181–190 of 344 posts
I loaned a close college friend $7000 last year. Due to life circumstances and lack of family resources, he was stuck in a rural area with no developer jobs. He was having trouble landing a remote job and I ignorantly asked why he wasn’t applying to in-person jobs on the west coast. He told me that he certainly wouldn’t be able to afford to move and I told him “don’t let that stop you”. Fronting him moving expenses w…
TIL: Radio on Internet is valuable
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Instead of rewarding the antisocial behavior and therefore causing it to happen more frequently, albeit to other people, I would recommend one of these: - "I'm sorry but I've lost my job. I cannot afford this." - "I'm sorry but no means no." - If they insist: "Which part of the two letters in 'No' do you not understand?" You aren't the jerk. Someone who doesn't accept "no" is the jerk. There's places to go to to lend…
Nothing is your job except your job, but how impoverished would your life, family and your community be if everyone stuck to strictly that? You might be right on the specifics in this case, I'll abstain from making judgement. But as a guideline, as a framework, "it's not your job" is monstrously insufficient.
There's no loss to my life if these people remove themselves from it.
They're thieves in disguise, nothing more. No value is lost if they leave.
And in fact, because money is stored time, my life becomes MORE if they leave, because I lose less of the time of my life to them.
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https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... Scroll down to ”Basic Exclusion Amount for Year of Death” The gift giver pays the tax, but only after they give more than the lifetime amount.
So that's an estate tax upon death. But given we're talking about loans and gifts while a person is living, I think the correct tax to invoke is the gift tax that has a limit of $17,000 per year. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Neither taxpayer A nor taxpayer B have a federal tax liability for gifting more than the annual exclusion amount.
So I do not see how the gift tax, which would implicitly involve a tax liability for the gift, has a limit of $17k.
Am I incorrect?
The advice that I have most commonly heard and that I follow. If I loan money to a friend then think of it as a gift instead of a loan. I have given serious amounts of money twice and unfortunately they avoid me like the plague. I wish that they knew that I will never mention it.
The advice is generally to MAKE it a gift - not secretly think of it as one. As you've experienced, the guilt can drive people apart from the borrower's side, even if you never ask for repayment, so you need to make it clear up from that none is expected.
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The risk of them not being able to pay you back and thus destroying the friendship is so high that I wouldn’t recommend this unless you are ok with losing that person as a friend OR you just give them the money without expectation of it being paid back.
If $7k destroys a friendship, it's not really that close of a friendship. Sure, there should be some consequences for not paying it back, but incessant mockery and refusal to pay for McDonald's is probably a fair exchange. "Give people lots of leeway, but only once" has worked out well so far. People can't fool you into making a big mistake twice, and once is just the cost of doing business^W^Wfriendship. On the othe…
I agree with the parent - don't give it with the expectation of receiving it back. Save everyone the heartache.
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In Spanish they are the same word also -- "alquilar" -- "to rent" and "to rent out". Do any linguistics geeks reading have a word I can google for this phenomenon? That is, a word that means something like "a word or phrase that is bidirectional in one language but part of a unidirectional pair in another"
I don't have an answer but English LOVES preposition-attached verbs. You can use lent and borrowed in both directions (I lent X to him; he lent X to me -- I borrowed X from him; he borrowed X from me) so the main difference is not in whether the verbs can be used bidirectionally, but in how you indicate the direction. I suspect Spanish (and maybe Polish) disambiguate in different ways, but disambiguate I'm sure they…
Those are both unidirectional: lent is always “the (possibly implicit) direct object moves from the subject to the indirect object prefaced with ‘to’” while borrowed is always “the (possibly implicit) direct object moves to the subject from the indirect object prefaced with ‘from’”.
Birectional would be where the subject could be the source or recipient depending on, e.g., the preposition used to relate the other party as the indirect object.
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Same. Several years ago I had an ex-GF of sorts reach out to me in SF. She was passing through and wanted to say hi, etc. I had a couple hours before my shift at a bar I worked at so I swung by where she was, bought her a drink, etc. Immediately could tell she was in a bad place, looked like her occasional drug use had become a permanent, more hard kind. About halfway through the drink was a clumsy come on and a push…
> She thought I was crazy and was laughing cause I had been conned by an ex. I then explained if I never saw my $40 again it was money well spent. One less person in my life bringing with it their chaos I was surprised by some of this, especially this last part. Firstly, $40 is not a lot of money. Hardly a "big con". Second, I think the "money well spent" part is that you helped her in some small amount, when it was…
Let's be clear here: the "out of gas" story was almost certainly a lie and OP knew it. He helped her buy a small amount of drugs.
I have a sibling struggling with drug addiction for the past 6+ years, constantly "borrowing" money from others and never quite hitting a serious enough "rock bottom" to decide to get help/rehab. My brother "borrows" $10+k/year from my dad and it's poisoning their relationship and draining my dad's finances. (my dad recently took out a 401k loan because he's so cashflow-negative and that money's gone already) My dad enables him every day while dreaming about moving to another state and cutting off all contact.
$40 for OP to cut ties with someone like that is indeed money well spent, IMO.
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The risk of them not being able to pay you back and thus destroying the friendship is so high that I wouldn’t recommend this unless you are ok with losing that person as a friend OR you just give them the money without expectation of it being paid back.
If $7k destroys a friendship, it's not really that close of a friendship. Sure, there should be some consequences for not paying it back, but incessant mockery and refusal to pay for McDonald's is probably a fair exchange. "Give people lots of leeway, but only once" has worked out well so far. People can't fool you into making a big mistake twice, and once is just the cost of doing business^W^Wfriendship. On the othe…
It also depends on how easily money comes to the lender.
Meanwhile, I go through life wondering if I borrowed $20 from someone and forgot to pay them back for months and kinda hope they would just say something if I did.
I _constantly_ try to evaluate where I stand with people. If they bought the most recent round of drinks, the next one is on me. If we split dinner, I'm thinking about how their total averaged out compared to mine. If I paid for something, I'm thinking about how much I add to their ledger. I have a "disadvantange" threshold of ~$100 where I won't say anything, but if the imbalance continues to tilt in their favor and…
I am, or rather used to be, quite similar. Now I am much more relaxed, as I think I understand better what a gift is. It is free and comes ideally with no strings attached. Otherwise it is an transaction. And it is a bad idea, to mix them up. My default is to consider a gift as a gift and nothing more.
I just give and take freely.
If you think too much about it, it can destroy a lot.
Also, there is more than money. Maybe the one guy bought more rounds, but then he unloaded his problems on the others. Or not. So what? Life is not a balance sheet, that needs to sum up. But if you try to make it one, you might find the joy is getting lost somewhere in those numbers.
Years ago, I had the crazy/stupid opportunity to start a night club in San Francisco. My dad said it would be a terrible idea, the business was hard, etc... but he also said he would help me out. Go dad, I'm lucky to have him. He had a piece of property that we could get a loan against, so we found a mortgage company that would give us the loan and went ahead. Well, he was totally right, after years of trying, the bu…