My university has tranfered me money by mistake, and wants me to transfer it back
If you are convinced/sure its legit. Is doing a bank transfer to correct their mistake, actually the right way to do it in the first place?  Best is to write to University and ask if this extra can be adjusted towards future payments. Not sure how much that is and would one or two future payments cover it off.  The second best thing would be to ask if University can take it up with Bank and have this reversed? If the above don't work, then request for an address where you can send the check for the refund. Confirming whether the payment was an error The simplest method is to confirm manually with the University whether the payment was a mistake and satisfy that between yourselves. If you're concerned it's fraudulant, I recommend calling the University finance office on a phone number you find on their website, or call one of the people you know. Reversing the payment To formally reverse the payment, I'd check your Product Disclosure Statement on your account with the bank. There's almost always a fee involved where a payment is reversed. It's probably easiest to just issue the payment back to the university to an agreed BSB/Account Number. Call in to the bank using a publicly available number to verify the request. Really a very straightforward situation, and subsequently, answer.  Call the university pursors that you normally deal with, ask them to document the last 3 months of disbursements and highlight the incorrect one(s). If the money is already spent out, ask them if they can apply it to future disbursements via adjusting entries, and call it a day.  If not, and you CAN pay it back, go to your bank and ask them to figure it out...which they should be able to do, having the original sender's info. "You have received some good answers, but since your concern is proper protocol, keep everything in writing (emails, not phone calls).  Also, you'll get a quick response by contacting the University ""Accounts Payable"" department, confirm the situation with a summary as you posted here and ask for the ABA routing number for the transfer.  The routing number, email, and you bank statement is all the records you need to cover your but."
"My recommendation is to shop around for a bank that handles wire transfers in a more sensible manner. Many wire transfers are set up so that you do not need to go physically into a branch. The wire transfer system I use has me initiate the transfer online, then call a dedicated number with a pin to authorise the transaction (24/7/365). I'm on the other side of the world from where the money ""is"" initially - no branch visit required." "You should certainly look into investments. If you don't expect to need the money until retirement, then I'd put it in an IRA so you get the tax advantages. It makes sense to keep some money handy ""just in case"", but $23k is a very large amount of money for an emergency fund. Of course much depends on your life situation, but I'm hard pressed to think of an unexpected emergency that would come up that would require $23k. If you're seriously planning to go back to school, then you might want to put the money in a non-retirement fund investment. As I write this -- September 2015 -- the stock market is falling, so if you expect to need the money within the next few months, putting it in the stock market may be a mistake. But long term, the stock market has always gone up, so it will almost certainly recover sooner or later. The question is just when. Investing versus paying off debts is a difficult decision. What is the interest rate on the debt? If it's more than you're likely to make on an investment, then you should pay off the debt first. (My broker recently told me that over the last few decades, the stock market has averaged 7% annual growth, so I'm using that as my working number.) If the interest rate is low, some people still prefer to pay off the debt because the interest is certain while the return on an investment is uncertain, and they're unwilling to take the risk." "is there anything I can do now to protect this currency advantage from future volatility? Generally not much. There are Fx hedges available, however these are for specialist like FI's and Large Corporates, traders. I've considered simply moving my funds to an Australian bank to ""lock-in"" the current rate, but I worry that this will put me at risk of a substantial loss (due to exchange rates, transfer fees, etc) when I move my funds back into the US in 6 months. If you know for sure you are going to spend 6 months in Australia. It would be wise to money certain amount of money that you need. So this way, there is no need to move back funds from Australia to US. Again whether this will be beneficial or not is speculative and to an extent can't be predicted." "First, you must prioritize what a ""need"" and what a ""want"" is.  This is different for everyone but generally, I think most people will agree that impulse items are ""want"" items.  Look at the item, hold it, put it back and wait 30 days.  Put the money that the item costs $x into your savings account (transfer from checking, straight deposit, etc) Come back to the store and hold the item again and as ""did I miss the fact that I didnt get it 30 days ago?"".  95% of the time, the answer is no.  You saved $x for 30-days, and received what is a tiny bit of interest for it. This is cause for celebration!  If you repeat this for every item you THINK you ""need"" or ""want"" then you'll be amazed at what you saved.  Dont waste this money on a vacation to the islands either!  