When last we saw our heroes…

“We are so screwed! We just lost $8000 and there’s nothing we can do to get it back!” I yelped to Kyeli.

And now, the exciting conclusion!

“$8000? No problem!” she replied. “We can find that under the couch cushions!”

That’s right. I didn’t need to flip out. $8000 isn’t all that much, after all. When we needed $22,500 for a short-term loan, everything worked out just fine — our friends came through for us. So if we needed $8000 for a longer-term loan, I’m sure it will work out too.

I stopped flipping out, and instead we began to problem solve.

How can we come up with $8000? Who could loan it to us? 5 people responded to our request for a short-term loan of $22,500, so maybe one of them would be interested in a longer-term loan?

So we called our friend Jorge (who wishes to remain pseudonymous). We asked him if he could loan us $10,000. (We have awesome plans for the extra $2000.) He said that would probably be fine, and we could work out the details later.

Phew! We were saved!

Later, we met with Jorge to discuss the terms of the loan. He would have had that $10k invested in the stock market if he hadn’t loaned it to us, so we discussed tying the interest rate to the market, or picking a rate that would be comparable to the average S&P 500 return, or something like that.

While Jorge was in the bathroom, Kyeli suggested, “Let’s give him 20%. I’d rather give 20% to a friend than 14% to a bank, and we like to be generous. It’s just $2000, and in a couple of years we’ll be able to afford that easily.” I concurred.

We offered Jorge 20%, and we started the backwards-haggling process. I love to do business where the parties haggle backwards. It’s so connection paradigm businessy. (: He wasn’t comfortable charging such a high rate to friends, even if it was offered out of generosity. We settled on an awesome compromise. We would pay the $10k back to Jorge, and the $2k would go into a Future Awesomeness Fund, to do some unspecified awesome thing in the future. We would all give our input as to the awesomeness, but Jorge would have the final decision. This neatly sidestepped Jorge’s reluctance to take our money for himself, and we had a deal.

We lost $8000. We gained $10,000. We promised $1000 more than we had to on something awesome in the future. And we all ended up much happier than if we had never lost that $8000 in the first place.