Family & Friend Loan Agreement FAQ (England & Wales)

About four minutes. You answer a few plain questions, send one secure link, and you both sign from your phones — no printing, no appointments.

No. You build the draft on your own, and when it's ready we email the borrower a secure link to read the exact same document and sign. They don't need an account.

Yes — a single repayment date or instalments (weekly, fortnightly or monthly), with or without interest. The builder generates a full payment schedule (Schedule A) so both of you can see every date and amount before anyone signs.

Before both parties have signed, you can edit freely. Once it's signed and sealed, the document is locked — that's the point of it. If circumstances change, the clean route is a short written variation or a fresh agreement that both of you sign.

Absolutely — friends, colleagues, flatmates. LendRight is for ordinary personal loans between individuals. It isn't for lending as a business, which is regulated activity.

Yes. Electronic signatures are valid for ordinary contracts like loan agreements (Electronic Communications Act 2000, confirmed by the Law Commission in 2019). What makes one hold up is the proof around it — timestamps and evidence the document wasn't altered. That's exactly what the signing certificate provides.

An agreement can't force payment — it removes every escape hatch. “I thought it was a gift” and “we never agreed on a date” disappear. If it reaches court, a signed agreement with a verified signing record is the strongest evidence you can bring. The small claims track covers most claims up to £10,000, and Money Claim Online lets you file without a solicitor. You generally have six years from the breach to bring a claim (Limitation Act 1980, s.5).

Two documents, emailed to both of you: the locked, signed agreement PDF, and a Certificate of Completion recording who signed, when, how each person was verified, and the document's SHA-256 fingerprint — so any copy can be checked later at verify.trylendright.com.

No. LendRight is a self-help document tool — you make every decision; the software assembles standardised agreement language built for England and Wales. For complicated situations, talk to a solicitor. We'll tell you when something looks beyond a simple agreement.

A solicitor drafts bespoke terms for your exact situation — worth every penny when the situation is genuinely complex, and bespoke drafting typically runs around £400 for the drafting alone. LendRight assembles clear, standardised terms for the ordinary case — a straightforward personal loan between two people — for £24.99, with e-signing and the certificate included. Our do-I-need-a-solicitor check will tell you honestly which side of the line you're on.

For an ordinary unsecured loan, no. You'd want a solicitor for security over property (a legal charge must be drafted and registered), guarantees executed as deeds, business borrowers, loans tangled up in a separation or an estate, or anything already in dispute.

Yes. A loan agreement is a simple contract — offer, acceptance and consideration (the money itself) make it binding. A solicitor isn't an ingredient of validity; clear written terms and both signatures are.

No. A simple contract in England and Wales needs neither a witness nor a notary. Witnessing rules apply to deeds — which you'd only need for things like a guarantee or forgiving a debt without payment — and that's solicitor territory. (Notarisation is largely an American habit; US templates that demand it are a red flag that they weren't written for England and Wales.)

Yes. Taking security means creating a legal charge, which must be properly drafted and registered at HM Land Registry to be worth anything. LendRight agreements are unsecured — if you want security, see a solicitor.

When the sum is life-changing for either side, when anyone might later suggest pressure or undue influence (large gifts or loans to a caregiver child, for example), when the loan props up a family business, or before forgiving a debt. Independent advice is what makes “they knew exactly what they were signing” stick.

Yes, optionally. There's no statutory cap on a private loan between individuals in England and Wales, but courts can reopen credit relationships they find unfair (Consumer Credit Act 1974, ss.140A–C) — so we write the rate as a clear annual figure and warn (never block) at 25%+. Remember interest you receive is taxable savings income. Most family loans skip interest, and that's fine too.

Drafting and previewing the full agreement is free — read it, edit it, download a draft, no card required. A one-time £24.99 applies only when you send the agreement for signing; it covers both signatures, the sealed PDF and the verification certificate. You choose whether the lender or the borrower pays.

