I went through a period where I loaned money to anyone that asked me
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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 was the best decision I ever made, even though it had a chance of not working out. Six months later he’s making 10x the wage he could get in his rural area, and I’ve been paid back with (unrequested) interest.
I guess my message is: sometimes loaning money won’t work out, but when it does, the ROI (emotionally and for society) is extremely high.
It's on the borrower to worry about paying me back. Me, I don't care.
So do you actually mean this, or are you just signaling how kind you are?
I've picked that up from friends I made in Taiwan. It was mostly paying each other's lunch but there's no reason why it shouldn't work in other areas of life.
A non-friend? Sure, that might be different.
Anyone can be forgiven of anything, if you are so inclined. No "signalling" required.
But knowing yourself enough to know you can trust yourself to do this is not easy.
If it does it says more about you than the friend
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 other hand, finding friends past age 30 is hard enough that paying random devs random sums of money isn't that bad of a deal.
I agree with the parent - don't give it with the expectation of receiving it back. Save everyone the heartache.
$7,000 / 24 = $300 (roughly an extra car payment)Which is bogus in my opinion - this is all discussion on why it's bogus. It's not a comment on the original post by alach11.
We helped my sister in law afford a down payment on a house. She still hasn't gotten a house after 6 months. Am I a bit miffed? Sure. But breaking off a friendship over a down payment seems absurd.
Life happens, and people tend to take a little while to figure it out. Who cares, it's not like we can take the money with us when we go to the next life anyway.
Unless they're a sociopath, borrowing significant amounts of money from friends is usually considered to be a last resort, they're already in a bad place. Adding another monthly payment to their budget going to put them in a worse place.
It also depends on how easily money comes to the lender.
This is easy to say if you're a software engineer at a top tier company making a solid six-figure salary, but $7k is an enormous amount of money for the vast majority of people. I think I would significantly hurt my relationships if I failed to pay back $7k to any of my friends.
If you promised to payback $1 that I lent you, and you don’t despite having it, I’ll equally judge you as if it were $1 million dollars.
Is a big lie to exploit a friendship enough to in the friendship?
now this is a SMALL amount compared to most people but I have friends who have had a really rough time financially.
You have to go into the "loan" with the mindset that you will work to maintain the friendship if it doesn't work out.
In short, it's a grant, not a loan. You will become this person's benefactor, and you may learn a lot about how their mind/life works. Perhaps more than you want.
1) If you are going to be financially impacted in any way by not having the loan repaid you should't "loan" (gift) it. Like gambling don't do it if you can't afford to lose it.
2) Assuming #1, the overall psychological stress and potential impact on the relationship just isn't worth it. As the "lender" you should feel good about helping someone while learning something about them in the process.
Personally, in having this outlook with family and friends they essentially get one shot. If all parties agree it's a loan and the debtor doesn't pay back the funds I move on without impact to the friendship but mentally they have a "strike" in my mind that essentially says "they can still be a good person and friend, but money can never enter the relationship again".
I feel like it's a decent balance.
An additional mechanic is that you tell them that you are not going to remind them to pay you back, that it is not your job to nag them.
Have lent to many friends/family members over the years telling them to pay me back whatever/whenever they can, however they want. Some have taken decades. No one has not paid back. Few have needed a nudge, which I only give after they have climbed out of whatever hole. Honest people will always make an effort to repay their debts. The rest make lousy friends anyway.
His thing was if a friend needs help and you can afford it then do it - and it’s not a loan. Making it a loan makes it a bad business transaction.
I took that to heart with that friend and later my daughter’s nanny needed help and asked for an advance and we gave her the money she needed.
Both amounts were significant but we could afford it and I’ve never regretted either.
(I call it a “loan” because they preferred to think of it that way. I made clear at the time that it would be fine if they never paid me back.)
1. Why poor stay poor (you need money to make money)
2. Why successful startup founders skew being from well-to-do families (they can afford to take the risk).
Really applaud you for helping your friend. You truly change their life.
America is definitely the "land of opportunity", more so than most countries, but it's really difficult to bootstrap when you don't have the means.
You have to aim a couple rungs up, not all the way up.
Starting from literally zero you can probably retire modestly but comfortably the owner of a respectable tax dodging container storage and dumpster rental business assuming a little luck and work in your formative years (maybe the local street gang will install the love of hustling for a buck into you) to set you down the right path.
Going from zero to C-suite manager type, not so tractable.
I've also loaned some amounts of money to people I figured wouldn't pay me back, but in smaller amounts. Often they behaved as expected and didn't pay me back, but because I was expecting it was also more or less of a non event.
My personal attitude has always been that you should loan money without the expectation that it be returned. You can't be let down if you had no expectations to begin with.
But what if 90% of the time it doesn't work out?
Fast forward a lot of years we both now live comfortable lives and it has been a good number of years since we last had to help each other.
Sometimes I miss the struggling years though. I think that showing off each other our new German cars is not as good a foundation for a good friendship and love as helping each other and laughing about being saved by the other at the last moment from some dramatic stuff like an eviction or bankruptcy
Initially it seemed logical to say OK you need 100 bucks for this or that and you'll get me back. But then a month later I'd mention it and was met with this sort of "why are you being a jerk about it" response. Now I'm in a position that its not a big deal, but back then even that relatively small amount of money was a big deal. It was a tough lesson to learn that some people just use the term 'loan' to make themselves feel less guilty for asking, or maybe intend to ghost you regardless.
