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I've seen lot of comments and close votes on question regarding anything financial as off-topic here and belonging on Personal Finance & Money. Since lot of such a question will inevitably appear, we should discuss which of questions regarding expat finances ought to be allowed and which disallowed here.

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We never meant to over-train people into thinking everything should be neatly bucketed on each individual site when we introduced migrations. Overlap is good. Not sending a user that arrived to your site and actually typed something good to another site unless absolutely necessary - even better.

Migrations are for the experience of the author, don't use them for filing.

Here's a simple test and workflow.

  • If you remove the expat part, is it essentially the same question? Is the user not facing additional complications or twists due to being an expatriate?

    • Yes! -> Put it on hold with guidance, or edit it if you can.
    • No! -> Answer it.

I'm specifically not going to migrate any questions to any other site until after the public beta. Remember that you need to be identifying the kinds of topics in which this community can excel - and I would expect that a community full of expatriates would be happy to answer personal finance questions that I have which suffer from the complications of being an expat.

That's the gist of it, if you think about it. Stuff is hard. When you're an expat, that's amplified. If the root of the questions is about that odd twist that living abroad tends to bring to problems, answer it.

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OK, here is a proposition: Let's accept those that are a legitimate questions by an expat without splitting hairs about how much applies to locals or not. Overlap is not a big problem as such.

(You can vote this up and down to express agreement or disagreement.)

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Very good question. On one side some of the financial issues expat have is quite unique to their situation. A simple local answer can be painfully wrong at times.

Also it is my experience that Personal Finance & Money has very big bias towards the United States or the english speaking world in general. To best of my knowledge, a credit card rating is something that is not common world wide.

Yet I would expect quite some knowledgeable people on money.se. So even with this English bias on money.se, I would vote for migrating money question to money.se as much as possible unless it really really is obvious that it only affects expats. I would not ask the question on credit card ratings on money.se, because I expect it to be closed immediately as a stupid question. From an anglo saxon perspective everybody knows what a credit card rating is.

Also migrating these question to money.se, might dampen the anglo saxon bias on money.se and it attracts the knowlegable people.

An nice example of a good effect is a question on travel.se that got migrated to money.se. The question is spot on on travel.se, yet quite some valuable info came from money.se

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    I think it's called a “credit report”, “credit rating” or “credit score” and goes beyond credit cards but I share your concern about the North American/Anglo bias on Personal Finance & Money. At the same time, I don't think there is any hostility towards international question there and they do make some effort to provide tags and the like. Maybe this site only needs more good quality questions and answers from other parts of the world.
    – Gala
    Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 9:52
  • Incidentally, it's true that private consumer credit reports do not exist everywhere but there is in fact one in the Netherlands or in Germany for example.
    – Gala
    Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 9:59
  • The Dutch example is similar to being registered at the "Banque de France" in France in the sense that it keeps records on people having problems in repayments and only in extreme conditions.
    – Andra
    Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 10:12
  • @GaelLaurans I don't feel any hostility either on money.se, only that at times it is difficult to ask a question due to a difference in context. I fully agree with you that it needs more international content, hence me being in favour for migrating questions from this site to money.se as much as possible
    – Andra
    Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 10:14
  • That's also more-or-less what a credit report is, the main difference is that it can be accessed by a broader set of people and includes more data. I think the Dutch thing is closer to a credit report than to the Banque de France files but it's another question.
    – Gala
    Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 10:43

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