Lending money to European friend

RespectableGary

Is there anyway I can get something legal to cover me if I lend £7000 to someone who works for me in the UK but actually resides in Poland? Thanks for any help.
Gary

John1993_2

While someone else will hopefully answer the technical side of your question, might I suggest that you also worry about the practical side?

Your chances of actually getting the legal system to force someone to give you this money is close to zero.

If they default it will be ceause either they don't want to pay you, or can't pay you. In the former case you'll need to actually enforce through the court system, using lawyers. This will eat up your money.

In the second case the courts can't magic money out of nowhere. If he doeasn't have it, you are not getting it.

If you look round the forums here you'll see literally thousands of stories where even close family members have failed to pay money back. They rarely end up with anyone being able to enforce anything significant against them.

Basically, unless someone says otherwise, you need to view this loan as being paid if the guy wants to pay it, and you getting zero if he decides that he's prefer not to pay.

Why would you lend to someone who might not pay you back?

DCFC79

RespectableGary wrote: »

Is there anyway I can get something legal to cover me if I lend £7000 to someone who works for me in the UK but actually resides in Poland? Thanks for any help.
Gary

Id say no there isn't.

What if the friendship goes belly up or your friend stops paying ?

Are you prepared to lose the 7k ?

What if the guy decides to not pay and he goes to another country with your £7k ?

dealer_wins

Whether you get something legal or not has no bearing on whether you will get your £7000 back.

Dont be a mug, just read all the horror stories on here re lending to family and friends and say a BIG FAT NO.

If you still decide to go ahead treat it like a gift, because you wont see it back in all likelihood.

bargainbetty

Your only possibility would be to do it as a loan via your company, with automatic deductions from salary at point of payment - similar to a season ticket loan. It would be declarable on his tax returns as a benefit (interest free loan) and you'd still struggle to get the remainder back if he stopped working for you without notice - you would have to reclaim what you could from his final salary if it all went belly-up.

DevCoder

Unless you can bind any collateral s/he has into a promissory note drawn up and notarised then you are always putting yourself at risk of your employee not being able to repay (and what they haven't got they cannot give even if you go down the court route).

polskiegowLondynie

As mentioned there are two parts to this, coming up with a legally binding agreement in the first place which is accepted in both countries and then actually recovering the debt if something did go wrong. I would have to agree with most of the posters above and say chance of recovery should something go wrong while maybe not impossible it would be very difficult, costly and time consuming.

Sampong

RespectableGary wrote: »

Is there anyway I can get something legal to cover me if I lend £7000 to someone who works for me in the UK but actually resides in Poland? Thanks for any help.
Gary

Good grief I can hardly believe what I am reading.

As you know we learn from our mistakes. So I suggest you proceed and lend your European friend the 7k.

I guarantee that in a few months from now, you will have learned something and be much wiser for it.

You'll be down £7,000 but hey - you can't put a price on wisdom.

RespectableGary

Sampong wrote: »

Good grief I can hardly believe what I am reading.

As you know we learn from our mistakes. So I suggest you proceed and lend your European friend the 7k.

I guarantee that in a few months from now, you will have learned something and be much wiser for it.

You'll be down £7,000 but hey - you can't put a price on wisdom.

I've already said no, I just asked the question to see if there was some strange law I didn't know about.

paddyrg

Glad you said 'no'. Even if he was a British national I hope you'd still say 'no' TBH!

Fact is if someone wants to borrow money and the banks won't lend it to them, there's a reason.