I think this also gets into Americans (or maybe just Southerners?) being weird about money and personal finance. Talking about money is taboo.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee.
Complicating things is that the penalties for not paying others, like a bank, utility company, landlord, etc. are real and tangible. Whereas hurt feelings are much more readily dismissed than an eviction notice or a debt collector.
I live where I was a born, so naturally, all elders needing a hand for whatever (mostly computing obv.) get my assistance. They always want to pay or they feel really really bad.
Reminds me I need to read graeber's book about non currency debts.. it seems to discuss these relationships.
First game I bought for my own pocket money, which at time, in Poland, was a lot for a kid as it was full price title, Baldur's Gate 1 in nice box with manual and a map, and dubbed gloriously with then-radio/TV stars, hell, the narrator voice was better than original. Needless to say I was pretty salty.
"Kuba pożyczył moj długopis" - Jakub borrowed my pen
"Kuba pożyczył mi jego długopos" - Jakub lent me his pen
I'm learning Polish slowly, living in Warsaw...
Surely a true Pole would say "kurwa Kuba pożyczył moj pierdolic długopis" ? ;-)
(Point taken, capital inserted on original post)
Yes, that's kind of the point.
Sort of a Polish in-joke I guess.
For an English language background on the power of "kurwa" and "pierdolic", I recommend these YouTube videos:
Kurwa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdWlspF3B2M
Pierdolic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTgT-IU--zM
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"
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 do!
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.
idk if there are regional exceptions, but in general borrow and lend seem more akin to learn and teach, respectively. The have an implicit direction: (from, in the case of borrow; to in the case of lend).
I teached something from you today or I will learn you calculus in extracurricular classes don't work.
In Spanish it is disambiguated in a similar way as you were mentioning (to me, to you)
"Alquilo" translates literally to rent, so not really the same:
- Me alquilas un piso. (you rent me a flat)
- Te alquilo un piso. (I rent you a flat)
I think a better translation to borrow/lend is "prestar/dejar:
- Me prestas/dejas un lápiz. (you lend me a pencil/I borrow a pencil from you)
- Te presto/dejo un lápiz. (I lend you a pencil/You borrow a pencil from me)
Language is interesting!
I actually don't think I've ever heard a native English (as a first language) speaker do it the way you recall - using lend when they mean borrow - I wonder if that's just coincidence, or if one way is more common up north and the other down south?
"I will lend you money" or "I will loan you money."
"I need to borrow money until I get back on my feet."
It is not grammatically correct to say "I will borrow you money."
Throw me down the hole a bale of hay!
It does seem common to say something along the lines of "grab me a book from the library" , even if it's "grammatically incorrect."
It seems much less common to say "borrow me something" but perhaps it's regional!
One: you "bring" things toward the speaker, and "take" them elsewhere. So "don't forget to bring your umbrella!" is incorrect.
Two: "like" compares, and "as" joins independent clauses. So "I wish I could communicate like tptacek does" should be "I wish I could communicate as tptacek does." A correct use of like might be "You, like tptacek, comment insightfully." A famous example of a controversial misuse of "like" was the 1970s slogan "Nobody can do it like McDonald's can." It should be "... as McDonald's can." When that came out, grammar aficionados lost their minds.
Of course, it's often said by someone who's with you, and on their way out, so your assertion makes sense and is often correct!
After a while he asked me for some more money, about $5 and swore he'd pay back really soon. I was so shocked that I broke all contact with that guy and never saw him again.
Carmack, it seems, was comfortable with not being paid back.
That's not how I read the tweet, at all.
> It was a learning experience for me, calibrating some general people behavior. I don’t think anyone intended to not pay me back, but things often just don’t work out the way you plan
Nah, he's not like that.
Decades of practice and I feel like my reading comprehension just gets worse :(
My first paycheck paid off all that debt, a couple weeks later I was living in a 1-bedroom apt minutes away from work. I had about $15K in my bank and that's when my self-employed friend needed money to pay rent so he could focus on and make his company successful. I ended up Venmo-ing him more than that (more money than I ever had before in my life back then) over next couple of months, so that he didn't have to stop working on his business and lay bricks instead, or do anything else but making his business a successful company. A couple of months later he got a large order and never struggled since. He's still working on increasing his sales and getting more clients, on a verge of becoming a millionaire. I get to do work and make money creating software for his company, so it wasn't just helping a friend, but a future (now current) source of income for me as well. I wouldn't give money if I see the person lacks good morals or is an idiot, that never pays back. But looking back and asking myself, "what did I do that year?", I always feel happy that it cost me less than $20K to help save my friend's business and make sure he doesn't ever get his time wasted by idiot bosses or managers.
So I had a fairly small allowance which I mostly saved. Other kids were spending their afternoons at the malls shopping, buying cigarettes and eating fast food.
So the richer kids eventually had their allowances lowered by their parents because of some sort of misbehavior, and it turned out this wasn't very effective as they started asking around to borrow money to keep up their habits.
