Your friend, child, brother, or parent can’t get a mortgage or a car loan so they ask you to be a co-signer. Of course you will be a hero and co-sign for your loved one! But beware of the dangers before doing so.
In reality, the lender is assuming that the odds are fairly high that there will be a default on the loan, otherwise, why would they need someone else to co-sign on the loan? There are certainly many situations that the loan never goes bad, but why take such a chance? Consider this:
If the borrower defaults on the loan, then your credit will take a hit because you are personally responsible for the loan. The lender may also come after you for payments on a loan that you never benefited from. Actually, you had almost all of the risk without any real benefit.
If you are familiar with Murphy’s law, then you know that what can happen will happen. So, what if you are ready to obtain a mortgage or finance a car and then find out that the loan you co-signed went bad? You may not qualify for the loan for yourself or the terms may not be as favorable as they were originally.
One last item to consider is the damage to the relationship once a co-signed loan goes bad. As Polonius said over 400 years ago in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend . . .” Even thousands of years before Shakespeare numerous bible versus were also written to warn against co-signing such as Proverbs 22:26-27 and Sirach 29:16-18.