Q: Should I be a guarantor for a friend/relative, or lend money out?

In 30 seconds: The test is one line — only lend or guarantee money you’re willing to treat as “thrown down a drain, gone for good.” And since you’ve already decided you don’t need that money back, the better move is to just give it to them and say “no need to repay” — not lend, and not guarantee. Being a guarantor means shouldering the entire debt for someone; only do it if you can afford to. Flip it to check: if you can’t afford to wire them the full amount outright and generously say “this is yours, don’t repay it,” then you can neither be their guarantor nor lend to anyone.¹

Variants (how people actually ask)

“A classmate/friend is borrowing from the bank and wants me as guarantor — should I agree?”
“A relative asks to borrow NT$500k / NT$1M — do I lend?”
“He says he’ll definitely repay within three years — can I lend on that?”
“My partner/fiancé wants me to co-sign a loan to invest, and we own a house together — should I agree?”

One test is enough: are you willing to just give it away?

James collapses the whole thing into one clean test:¹

Lending or guaranteeing means you’re shouldering the debt for them — so the precondition is “you can afford it.”
What “afford it” means: you’d be willing to wire the money straight to their account and say “this isn’t a loan, it’s yours, don’t repay it.” Only then are you qualified to act.
If you can’t, do nothing — don’t lend, and definitely don’t guarantee. “Someone asks to borrow NT$1M and you say ‘okay, repay me within three years’ — then don’t lend to him; either say ‘this NT$1M is yours, no need to repay,’ or do nothing at all.”
The closing line: “Only money you don’t want back is money you can give to someone.”

James’s own practice is to keep the whole thing out of his life: “There’s no such thing as being a guarantor or lending money to people — it has never happened to me.”¹

Why “being a guarantor” is especially to be avoided

Guaranteeing is riskier than lending in a hidden way — you never received the money, yet you carry the full debt. Taiwan’s old joint-guarantee (連帶保證) system once let parents become guarantors with the debt pursuing their children, “chased for a lifetime,” dragging families into ruin. (The current system differs, but keep the risk awareness.) So CLEC’s stance is: you don’t need to be anyone’s guarantor.¹

This aligns with the first principle of 15 years of cash flow — secure your own cash-flow safety first, and don’t let an unbearable contingent liability (a guarantee) drag you under — and with the spirit of the borrowing order: borrowing is a disciplined tool for launching your own assets, not a favor for co-signing someone else’s.

Special case: when it’s a “partner + shared asset + stable income,” the test loosens

00575 a member’s situation differs from “co-signing for a friend” and is worth unpacking: after hearing about a member Xin muster, her boyfriend wanted to pledge his other unmortgaged house for about NT$2M to invest, and asked a member to be guarantor; but she’s already guarantor on their shared marital home (NT$10M+ mortgage) and doesn’t want to add more guarantee debt. James’s judgment here clearly loosens, because two risk preconditions change:²

Repayable → co-sign risk is small: the house is in both names, and the boyfriend is a civil servant with stable income — “he can repay the NT$2M, he won’t stick you (the guarantor) with it.” This still fits the page’s underlying test — only do it if you can bear it — it’s just that “can bear it” holds here because of his stable income and the shared asset.
The real risk is “will he mess around,” not “will you be chased for the debt”: the only risk is if he takes the NT$2M for short-term trading / gambling and loses it all (“then that NT$2M is thrown down a drain”). So James’s condition is: “If you’re willing to allocate the CLEC (index) way, I think borrowing is fine; but you have to keep your promise” — and “keeping the promise” has no paper contract and is hard to ensure. The safer move: put the borrowed money into a member’s own account and hold to the death (though the boyfriend may not agree).
Don’t break up over an NT$2M co-sign: James circled back to add — they’re already a couple who jointly bought a house, near marriage; “breaking up over co-signing NT$2M is too arbitrary,” and he suggests wait and see; only if the other walks the gambler’s road (vice) is it unsolvable. Here the marriage/relationship risk is actually greater than the co-sign’s financial risk (the money-vs-relationship boundary is in 要不要讓伴侶或家人知道我的資產).

Contrast: for “friends/relatives” the baseline is still “only lend what you’d give away” (next section); the difference is that partner + shared asset + stable income makes “can bear it” easy to satisfy, so the focus shifts from “will I get stuck with the debt” to “will he invest with discipline” and “the relationship itself.”

A faster test: if the bank asks for a guarantor, the loan was already too big (00576)

00576 gave what is so far the most usable check on this question — it moves the judgement off you and onto the bank’s own risk control:³

“If the bank says it will only lend once your wife guarantees it, that means the loan is too big. The bank is worried he can’t repay, which is why it tells him to go find a guarantor. That’s risk control too — it isn’t that you won’t sign; it’s that even the bank is afraid. It isn’t me who’s afraid, it’s the bank.”

