[oompa loompa]

Originally Posted by Irenicus

Uh, I need a little advice.

Spoiler for personal situation/little traceable information though, unless you're a pro internet stalker:

Anyway, long story short, I'm a college student planning to go study abroad in Japan. The ETA is...a month and a half away. That's all fine and dandy. But I have a problem. A financial sort of problem.

No this isn't a solicitation for money over the Internet, but for advice. Rather, read on for an oops it's a mess kind of story. Essentially, it's like this:

Things are coming merrily along. But I have a few deadlines to meet. The earliest is to send the flight information to the school and organization involved and as part of the visa application. This is by July 31st, very soon.

Great. I just happened to have a surplus of $2500 from a scholarship stipend. With the price of the round trip around ~$1800 at most, I was fine.

Or so I thought. Of course I had a problem. There was another deadline after this one, August 6, nine days after this day of course. The JPN school asked me for let's say 300000 yen for short for important housing fees, which around this moment calculates to ~$3500. They asked for yen and they wanted it in Japan, which means I'll have to visit a big bank and do some alchemy with my Presidents. So hurry that deadline up a day or three.

Fine too, I thought. I had a big FAFSA-related disbursement of grants and loans and shit coming up. 3500 was well within my budget and more...

...that is, if it actually was coming up on time. Its earliest possible disbursement date was August 13. I asked the finaid counselor if they could move it earlier. Nope, nadah, this is federal regulation. Never gonna happen. I asked the JPN school if they could delay it a bit later. Nein either, it's concrete pay-or-don't-go moment.

So I was like, uhhh shit, what the Haruhi was I gonna do. Well, I thought of a solution. I still had that $2500 scholarship still standing, add that to say $500 or so in my account, and it's only 600 short for the Important Payment, counting in possible transaction fees, which I could hopefully scrounge up from somewhere.

Fine then, but that meant I had no more money to actually buy my tickets. Went online and realized (well, I knew it earlier), but those damned airfare comparison/agent sites like expedia and so on demanded that I pay straight out, and their return policy was generally, well, shit.

I googled to find yet another solution (promise it's the last one). Well, real, live travel agents allow a bit of a leeway between booking and payment. The agent mentioned that she could hold a ticket for me for about three days. Yay, solution! I could book it now, get a copy of the itinerary, send this preliminary plan around like it was my real one, cancel and then try again ten days later when I actually have the money. Good idea right? Well, that's the point where I need some advice:

1) How do I actually go about this? Do I just book, cancel, then go back to the agent (who's giving me a surprisingly good deal I would've gone "why not?" in a heartbeat had I not have this problem, even in comparison with online airfare bargain search engines) like nothing happened? Or should I try to explain (which I did a little already, though not in any detail), that I needed to apply for a visa and the money for the ticket won't actually be there 'til the 13th, and that she should join in my evil conspiracy to trick some people with utterly innocuous information?

2) Actually, do the visa guys take offense if my flight information was changed along the way, if I report to them properly right after the change?

3) More generally, the reason I wrote the whole affair down is because I want people to see what kind of holes are in my solution and what I really should be doing instead at this point, noting that I have an extremely limited resource and double obligations that MUST be fulfilled during this period of time between now and the disbursement date?

I'm gonna be studying abroad there too

After having my fair share of flight problems, I can tell you that your plan doesn't sound all that bad, but you need to get some security in there. You should probably get in contact with your home school; I'm sure they've had this problem before. Your study abroad office mind you, not the financial aid one. Worst comes to worst you should ask your school to give you a student loan, although you may lose a pound of flesh in the process. If the money will be there within a week I can't see it being a problem.

Mhmm.. talking to the travel agent is tricky. It's a gamble either way, but I would talk to your travel agent about it. It's just that otherwise, you could find yourself down a lot of money, and with no ticket to Japan.

Visa Officials! No, they don't care that much as far as I know - especially for stuff like study abroad. One of the perks of having people read the documents. I don't think they'll mind and you are allowed to do so - they really aren't that draconian.

Gah as much as I hate to send people into a debt-trap, you should look into taking out a loan if you're not already knee deep in debt.