Money & Career

A Friend Keeps Borrowing Money and Not Paying It Back

My friend keeps borrowing money and never pays it back. What do I do?

Stop calling it a loan

A loan has a date on it. What you have been doing is giving money to someone who has learned there is no date and no consequence.

That is not an accusation about him. It is a description of what you built. He kept asking because it kept working.

Say the number and the answer

You do not owe a speech. "I am not able to do that anymore" is a complete sentence, and the discomfort after it lasts about four seconds.

If you want the old money back, name it once, with a date: "You are at four hundred. Can you get me half by the first?" Say it once. Repeating it is how you become the villain in a story about his debt.

Watch what he does with the no

This is the part that tells you what the friendship actually is. A friend takes the no and stays a friend. Someone who was working an angle gets angry, guilt-trips you, or disappears.

Either way you learn something worth more than the money — and you stop paying monthly for the privilege of not knowing.