The discussion in the other thread about people who took out mortgages they could not afford, how mortgage companies gave them out, and the like made me think of a somewhat similar question from a long time ago on the CHB.
For background, many many years ago on the old CHB there was a poster named Jeff Freeman who ran a computer business in the Atlanta area. He said all of this publicly, so I am not saying anything private. He was very no-nonsense and did not suffer fools as customers, and he was really big on personal responsibility. Having just gotten out of retail where I had seen my share of customers who were full of it, I don’t mind saying that I agreed with him far more often than not and respected him a lot.
That is why one thing that he said later on absolutely floored me. He said that if a business lent money to a person and the person did not pay it back, the person’s relatives have an obligation to pay it back. To be clear, he never said they had a legal obligation, but he felt they had a moral obligation. I totally disagreed with him on this.
As we discussed it, at one point he asked about the poor businessman and why he should be left holding the bag when the customer welched on his loan. My answer was that he as the businessman had made the business decision to extend credit to this person and had taken on the associated risk with it. That transaction was between the businessman and customer only, and none of the customer’s relatives were part of it. Yet, rather than accept responsibility for the risk he took when he extended credit, he wanted to pass it onto the deadbeat’s relatives so that he didn’t lose anything.
If that standard applied, business people would be extending credit to just about anybody knowing that they could find some responsible relative to stick with the debt if the customer defaulted. I recall asking him how he would feel if one of his relatives defaulted on a loan and the bank came to him and told him to pay up. As I recall, he didn’t give a straight answer.
I also told him that if he ever came to me telling me that I needed to pay a debt that one of my deadbeat relatives owed him, my reply would be that unless he had something showing I had co-signed or guaranteed that debt then he could take his “request” and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
Now, in the interest of fairness, I do remember one poster replying that one of her relatives had defaulted on a debt and her family had taken it upon themselves to pay it off. They felt it reflected on them as a family and they had that obligation. I disagreed with her rationale, but that was her opinion and her decision.
So, with said, does anybody have any thoughts on whether obligations to pay off debts should extend to relatives?