So I gave small sums of money and since I was a very distrustful teenager I had the following terms - if you don't pay me back by Friday I'm gonna round up the sum or increase it to some other arbitrary point. Usually what happened is they would obnoxiously blow me off, but I would get a concession about increasing the interest further. I didn't want to argue over small sums so I just increased them, giving them a way out of the impasse
In a few weeks the debt would simply balloon and I would start to get angry by the way they were treating me. I learned that I wouldn't get my money by cornering them alone someplace and they would make up credible payment arrangements as soon as possible. I ended up collecting everything with several hundred percent of profit. I learned later that interest rates are calculated yearly and these terms were absolutely insane.
Even though the profits were big the sums were in fact quite small for the trouble, so I just stopped lending out the next year and honestly my market was saturated by then.
My clients probably learned much more than me. At a later time in my life I read 'Poor Economics' and worked with fintechs in an IT capacity. What my teenage self was practicing was fairly common in poor developing countries with next payday or next week loans financing many lively hoods.
I have also never taken a loan, and I'm not planning to.
Also you know that in the catholic middle ages, high lending rate was immoral, it was a big topic at the time (and apparently lead to some foreign groups to become the loan guys as an escape hatch in harsh times).
If you run a business, it becomes a necessity. The problem is that expenses like payroll have to be paid immediately, while accounts receivable are erratic. The choice is to keep a large amount of cash in a checking account earning 0 interest, or have a revolving line of credit at the bank.
Having the credit is cheaper than having large amounts of cash sitting idle as a buffer.
In fact, buffer is the right word. If you're a programmer, you use buffers to compensate for the mismatch between input and output.
I'm sure most people don't care about it as much as I do, but I have this deep-seated need to make sure I'm as square with as many people as I can be and I expect the same from everyone else. It's not just about being owed, it's about owing, too. I wish I knew where it came from. I wish I was better about just letting it go.
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.
Some therapists like specific goals like this, for fixed periods of time. Doesn't have to be open ended. Spend X weeks working through the challenges of letting this go.
Same. I sometimes ask my friends to tell me if they think I owe them anything. I try to keep things in mind, but I much prefer to hear if I forgot something than let the relationship detoriate.
I'd rather just give money or buy meals now and then rather than have complicated obligations.
The largest loan I made (a few thousand dollars) was diligently repaid; a little each month once the borrower found work again. I also allowed the same person to stay with me, my wife and young daughter a few years later. To clarify - not because they were incapable of paying rent - they needed somewhere short term (couple of months) and I was happy to assist. Said person is now fairly significantly more wealthy than me and they've mentioned several times how thankful they are of what I did for them. I don't need (or want) anything from them, but if anything ever happens to me, and my family need help, I suspect they'd try help out if they could.
It had successes but in the end it went under after about 4 or 5 years operation.
I had to borrow from several friends to avoid being bankrupted.
Maybe around $80,000, which was alot of money at the time. The friends universally said "mate I don't care if you never pay it pack, you just sort out what you need to with it."
Paying the money back became my only life mission. Everything I did was focused on paying that money back.
It took me more than 5 years and I paid every cent back with 10% interest on top.
I operate on the principle that no-one should ever be worse off for backing me. I want people to see me as a person of integrity. Looking after the interests of others who have backed you should be your primary driver.
I can talk about it easily now as it's 25 years down the track, but the whole experience at the time was traumatic.
Sometimes I get paid back. Usually not. It’s because people are aware I have money so various people ask.
The goal isn’t to get paid back. Often these acquaintances cut off all contact. The goal is to never be asked for money again and slowly bled out by frequent sob stories. If they know they are already into me for more than they thought they would get, they won’t come back, and I don’t look like a jerk.
"Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will repay him for his deed." – Proverbs 19:17
And honestly, habitually soliciting money from friends shares a lot of similarities with using venture capital -- the reasoning that it's better to explode with someone else's money than your own.
Well, some most likely are.
Usually they're choosing between a set of bad options.
Seems like a major jerk move to structure the "loan" in a way where you remove these people from your life.
If you want be charitable, there's certainly more efficient ways than giving free money to random people who ask you.
It's not "get" if it's a loan.
The IRS might also be interested if you treat this a taxable gift rather than a loan... (unlikely they'd care for $1000).
The per year limit for 2023 is 17,000. A 11M lifetime limit would mean 647 years of giving.
I think the 11M figure is just totally way off. Not sure where they are getting that from.
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.
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?
If A is alive when that happens then that is wrong. B will be taxed on the amount of $1M - 17k because the gift tax applies not the estate tax.
If A were dead and gifted B in their will, then you would be correct because the estate tax applies in this scenario.
Again, since we're taking about loans and gifts while a person is alive in this thread, the first scenario of the gift tax applies.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
>Who pays the gift tax?
> The donor is generally responsible for paying the gift tax. Under special arrangements the donee may agree to pay the tax instead. Please visit with your tax professional if you are considering this type of arrangement.
https://www.irs.gov/faqs/interest-dividends-other-types-of-i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_tax_in_the_United_States
> Second, gifts in excess of the annual exclusion may still be tax-free up to the lifetime estate basic exclusion amount ($11.58 million for 2020).[9] For estates over that amount, however, such gifts might result in an increase in estate taxes. Taxpayers that expect to have a taxable estate may sometimes prefer to pay gift taxes as they occur, rather than saving them up as part of the estate.
The paperwork only starts when you gift one person more than $16k (2022 value) in one year, which is quite a large gift and the lifetime estate tax exemption is also very high (currently $12M), so even if you do need to file paperwork because a gift is taxable, the tax rate is likely to be 0% for almost everyone. And as much as people complain about death being taxable, most people don't have that many tears for the tax impact on people who had a $15M estate.
