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On travel SE I just asked an intricate question about sending money to a friend in the UK while I'm travelling in Laos, Southeast Asia but the money is in an Australian bank account:

Cheapest way to “wire” money in an Australian bank account to a person in England, while I'm in Laos?

Some people there suggested it might be better to ask here on money.SE. I had thought this site was mostly about investing but I see there are questions about international transfer so maybe this is a good crossover question for our two sites.

I won't report all the details here so please read the question and feel free to comment here, on that question, to submit answers there, or to advise me to migrate it over to this site.

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I think that this would be on topic for Money SE. It's related to managing your money, aka it's personal.

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  • Thanks for your input. We've now migrated the question here so I'm looking forward to seeing some new takes. – hippietrail Oct 9 '13 at 5:50
  • Right.. but does that mean it's off topic on the travel SE? – Paul Oct 10 '13 at 8:39
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The problem with the example question "cheapest way" is that the answer quickly would become stale and might only apply to one set of countries.

I would expect that it would be closed on this site.

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    Really? On travel.SE we always prefer a question of this form because "cheapest" means there will actually be "one right answer". Since posts including answers on Stack Exchange are wikis that anybody can edit it's almost trivial to update them whenever the next person who needs it comes along. Of course exchange rates change "quickly" but the fees the various methods charge and the spread ranges they typically offer do change but not "quickly". Of course most objective answers other than ones about physics and mathematics all change over time and "quickly" is subjective. – hippietrail Oct 9 '13 at 10:43
  • Many SEs are about building a library of knowledge. Answers quoting rates "today" don't contribute to this – Paul Oct 10 '13 at 8:40
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    The best path is to ask "How do I find the cheapest way to transfer money?" instead of "What is the cheapest way to transfer money?" The answer to the "how" question will likely be correct for much longer than the "what is cheapest" question. – Alex B Oct 11 '13 at 3:16
  • Answering the "what" must be done before the "how" can be answered - you can't describe "how" until you know "what" it is describing. For timeline, whats and hows are often only relevant for some time period around the target date. So, one should usually filter answers through the time-lense. For example, a perfect answer if it were asked 20 or even 10 years ago, would not be accurate now for either what and especially not how. In addition, it is pretty much a given that no matter what, how, or when, the answer will be different for different sets of countries anywhere. – Iceberg Oct 18 '13 at 19:03

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