If you have a friend who needs money, should you loan them money?
I have been in a jam and had a friend help me out on more than one occasion. I have helped a friend in a jam on more than one occasion. For someone I am really close with, I am the friend who will go find a bail bondsman in the middle of the night before someone gets transferred to county. I have mostly had good experiences with this, but I've had bad ones too and there are certainly some relationships I've had where I've seen things go badly whether I was the borrower or the lender.
These days, I am most likely to be the lender, unless it is the oh-they-don't-take-credit-cards-let's-hit-the-ATM-after-this sort of loan i.e. the sort of small dollar loan that lasts about two hours. I recently loaned someone quite a few hundred dollars because they told me it was an emergency or they were going to lose all their possessions. Okay, this is someone who borrowed a similar amount of money from their supposed best friend like six months ago and then had a falling out with them and never paid them. I probably should have known better, but they just seemed like they really needed it.
I communicated to my friend that they could either just pay me back or I would hire them to do work which would be equal to the amount of the loan, whatever was best for them. I can't tell if I basically threw the relationship away because I loaned my friend a bunch of money.
Should I have refused to extend this person a loan, knowing they were a questionnable credit risk? Or was it just a good gauge of what sort of person they are?
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