But I understand the rest. I simply did not know that the rules are very reasonable. Myself I am in Canada not the US.
The IRS does require you to report it if it goes over $16k from one individual to another. This is solely to keep track of that $12M lifetime gift limit.
Totally reasonable IMO unless you don't believe in inheritance taxes at all.
so you could do $48k from a couple to their child and child's spouse.
They certainly wouldn't, since you can legally receive a gift of up to $16k per year tax free.
But I also like the IRS limits. It limits how much my family/in laws think I might be able to give them in a year :)
Further, that tax is payed by the donor, not the recipient.
In other words, the IRS won't care if you can't pay rent and somebody gifts you $1000.
With such a friend, whether to loan money is an easy question to answer: yes, as long as I can afford to.
With anyone else I figure I’m not a bank (or a loan shark), so I shouldn’t get into a bank’s business.
Yes, because i don't like to call myself a shitty human.
I think the minority would call you a victim of 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire syndrome'.
Misplaced pride? Or lack of self-awareness and acceptation of their shortcomings? Guilt that builds upon itself (where just talking about it first could ... just clear things up)?
Or they don't know/understand/weren't explained how to repay it (even if that's as simple as just paying back, or only saying "thanks"). Social rituals definitely help here.
Edit: I don’t have fuck you money, so I am actually ignorant of the dynamic you’re describing. I’d rather be known as an asshole with backbone than a rich sap though. One of those looks more like a mark than the other.
And I understand if it's a sick kid or some other kind of an emergency... but people overstretch for luxuries.
> when you see on earth the man who has encountered the shipwreck of poverty, do not judge him, do not seek an account of his life, but free him from his misfortune. Why do you make trouble for yourself? God has excused you from all officiousness and meddlesomeness. How much most of us would complain, if God had bidden us first to examine each person's life exactly, to interfere with his behavior and his deeds, and only then to give alms? But as it is we are freed from all this kind of annoyance. A judge is one thing, an almsgiver is another.
If they scuttle off, then they weren’t real at all, and I got played. I guess this supports OPs point, so I kinda get it.
However this group of people is not very large, most people I know aren’t getting money willy-nilly.
It's normal to forgive a loan to family if circumstances change, or to give money no-strings-attached if they need it, but it's equally normal to loan money to help with cash flow problems and then expect repayment eventually.
Is this common? Such a thing is unthinkable to me, and even friends from more businesslike families than mine have expressed major shame to me that they had to get a couple grand from their dad to cover closing costs (paid back within weeks)
It's unfortunate that some people seem incapable of feeling guilty. They have a victim mentality which only gets worse whenever people don't do anything nice for them.
If they're redeemable there is a point where you give them so much that they finally escape their problems and their attitude improves. Sadly this doesn't always happen and it doesn't always last.
Surely you've spent some amount of money on frivolity.
"Fuck you money" is "I could afford to burn every professional and personal bridge that exists in my life and still be fine"
As in, you can afford to say "Fuck you" to the entire world if you wanted to.
This may be your particular disposition, but it is by no means universal. Given these two choices, I would much rather be known as a rich sap.
I think it’s important to note that a person can knowingly run the risk of being ripped off, not because they’re too stupid to know better, but because of their philosophical attitude toward money and how they relate with their fellow humans.
If one came from a different environment, material concerns might not be as pressing, and it might be a better strategy to placate said crabs in order to not lose one’s social standing.
I've also asked friends for money and I've been incredibly grateful to have people who have had my back in that way. There's a sense of security there that's invaluable.
Some people are just perpetually bad with money and always come back for more, and that's okay too. As long as I can afford it, I don't mind helping somebody out of a tough spot, even if it's semi-regularly.
I wonder if Carmack ever regrets lending money to somebody.
1. Assume it's never getting paid back and only lend out money you're willing to lose.
2. Tell them if you get paid back in full, then later, they can ask for another loan.
3. If you don't get paid back, then consider it a gift, but no more loans to that person.
This way, you can continue helping people who are down on their luck but responsible about paying back, and you avoid being drained by deadbeats.
- "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 money, they're called banks. If you're not a bank it's not your job.
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.
And they left behind truckloads of trash.
How much have you lost to those?
I would speculate once you get to a sum this significant your perspective would change ;)
If you grew up rich, you didn't have friends or uncles or aunt's constantly asking for money and never paying it back so parent poster's mindset seems dramatic/extreme. It is not.
I'd like to point out my experience of taking the loan and never repaying it. I felt guilty for decades and more distant from the loaner. They never brought it up but my guilty mind did.
So I'm not 100% sure it was a net positive for our relationship.
If I was to do loan money and they didn't pay back in some reasonable amount of time I think I'd tell them explicitly it was a gift. Though I'm not sure that would fix things in the guilty person's mind (yea, I get I'm projecting my feeling on guilt on them. They might not feel any guilt at all)
This is an obvious fabrication by someone with little to no actual life experience.
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 obvious she was suffering, and you didn't expect anything in return.
I think if she had come back expecting continued/sustained support, then you'd be right to pull away. But that sounds like the story of somebody who struggled in that moment and you gave some small gesture of support. I think it's good. Hardly an "investment to get her to leave you alone". That sounds too cynical and harsh.
