there's something about seeing someone like you on the screen that makes that much more of an impact. Watching people who looked like me perform on those big stages and be cheered on by thousands of screaming fans that also resembled me in some way helped me finally realize that being Korean maybe isn’t a bad thing as I had believed for a long time growing up. It took a long time, and I’m still processing, but I believe I’m finally at a point in my life where I’m comfortable with who I am and my racial identity.

~

"Sometimes it’s hard to see all the good things in your life

But you gotta be strong and you gotta hold on and love yourself"

Yoon Mi-rae/윤미래 - 'Black Happiness'

Potato in Seoul - Zapangi Tin and Bottle Cafe (Seoul)

Seoul is known for having dozens upon dozens of unique cafes, many of them created based on a specific theme. There's dog/cat/raccoon/meerkat/sheep cafes, color-themed cafes, Hello Kitty, comic or board-game themed cafes...literally everything. As someone who likes exploring places that offer good drinks and good food, it's the perfect city for me. There's always a different cafe to go to. (The repercussions of having so many cafes in Seoul is a different story.)

With my 베프, I headed out to a rather new cafe not too far from Hongdae called Zapangi: Tin and Bottle. It's a cafe that focuses on its milk tea and small cakes that come in little tin canisters. The milk tea and cake were both delicious!

Menu:
They offer a few different flavors of cakes. Melon, cherry, peach, and blueberry were the offerings the day I went. My friend and I decided on a blueberry cake to split between the two of us and then a drink each. I'm a big milk tea fan, so I went with the Original milk tea, while my friend went with a coffee.

Special summer drinks came in floaty stands!

Potato in Seoul - Gyeongbokgung/경복궁 (Again!)

If you're friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram (@lilea_ishere), you've probably seen all of these photos already, however, you're about to see them again! Yay! I decided to make a post using some of my favorite shots from this trip to the Palace.

Last month, I went to one of the palaces that I went to last summer, but this time, I was dressed in traditional regalia. I went with two friends, and we made a quick stop to a hanbok rental place that was right next to the palace where we got all dressed up before heading to the palace. Though palace entry isn't expensive to begin with, if you go to the palace dressed in traditional Korean clothing (hanbok), you get free entry! The hanbok place that we went to was small, and I didn't get any photos of the inside. The staff spoke a variety of languages, and everything was very quick and efficient.

Although hanboks traditionally come in bright colors, I opted for one that's more modern-looking made with darker colors. Those who know me, know that I'm always wearing dark colors. I haven't worn brights in...a long time.T and you get to try on two different options, but if you're still not satisfied with the first two tries, you can pay extra to try on more. I got lucky and ended up going with the first hanbok I tried on.