Wire Transfer Woes

After a lot of work (so much work...), I finally have my visa application out and my dorm money sent through wire transfer.

Really, the visa application was merely a matter of getting it done.  The only confusion here was that I purchased mailers for both ways, one to send to the Korean Consulate, and the other for them to send right back to me.  Neither of these was necessary.  FedEx will put it all in one of their mailers.  If you want to be able to track your package on the way back, which I highly suggest since your passport will be in it, you need one of their mailers for the return as well.  I really have no idea what all they will be sending back so I simply went with a USPS flat rate mailer.  We joked that if they send me a complimentary brick along with my visa and passport, I will be set!

The hard part came with the wire transfer.  When staying in one of Yonsei's dorms, which is now required as they no longer allow international students to stay off-campus, you will have to wire money in order to pay the housing cost.  For my first term, Fall 2013, the cost was 1,650,000 KRW.  They give you all the information you need for the wire after you have been accepted to stay in the dorms which you can print out from SK Global's site at "MY PAGE".

I will spare you the many problems I ran into an the array of misinformation I was given, and instead tell anyone else thinking to study abroad and who needs to wire money to their school that Western Union does not wire money to a bank account.  You must go through your bank and pay their much higher fee (mine was $40).  My bank was would not tell me the exchange rate because they don't want to be held accountable if it changes from the time they send the money to the time Yonsei receives it.  My advice is to figure out the exchange rate yourself and then round up to be on the safe side (I rounded up four dollars).  I was told that Yonsei will not be giving me a refund if I end up sending too much after my USD is changed to KRW.  But rounding up a few dollars is a whole lot cheaper than finding out you are under and having to spend $40 more in order to send another wire transfer.

This part of the process was approximately 0% fun.  But hopefully if someone runs into this you are saved a tiny bit of headache.  Though it was a pain, it sure feels nice to be done.  But do you know what will NOT feel nice?  My TB test tomorrow.