It seems you have been lucky enough to be living a sheltered life, without any acquaintance having tried to chat you up to their advantage.
Unfortunately there are plenty of people in the real world who are either takers or outright set to exploit you. Not many, but enough to have people learn the wisdom of saying "no" to sob stories.
I once came across a guy who apparently lived close to me who was asking for money for a taxi ride because he was out of gas and had to go to the hospital to check up on his kid who had an emergency and blablabla. I gave the guy 10€ and wished him well. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I stumble upon the same guy right on the same spot. He clearly didn't recognize me as he asked me again for money for a taxi ride because he ran out of gas and his kid was just admitted to the hospital and blablabla. I asked him if he didn't asked for that same request a few weeks ago, to which he just stood there looking at me without saying a word, and after a couple of seconds he turned back and proceeded to walk away and never be seen again.
In the pre mass online shopping days I also had a close friend who just moved to another city. Our friend group had thrown him a big farewell party and everyone promised to keep in touch and visit all the time and all those things. After a few days that friend reached out to us saying he now lived right next to a consumer electronics megashop, and if any of us wanted anything shipped then we could simply send him the cash and he would buy the stuff we needed. A couple of guys from the friend group took him on his offer and sent him cash transfers, and that friend proceeded to ghost everyone.
Sadly I have other personal anecdotes, some of which real sob stories.
It really depends on what you mean by helping people with a small amount. Those who profit from your actions do benefit from the money they get from you even if it's under false pretenses. Robbers who steal stuff from people around them are also helped by getting their hands on il gotten gains.
I'm sorry good sir or madam, I stopped reading here.
In my personal life experience with abusive people, I find it makes me want to be more in favor of unconditional help for others, not less. Though I have experienced the urge to want to help people less, which you seem stuck in, and I was formerly stuck. I think it's a stress response. It creates a lot of anxiety to keep sizing people up for how they're going to screw you, instead of just accepting them and treating them well. (Yes, there is a difference between treating them well and letting them abuse you.)
This has nothing to do with conditional or conditional help, or help at all. You feel compelled to fool yourself into believing you're not being exploited, but you're the only one believing that nonsense. You're dealt with like the mark in a con, and not exercising any common sense does not make you more pious, just an easy mark without self esteem.
The people that leech off of you are not the ones who need it the most. They are just the ones that don't mind profiting from less than ethical and moral means.
It's ok to be yourself around those people, to let down your proverbial guard, while having appropriate boundaries and not being exploited ... But over focus on who exploits and who is exploited blah blah blah ... All of that is quite toxic. It can make you just as miserable as the people you're accusing, if not more. And if you see every interaction this way, it's only a matter of time before you start seeing potential exploitation where it doesn't exist.
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.
I offered my seat on the subway to a young woman about my age who looked very tired. She didn't say anything, or even look in my direction: she just seemed like she was having a difficult time. She said "yes, thank you" and I got up.
When I got up, the dude I was standing next to whispered in my ear "can't believe you let yourself get conned out of your seat like that."
Some people just don't want others to be helped I guess.
We had a guy at the racquetball club move away, and then about 10 people all mentioned how he owed them $20...
If you're going to be a loan shark you can't have people thinking they won't have to pay you back. You have to break their kneecaps.
I would just cut off contact with those people. I don't really get this much because I'm not rich, but if people ask me for loans just to get money out of me I will be the one breaking off contact.
On the other hand I have a friend of mine who has loaned money and never paid me back, but she is always in a financial hard spot and she is extremely generous to the community she drives. I never really expected to be paid back for that either but in this case I just wanted to help someone who cares more about others than herself.
The inequalities of capitalism are gross, but while we're here, that's the way the world works.
Sure, money or anything can be used as a test to determine someone's character. But you can do so without putting money on the line and save yourself some headache.
One way to determine someone's character is to spend time with them, listen to what they say about themselves and others, and whether or not their claims about themselves line up with their actions across time.
Maybe money is "cheaper" and "faster" than this route, but... Guess that's just been my go-to method to determine whether or not someone has integrity, is trustworthy, and has a sense of responsibility, parity, and respect for self and others.
Giving money without expecting it in return, or even being clear about expecting to be paid back, is more about having gauged people's characters & motivations, even when I get it wrong or things don't pan out as agreed-upon.
I used to do the same thing as you on a smaller scale (in the hundreds, never the thousands). I noticed that while loaning more money made more sense to me, whenever I did that it was a struggle to get the money back. Meanwhile when I loaned the exact amount, it more often came back.
I lost several friendships this way for a short while, with the only way to get the person out of the guilt cycle to surprise them at some random Christmas or birthday with "my gift to you this year is to give you the money you owe me". With them later telling me that they were feeling so guilty about the money they avoided talking to me because every conversation would make them feel miserable.
Now when I loan money, I enter the amount in an app we have in common and then actually put in place a (vague) payment plan. I find it helps people structure the entire situation and since they get to pay some money back the guilt is less present. It seem to remove the expectation that they need to gather the full amount before paying back.
Keep in mind I was unable to afford groceries many of these months.
In the end, they cleared out on that date and I never heard from them again. Even though we were quite close at one time.
Money well spent really.
Sometimes if you "loan" people money they will cut contact and disappear from your life.