Keep saving.   There will be plenty of rainy days when you'll have wanted to trade that island vacation (or the impulse items you bought that you used once or twice and are lost in your garage somewhere) to pay for some unexpected emergency.  Trust me on this!" The initial story sounds normal. Happens every day. Checksums cannot prevent this, since it is a typo by the sender. The sender typed in a wrong account number. That account number happened to exist (so the sender wouldn't get any immediate error message), your account. But, that innocent story can also be used as part of a money laundering plan. Namely, to give the money a legitimate source. Also can be used in a scheme to frame you for something. The question of how the person got your phone number raises suspicion. The bluffs to avoid the normal paperwork, and then disappearing, make it incriminating. No doubt. Take this to the police. The question arises: even if the plan (whatever it was) failed, why didn't he do the paperwork and get the money back? The answer is that that would leave a trail to possibly be picked up in a future investigation. From what I understand (I never had an RESP but would consider one for a future child), with the right type of withdrawal, you can use the RESP money for anything education related. Basically, know that the RESP is considered to have three compartments within it: (1) your contributions, (2) contributions from the government through the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG), and (3) the return on the investment, or accumulated earnings. The government contributes an extra 20% on top of your contributions annually by way of the CESG, up to a $500 max. Tuition As you noted, official tuition fees, reported on a fee slip, is where one large chunk of the RESP will go. This will be pulled out of your original contributions and is known as a Post-Secondary Education (PSE) Withdrawal. Different RESP administrators (bank, discount brokerage, etc) determine what sort of proof of enrolment would be required, but it ought to be similar between them and different educational institutions. This withdrawal is not taxable by either you or the student, since the contributions were made with after-tax dollars. Educational Assistance Payments (EAPs) EAPs are for other expenses that the student would incur by being at university. In the first 13 weeks of studies, you can request up to $5000 in EAP withdrawals (full-time studies, $2500 for par-time), after which there is no limit. Each EAP payment is made up of the CESG and accumulated earnings portions of the RESP, whose proportions are determined based on the EAP amount. This is considered taxable income for the student, or beneficiary, in the year the EAP withdrawal is made. It gets a bit fuzzy here, from my understanding. The student would ostensibly be able to purchase anything that they could rationalize as education-related, and I'm not sure what sort of proof different banks would need. Maybe just the confirmation of enrolment is enough. This is the part of my post that should directly answer your question which, using this terminology, boils down to what sorts of expenses can I use the EAP withdrawals for? To this, from what I've read out there, I would say that you could probably purchase anything. From the student's point of view, they are enrolled in a qualifying education institution, and if they don't spend the money on education-related purchases, money required for those purchases will have to come from somewhere else anyway.  Other withdrawals Any other type of withdrawal is like walking through a minefield. You can withdraw the original contributions without paying tax on them, but you would need to pay back the corresponding CESG back to the government. Other types of withdrawals would be taxable and may incur a 20% penalty. I don't have any more details on that. As I mentioned, this is from what I've read and looked into for future RESP purposes. A new concept that has popped up is RESP vs TFSA. The TFSA provides the same tax shelter (after-tax dollar contributions, no tax on the gains), but also allows for no tax on the withdrawals. To add to that, the TFSA withdrawals are tax-free as well. The main benefit that the RESP offers that the TFSA doesn't is the CESG. My current opinion (and I could be wrong) is that you should contribute $2500 annually to the RESP in order to get the $500 max CESG, and anything else that you'd like to contribute should go in a TFSA. But I digress. Hopefully my long-winded response makes some sense. Enjoy. The company says it's out of their control - it isn't. All they have to do is to INSTRUCT HSBC to send a certain amount of GBP, and then HSBC MUST send GBP.  Obviously the bank doesn't like that because they make money through the conversion. That's not your problem. When told to send GBP, they must send GBP.  Depending on what your relationship with that company is, you lost money because they didn't send the GBP. At the very least, they sent you four percent less in Euros than they should have sent you. So send them a bill for the difference. It's unfortunate that your bank charged for the conversion Euro to GBP, but fact is that less than the agreed amount arrived at your bank, and that's the responsibility of the sender. "Well, it took some effort to get an explanation from my bank. Turns out that some supermarkets use direct debit as a method of transferring money for purchases payed by so-called ""EC"" cards here. I was told that for some reason, a supermarket decided to reverse one of such transactions."