It happens all the time. Friends ask other friends if they can borrow some money. And suddenly there often becomes a complicated and sketchy ordeal for that person being asked.
For the longest time, I was doing quite well on financial level and was faced with those situations of being asked for a loan quite a bit. With the passings of both of my parents and their parents over a short period of time, an amount of money was handed down to me that was nothing to scoff at. Because of my lack of discipline with it, my ego got the best of me and it became pretty obvious to others that I was living with more than most. Unfortunately this led to various complications such as new friends coming into my life solely because I had money, or existing friends expecting me to pay for everything on our social outings because they felt I had more then them. The hardest complication to face though was when those same friends would ask me if they could borrow some money and pay me back later.
Over the years, I had to learn the hard way that it’s best not to offer a loan to anyone you care about. All of the times I have done it were with people I was dating or very close to. In each of those cases, they had major financial issues already going on in their lives at the time of their request. I thought that loaning them money would prevent them from drowning further in their debt that had built up throughout their lives. Upon receiving my loan, there was always initially considerable amounts of gratitude offered. But like it was with my own addictions in life, no one was able to save me from my disease if they took my alcohol or drugs away. No one was able to change the course of my sex and love addictions by any of their actions either. The same held true for all of the other addictions I suffered from. There were no amounts of anything anyone could do to alter my course of self-destruction. In most cases, I have found the same principle to hold true with those with massive money issues. Often I found spending money was an addiction in itself for these people. So for each of them who I lent money to, within a short period of time, all of it was gone and usually spent on everything but what it was supposed to help the person with. And even when it was spent paying off bills, it only gave them the appearance that everything was good again. Most would go out on further spending sprees because of this, racking up more debt with any other money that was coming to them. The result would always end with their debt only increasing. What transpired next after all of this, in each of these loans were the things that frustrated me the most.
First, there were the apologies and sincere attempts at statements from them saying they didn’t know what happened. Next came their waves of self-pity and promises that they would pay me back, but it might take a little more time. Finally, many would ask for another loan on top of the one existing and say that they knew exactly what they needed to do this time around to fix everything and pay me back. Sadly, no one ever did. What’s even worse are the guilt trips I would often get from them saying that I didn’t understand what’s it like to be in their shoes. Some would even play the friend card and and get very angry with me on how bad of a friend they felt I was because I didn’t want to loan them more money. All of this is what has led me to take a different position today with money.
Ironically I don’t have what I used to anymore to loan anyway, but even so, I have come to decide that it’s just not healthy to establish loans with friends. Not for me and not for them. It’s rare that I have ever seen a person desire a loan where they weren’t spending way out of their means already. And if they are already spending out of their means, then they are going to spend the money being loaned to them out of their means as well. On the contrary, a person with good financial management generally won’t ask for a loan from a friend in the first place. More often than not, if they need a loan, they are able to go to banks and other financial institutions because they have spent their money wisely and know how to pay their debts off. In those cases of people who reach out to friends and ask for loans, most can’t go to a bank because of the bad credit they have from their previous spending. And if a bank is unwilling to lend a person money, it’s because there’s history and good potential that the person won’t pay any new debts off. For those I tried to save financially, I dealt with this first hand and even worse, many never even intended to pay me back to start with.
As a recovering addict of so many things, sometimes it’s best to just let people fall as hard as they can to a rock bottom place. It’s at those places where I’ve found my biggest push to find recovery in my life from whatever the addiction is that got me there. In the case of those who over spend and over borrow, becoming broke and having no one willing to loan them money is the best wake up call for them. I enabled many people for a long time with their money addictions. I lost friends over it and experienced a number of terrible ordeals all because of lending money to those I cared about. The sad truth in my case is that approximately 95% of the hundreds of thousands of dollars I loaned over the years to friends, was never paid back to me.
My philosophy today surrounding this issue has changed greatly because of all of this. I consider myself a God-centered person now who definitely wants to do the next right thing for people in the hopes it might help their lives. Loaning money isn’t one of them though especially to those who already are in financial crisis. It has proven throughout the years to do nothing more than cause greater pain, hardship, and stress for all parties involved. Instead, when I’m asked for a loan today, I either decline and offer my love and support in other ways instead, or in rare cases, I’ll give them a donation with no expectations of it ever coming back. This solution seems to be working and I haven’t lost any friends because of it. Maybe that’s because I asked God to help me with this, as it looks like he has.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