The much more likely scenario is that you will get the reputation of someone who has money and is generous with it, and these requests and sob stories will increase 100x.
-Shakespear
I've just followed this my entire life and it has served me very well. Other than a mortgage, I never borrow, and other than family emergencies, I never lend.
> He is chief counsellor of the play's ultimate villain, Claudius, and the father of Laertes and Ophelia. Generally regarded as wrong in every judgment he makes over the course of the play, Polonius is described by William Hazlitt as a "sincere" father, but also "a busy-body, [who] is accordingly officious, garrulous, and impertinent".
Sometimes people ask for a loan and insist they will repay me. Fine, I will call it a loan because that's what helps them frame things in their own heads. If they repay me, also fine, why would I turn down free money?
But for my own peace of mind, I think of these things as gifts to help a good person out. If I don't think of them as loans, I don't find myself chasing former friends for repayment.
I am not a bank. I am not a debt collector. I do not wish to become a bank or debt collector as a side hustle. If you ask me for more money than I can afford to gve you without repayment, it is far less stressful to say "no" and get the conflict over with on the spot.
This only works if the people have fucking shame.
I have a relative who has no shame and will keep taking as much money as you'll let him take.
So I limit what i give.
He keeps saying to me it's ok if I borrow and charge him points ... but in the Christian tradition usury is a sin so I don't and though I'm not a religious person, I was raised with mainly Christians principles that I adhere to because they just seem like good principles in general to live by.
Plus I'm pretty sure if I did charge interest I'd just be disappointed when he doesn't follow through with interest payments knowing how flaky he is with his money.
I'd rather just give money and give what's comfortable.
Kept asking me for money for some new reason every time I popped onto Facebook via Messenger until I stopped updating my active status. A bit later they deleted that profile and created a new one, and I decided not to become friends with him again.
Looking the guy up, and he was always posting GoFundMe's for some cause or family illness or another, and you'd see links to people in the industry asking for things on his behalf periodically across various websites, going back more than a decade.
I do believe he dug himself into a deep hole and he was in a hard place, but I also believe he's willing to take advantage of anyone as much and as often as possible until he can't get anything more from them, then moves on to the next person (well, probably multiple people at the same time).
So anyway, that's too fresh in my head, and I'm hesitant to give anyone money for anything right now. I've got plenty of crap going on for the forseeable future that needs a bunch of money anyway (implants, roof replacement, flooded basement, etc).
If you give money, the other side will always resent you when you try to get it back. They'll think "I'm struggling to pay this, and this person had it" however irrational that may seem.
If you care enough to give, just give. If you don't, don't.
The only way this makes sense to me, especially at that kind of money you're talking about, is if you are fairly wealthy.
And, man, to me what this says is that it's impossible to have real solid relationships with people if you are rich and they aren't. It makes me think of all these people who only are interested in you for your money, and your fear that people will think you're a jerk if you don't give them money (over and over again!) anyway because you have so much money, all these people approaching you with "sob stories." It seems like it makes it almost impossible to be real friends with people, if they aren't as wealthy as you.
I guess it's a reason to be glad I'm not that rich, after all.
I have only had to ask to borrow money a few times, and man it hits so hard. I loath the experience. I sent $50 to someone who needed some cash to buy groceries and they said they would send it back when they could but didn't and I'm ok with it.
It hurts knowing how little (depending on wealth) it would take to change someones life. I'm still paying back a loan from someone so I could afford to buy my first house and damn does it still sting. I had to save every single cent just to afford the down payment, and it wasn't enough.
I lent one friend money to help pay for a video card and he paid me back exactly on time when he said he would. I respect him to this day. I lent another friend money to pay for some car parts and he did the whole dodging, partial payment, and then forgetfulness thing. I ended up giving up trying to get payment but wrote him off and never had a meaningful interaction with him again.
In some ways its crappy, judging an adult by something in their youth but I've yet to find a case where someone's character changes appreciably in this regard. You're either responsible and pay your debts or you're not.
I do have one weird (?) friend that is not a friend any more because she felt she still owed me and kept feeling bad about it.
Generally, someone asking for a non-trivial loan is in a really bad place; your loan may likely not be enough for them to get out of it, for whatever reasons they need money now, it's probably not that unlikely they're going to be unable to pay back the money when they optimistically thought they would, the loan probably isn't going to change their life circumstances as much as they hoped.
If that happens, are you willing to let it destroy your friendship? If yes, then why are you loaning them money in the first place, you apparently don't trust them enough or value their friendship enough to give them a personal loan, at least not of the size you gave them, a size which if not paid back would hurt you a lot.
And if you wouldn't end the friendship if they didn't pay it back... why not just make it a gift instead of a loan? Maybe for less than they asked, for what you can actually afford to not see back without being resentful -- because that's what you'd be risking with a loan anyway.
I learned this the hard way. Loans will ruin friendships.
I sometimes say no, sometimes say yes, but almost always make the 'yes' a gift not a loan. Pay it forward, pay it back to me however you think appropriate with voluntary favors or helping me when I need it myself, but not expecting you to pay it back monetarily at a certain date.
Well, he was totally right, after years of trying, the business totally flopped and I had lost all of the money, as well as a ton of my own. It set my finances back at least a decade or more. Luckily, my dad has a lifelong friend who was willing to buy out the loan when it looked like the company was going to default, so now my debt was really to my dads friend.
