CV and mad panic behaviour

[Mav]

Oh boy! I missed the point they’d bought after the pandemic hit. What a risky gamble.

I can’t believe they’d look to relatives to bail them out. If I went to Crown casino and lost $200k at the roulette wheel, I wouldn’t have the chutzpah to tell relatives they needed to foot the bill.

In the taxi industry, taxi owners would band together in a form of Insurance pooling. If one of them was sued over a crash, they’d share the costs (and perhaps also share the costs of fixing the taxi). But that was all organised ahead of time and featured reciprocal obligations. Any owner who was deemed to be a cowboy wouldn’t be allowed into the pool. But here, your in-laws have, unbeknownst to you, effectively made you a co-borrower who is jointly responsible for the loan. You had no chance to assess risk or opt out. And if the café had gone gangbusters, no doubt you wouldn’t have shared In the success.

I don’t envy you. There’ll be heaps of pressure from the family and ironically the sister who refused to pay will probably have some reason why you should pay when she didn’t, thus successfully passing the hot potato. I like to read Ask Prudence in Slate and so many people write in with variations of this issue.