Being a guarantor means promising a lender that you'll repay someone's loan if they stop paying. A co-signer, or joint borrower, takes out the loan together with someone else and is liable for all of it, for example a parent signing with a grown-up child. Either way, it's your debt even though you don't use the money.
A liability like this can be passed on to your estate. If your family doesn't know about it, a demand for payment can arrive out of the blue when the main borrower falls behind.
What to write down
- whose loan you guarantee or share (their full name),
- which bank or lender it's with,
- where the copy of the agreement is, such as “folder on the shelf” or “scan in the cloud”.
Knowing about it lets your family deal with the estate calmly instead of discovering the debt afterwards.
In the app: Financial Liabilities, then Guarantees.