Fast forward many years... my dad has retired and needs money. He's had trouble selling the property (although it looks like that is happening now in the next month or two). The property gained a lot of value over the years, so that is good. He will have enough to pay back the friend in full and a bunch left over for himself.
I've been paying my dad back as I can over the years and in recent times, reached the principle amount of the loan... now I'm paying the interest (the principle has ballooned more than 2x).
My current payments have been a lifesaver for him. It worked out that being able to pay him back now when he needs money the most, has been really helpful for him. Had I paid him back in full earlier, it might have been harder for him to come to me asking for a loan, now he has some steady cash flow from me. When the property sells, his friend will get paid back first and I'll just owe my dad the rest of the interest.
This has weighed on me for a long time and is something that I think about almost daily. It sucks owing money. I have no other debt than this. Some day, I'll be free of it and I can't wait for that day.
My tenure was more than a decade ago, but the space was on 11th and folsom and has brick walls on the inside. The space next to the corner venue. It has been several different venues since I had it.
In fact, the scene changed and morphed a lot over the years. While I'm sure that people will find ways to have their own kinds of fun, I don't think it'll ever get repeated in the same way again. Mostly because of the fact that we all have phone/cameras along with social influencers now... it changed everything, and that's ok too. It'll be interesting to see how to changes again in the next decade or so.
My ownership period was more in the 1999-2005 range, so you were just after that by a few years.
Thanks for sharing your story.
If I had instead invested my dads money in say... property in the east bay (at the time, it was pretty low compared with today), then I would have been 'rich' as well. Live and learn.
Think about it. Most people on HN how many paths would you have to go down first before you would borrow money from an individual? I'm guessing several options would be tried first.
The reason those people are shitty is they already burnt all those options and have now moved onto individuals to grift in small ways.
The number of people that truly need help from a single person in the form of money is exceedingly rare. This is not limited to any specific place.
Yes I'm aware people can be in different/difficult places in life that make such need more likely, I'm just speaking as a general rule. Usually people that really need help are hesitant to even ask.
On the other hand, asking for money from a close friend means 0% interest, and an implied forgiveness in case it's not able to get repaid. That sounds like a much better option to me (of course, depends heavily on your relationship with your friends, etc.).
I wonder if most often the smart move is to make sure that one's sudden acquisition of wealth (say the sale of a startup-now-a-successful-scaleup) is hidden from one's even closest circles to avoid the curse of the lottery winner as well described in the famous reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/c...
But I also wonder if trying to hide one's wealth that much comes at the price of social isolation, where you have to reduce your contacts with the outside world to avoid flashing the new possibilities that your wealth opened to you. Or you make sure your lifestyle doesn't change at all, but then you cannot take advantage of your wealth either.
> you might consider picking another G7 or otherwise mainstream country other than the U.S. according to where you want to live if the United States dissolves into anarchy or Britney Spears is elected to the United States Senate.
Things can (and did) get much worse with our national politics than Britney being elected to the Senate.
> You know you will be getting $638,400 per year unless the capital building is burning
Or even IF the capital building is burning.
Probably due to him putting his name in front of the game's title.
Regardless of whether or not McGee feels like he deserved to have been better compensated by id software for his contributions, he feels personally indebted to John Carmack for the money he borrowed.
And in the case of feeling slighted, while he could justify never paying Carmack back by saying that since Carmack was one of the founder/owners of the company that slighted him, this was just money Carmack owed him, he has not taken that tack.
It is possible to compartmentalize.
There’s usually a fairly small circle of close people that get the biggest share of the financial pie, and others don’t get very much.
I’ve seen a few situations where some friends ended up earning a regular salary at startups when the closed circle made millions. So yeah you can brag about working at $trendy_company but that doesn’t financially translate into anything special.
3/12/98
-------
American McGee has been let go from Id.
His past contributions include work in three of the all time great games
(DOOM 2, Quake, Quake 2), but we were not seeing what we wanted.And it is totally possible that his work wasn't sufficient to remain employed. It's possible he produced too slowly or not enough or his work needed help, etc.
Are those games still "all time great games" without McGee's contributions? Very likely. Without Carmack and Romero, that's a different story. And even though Romero had no input on Quake 2, it's built off of Quake, so it carries a lot of that with it.
And the whole question is complex. These games sold well. McGee did work for these games as an employee. Does he deserve a percentage of sales? If so, how much, etc? Or is it much the case with the people who worked on Microsoft Word. It was a job and they did their part and were paid for that part. I don't see anyone trying to get the Office team a percentage of Office sales, even though that would make some people fantastically wealthy.
That's a pretty prejudicial way to put it - he was a junior dev who got fired, how much of "Id's success" do you think he was entitled to?
I’ve never loaned money to folks who I don’t have a strong relationship with. Extended Family has found this out the hard way. On the other hand - I’ve never thought twice about money transactions with closer friends. Obviously they value the relationship the same as I do. I’ve had friends loan me 5 digits for a couple of days because my Schwab didn’t settle in time and I wanted to close a property. We’ve have done so many vacations with friends where thousands are transacted and settled. It seems weird that you’d special case money alone.
Whenever I think about lending, or asking for a loan or help (I am terribly short on money and very sad about it) - I remember this story.
The synopsis reads almost as though written by Sophocles two thousand years earlier.
You already know how that went.