Turn it around: if the loan were safe and the borrower could repay, the bank wouldn’t need a second person at all. Asking for a guarantor is the bank telling you this person’s credit doesn’t support this amount.
So declining isn’t a betrayal — it’s following the bank’s own assessment. You don’t have to evaluate their ability to repay; the bank already did, and gave you the answer.
“If someone’s credit is insufficient and you guarantee them, you wrong them and you wrong yourself” — because they probably really will fail to pay, or the bank wouldn’t have wanted a second name.
It applies to spouses too: “Even husband and wife don’t necessarily have to guarantee each other.” This narrows the partner exception above — 00575’s loosening rested on “stable income, can repay”; once the bank itself demands a co-signer, that premise has failed.
The close is the same line: “If you don’t want to, don’t guarantee… if the relationship can’t survive you not guaranteeing, it was never solid.”

🔗 This and the page’s original test (would you give the money away?) are two angles on the same thing: the original asks whether you can bear it; this one asks whether the bank thinks they can. Fail both and don’t sign.

One member’s first-hand account: guarantee debt reaches the next generation

A member in the same session shared a childhood experience showing why guarantee debt is harder to unwind than a loan:³

His father guaranteed a friend, and the borrower disappeared — “in the end the debtor runs; of course they run, otherwise why would they have needed a guarantor?”
Worse, his father was at the time in treatment for terminal cancer. When enforcement officers came to seal the home, only he — still a child — was there to answer the door; they asked, considerately, whether the seal could go behind a painting rather than on the front door where it would look bad. He said the shock was immense — that was the moment he understood “we don’t even have a place to live any more.”
His father later died and the house was seized; his mother took him, still young, to the debtor’s brother’s home to kneel and plead. The brother eventually settled the debt and the seizure was lifted.
His conclusion: “When you’re riding high and feel your resources are unlimited, guaranteeing seems like nothing — everyone’s a good friend, a sworn brother. But when the tea goes cold, the moment anything goes wrong everyone vanishes faster than you can imagine, and there’s no one left to help.”

This is the worst form of the contingent liability described in 十五年現金流: it isn’t on your balance sheet, yet it detonates exactly when you can least absorb it — and it takes your family with it. Which is why CLEC’s position isn’t “assess carefully then decide,” it’s don’t.

Answer log

2026-08-01 (00576): James gave the “if the bank asks for a guarantor, the loan was already too big” test (“it isn’t me who’s afraid, it’s the bank”) and narrowed the partner exception — even spouses don’t necessarily guarantee each other; a member shared a childhood account of his father guaranteeing a friend who then fled, his father’s terminal illness, the seizure of the home, and his mother taking him to plead with the debtor’s brother.³
2026-07-25 (00575): partner co-sign special case (above) — when it’s a near-spouse with stable income and a shared asset, the co-sign’s financial risk is small, on the condition he invests with index discipline; don’t advise breakup over one co-sign, the relationship risk exceeds the financial risk.²
2026-05-16 (00565): A member asked, “A classmate wants to borrow and asked me to be guarantor.” James gave the “only lend what you’d throw down a drain / better to just give it” test and recalled the lesson of Taiwan’s old joint-guarantee rules pursuing children. The same point is printed on that week’s deck.¹

🔎 This question also appears in 00481, 00565, 00575 and others (keyword hits, content pending verification) — “being a guarantor / lending money out” is an evergreen asked every so often.

⚠️ Guarantees and lending involve local law (joint guarantee, claim priority) and your own cash-flow tolerance; this page summarizes James’s spoken decision rule, not personalized legal or financial advice.

CLEC James, 長篇 00565 “Waiting is the dumbest strategy — you’re not a god; buy at market immediately,” 2026-05-16, guarantor/lending @36:50–38:40; matching deck page in raw/docs/簡報資料/00565… (“You must not be a guarantor! … Lending to someone or guaranteeing means you can bear that debt … only money you don’t want back can be given to people.”). Transcript in raw/transcripts/長篇/00565…. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
CLEC James, 長篇 00575 “What truly teaches you is not the result, but the process!”, 2026-07-25, a member co-signing her boyfriend’s NT$2M pledge to invest @58:00–1:09:00 (“he can repay the NT$2M, he won’t stick you with it … if you’re willing to allocate the CLEC way I think borrowing is fine, but you have to keep your promise … put the borrowed money into your account”), James adding don’t advise breakup over a co-sign, wait and see @1:40:30–1:42:30. Transcript in raw/transcripts/長篇/00575…. ↩ ↩²
CLEC James with a member, 長篇 00576 “Waiting Is Not a Strategy — Buy and Hold Long Term Is the Real Way to Invest,” 2026-08-01, “if the bank says your wife must guarantee it, the loan is too big… it isn’t me who’s afraid, it’s the bank” and “even husband and wife don’t necessarily guarantee each other” @2:56:30–3:04:00; the member’s childhood account of his father guaranteeing a friend, the borrower fleeing, and the home being seized @2:59:00–3:01:30. Transcript: raw/transcripts/長篇/00576…. Member identity anonymized per EDITORIAL.md. ↩ ↩² ↩³