When to use utf-8 and when to use latin1 in MySQL?

Question

I know that MySQL has default of latin1 encoding and apparently it takes 1 byte to store a character in latin1 and 3 bytes to store a character in

Answer 1

We did an application using Latin because it was the default. But later on we had to change everything to UTF because of spanish characters, not incredible difficult but no point having to change things unnecessarily.

So short answer is just go with UTF-8 from the beginning, it will save you trouble later on.