Some 20 odd years later the guy crawls back out of the woodwork. He had a guilty conscience and wanted to do the currency exchange finally. _At the exchange rate of 20 years later than was originally agreed apon_.
Dad told him to donate the now trifling sum of dollars to whatever charity he wanted, and that he's still going to hell for screwing over an immigrant family.
1. You can only have one loan at a time.
2. The money has to be used to complete a goal. Moving across country is a goal, paying rent is not.
3. There is no repayment date, but you do have to write me an email stating what you are using the money for and that you agree to the rules.
Those are the simplest rules I could come up with that prevent abuse without being too onerous. They seem to work. About 1/3 of the loans I've given out have been repaid.
YMMV
YMMV
My personal experience. I overcame a lot to go from "lower middle class" to "upper middle class". So I'm great with money, save a lot, etc. But, given my history and where I come from, most of the people I know aren't good with money. I learned a lot of this the hard way - via loans.
I'm not "from the hood", but there's similarities. You sometimes have to cut ties to mature/grow in your personal life. I had to learn most of these people who "were" my friends really aren't my friends any more.
"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in"
Be smart people.
I think it's a much harder game for the rest of us.
Also, it has a built-in assumption that people will self-limit what they are asking. I learned the unpleasant way that people don't. At some point in my life, I had a friend who was constantly asking for smallish amounts and conveniently forgetting to return them. Each ask for definitely in the category that I didn't care whether it was returned or not, but if you accumulate all of them, it was an amount big enough to care. After numerous unpleasant interactions with the money subject, I just decided to stop this practice.
That being said, I feel like it's critical to not become too thick-skinned. Sometimes people do need help and they are truly in a bad place and dismissing their ask just based on some other problematic person is not good.
They're insecure about being successful when others are less fortunate. Rather than admit they got where they are due to a combination of skill _and_ luck, it's decided that it was all skill and that it is the duty of the skilled elites to take care of the rest of us.
Unfortunately, these days you don't even need skill, just a splash of narcissism and good self-marketing.
Money I can't afford to give away is money I probably shouldn't be loaning out.
Usually, people pay me back, and it's a nice treat.
Sometimes, people don't, and because I wasn't expecting the money back, and wasn't counting on it, it's fine.
Sometimes in the 90s I had a software product. It so happened that there were competitors for the same very niche market right here in Toronto - tiny company of 3 people. So they came to me with the offer to sell them a product and start working for them. The money offered was absolute peanuts, so was the salary proposed. Obviously I refused. 2 years after they called me back again and asked for a meeting. I assumed that they've probably come to their senses and had agreed to meet even though I was already employed with 6 figures.
Now the depressing part. They came and tried to pitch to me some bullshit (snake oil type) products to sell. Basically they went to multilevel marketing. I did not like it at all.
On a side note, everytime I see the name of John Carmack popping up my heart goes to game programming and I have the impulse to create a game. Masters of Doom really is magical.
"listen, how about I guarantee a bank loan for you of that amount, then you get the money you need but there's no scope for it to lessen our friendship"
Surprised to hear people think everyone out there have similar life circumstances to themselves.
I’m still thankful that I learnt the lesson online instead of in real life.
What a wonderful construct.
Same thing happened to me. It was a good calibration.
> The quokka is a meme animal that lives on Bald Island on the SW coast of Australia, where it has no natural predators. If you visit this island, it will fearlessly walk up and try to hug you..........The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up.
Among my peers, a contractless intangible favor weighs far heavier than one signed on paper with a $$-sign associated with it. That I'd offer/accept such a favor from someone not in my close group of 'people who would uproot their lives for me' is unthinkable. It is a double edged sword. Good faith and high trust societies allow for frictionless societies, but only because betraying that trust has very high social (and sometimes legal) costs. But at some-point, if it is truly no-strings-attached, you're just naïve & gullible. You're letting yourself be taken advantage of, and your naivete is actively working towards the future destruction of the high trust society.
________
People should stop trying to be selfless. It is possible to convince/delude your conscious into believing that you are being selfless. But enough unreciprocated favors make you jaded in the subconscious. It is an unhealthy festering that goes on, until a person finds values that sit well with both the conscious and the subconscious.
Invest in people (monetarily or as a relationship) directly. That way, if things go south, you can blame your intuition for picking (human) stocks, rather than resenting the person who failed despite their best efforts. Ask for reciprocation in intangibles (look after my kids, teach me a skill, be my emotional shoulder, let me crash anytime) they can easily give. That way, you are almost paying for a service more so than giving an unprotected loan.
My experience comes from living in joint-family style Asian relationships. They go above and beyond for members of the family who are struggling, but never properly communicate the nature of the unspoken interest that this help entails. So the helped person ends up in a situation where they don't know if they can ever say 'No' to those who helped them at a rough time. It also means that if the helped person isn't reciprocating in (the unspoken) kind, then they get slandered as being selfish, while simultaneously not knowing what is expected from them in the first place. Don't make your friends read your mind. Sign a contract (socially or legally) make the stakes clear to everyone. Life is a lot easier that way.
Paradoxically, Being aware of the transactional nature of relationships, helps structure transactions where favors don't impose an unseen burden on the counterpart in the relationship. In a weird way, being more selfish, is the best way to be selfless.
[1] https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1276138147521400833 (Ignore the rest of the tweet, it goes off the rails pretty fast)