Money Between People

Money is good at turning vagueness into resentment.

A borrowed sum means temporary help to one person, a gift to another and a test of friendship to a third. All three may discover the difference only after a missed deadline.

So before the money changes hands you have to settle:

• is this a gift or a loan;
• when is it to be repaid;
• in instalments or all at once;
• what happens if it is late;
• whether it needs to be put in writing;
• whether you can survive losing the whole sum.

Do not lend money whose loss would wreck your own life. And do not use a loan as a way of getting rid of someone: there are cheaper words for that.

Acting as a guarantor is more dangerous than an ordinary loan. You are effectively agreeing to answer for a decision that someone else makes and someone else controls.

Purchases call for a similar pause. Artificial urgency is a salesperson’s favourite tool:

today only;

the last one in stock;

we need your decision now.

Unique opportunities do exist, but real scarcity should be explained by external conditions rather than by a timer on the page.

Someone with an interest in the sale can supply facts. They are not an independent adviser on whether the purchase is needed.

Price is a property of the deal, not of the buyer. You can calmly say that a thing is too expensive for its value or for your budget. The seller will survive. They were professionally trained for exactly this moment.

Your own money needs no justification to outsiders. But “it is my money, I do what I want” does not cancel obligations to your family, your creditors and your future self.

Freedom to dispose of money begins after accounting for those you already have a contract with.

The test is simple and unpleasant: name to yourself the sum you would not mind giving away. If your brother asks for three thousand and you can part calmly with one, give one and say it is a gift. Then six months later a third participant does not appear in your conversations — a silent counter noting that your brother has a new phone while the debt is still unpaid. What destroys the relationship is not the loss of money but the expectation that one side remembers and the other, possibly, no longer does.

A written note between people close to each other looks insulting right up to the first missed payment, after which its absence starts to look insulting instead. It is not there for a court but so that a year later two people remember the same thing.