Only at the signing stage. If you (the lender) chose to pay, you pay when you sign & send. If you chose borrower-pays, the borrower pays £24.99 when they open their signing link, before they sign — you're never charged anything.

Email doit@trylendright.com and we'll look at it properly — if the service genuinely wasn't delivered, we'll put it right. Formally: at checkout you ask us to supply the document immediately and acknowledge losing the 14-day cancellation right once it's supplied (Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, reg 37), and your rights for faulty digital content under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 are always unaffected. Full details: refunds & cancellation.

Drafting is free, so before payment there's nothing to refund — just walk away, no account needed. Once you've paid, the checkout consent means the service is supplied immediately and the cooling-off right is lost — that's the legal trade-off for instant digital delivery. If something's gone wrong rather than merely changed, email us; genuine faults are covered by the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Once both parties have signed and the sealed documents are delivered, the service is fully performed, so change-of-mind refunds aren't available. If the delivered documents are faulty — wrong content, broken files — your Consumer Rights Act 2015 remedies apply and we'll fix it.

It usually lands the opposite way. A clear agreement says “I take this seriously and I want us to stay good.” It reads like a person wrote it, not a law firm. Many borrowers are relieved — now they know exactly what's expected.

Then nothing becomes binding — and you've learned something important before the money moved, not after. If you chose borrower-pays, you haven't paid anything. Most refusals aren't refusals at all; they're questions, and the plain-language document tends to answer them.

Everything you send travels over an encrypted HTTPS/TLS connection, and your data is encrypted at rest. We sign you in with one-time email codes, so there's no password to leak. Payments are handled by Stripe and we never see or store your full card number. UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply, and we never sell your information. Signed documents stay private, reachable only through short-lived signed download links.

No. We never ask for, collect, or store government ID, photos or scans of ID, driving licences, passports, or biometric data. The only thing we use to confirm you're 18 or over is a date of birth.

When your agreement is fully signed, we run the final PDF through SHA-256 — a standard cryptographic function that turns the exact bytes of the file into a unique 64-character fingerprint. Changing a single character changes the fingerprint completely. We record it and print it on your certificate, so any copy can be checked against it byte-for-byte, years later.

When both parties sign, we issue an Electronic Signing Certificate: a tamper-evident audit record showing the agreement reference number, each signer's name and masked email, the date and time each signed, how they were verified (a one-time email code), their consent, connection details captured at signing, the SHA-256 document fingerprint, and a QR code linking to verification.

Go to verify.trylendright.com — or scan the QR code on the certificate — enter the agreement reference number, then select the final signed PDF from your device. Your browser calculates the file's SHA-256 fingerprint locally and sends only the reference and fingerprint; the PDF never leaves your device. An exact match means the file is byte-for-byte identical to the agreement LendRight recorded. There's also a weaker fallback for when you don't have the file: type the printed fingerprint, which checks the certificate record only.

Yes. The check runs in your browser: the PDF is hashed locally and never uploaded. Only the reference number and the fingerprint are sent, and anyone holding the certificate — a borrower, a lender, or a third party like a court or an accountant — can run the check.

The moment the second signature lands, both of you are emailed the sealed agreement and the certificate. Each of you holds a complete, independently verifiable record — nobody has to ask the other for a copy.

Three things a printout can't do: clauses actually written for the law of England and Wales; verified e-signatures with a timestamped audit trail; and a cryptographic seal that proves the copy in your hand is the copy that was signed. A template gives you words — this gives you evidence.

England and Wales — one system of contract law, one court system, one properly drafted agreement, whichever side of the border either of you lives on. The builder confirms the jurisdiction from each person's postcode.

The builder checks both postcodes and will tell you honestly that we can't serve you yet. Scots law has different rules (no doctrine of consideration, its own prescription periods) and Northern Ireland has its own courts — a template written for England and Wales isn't automatically right in either. Cross-border loans can still be documented, but they deserve a professional's eye. Both are on our roadmap.

LendRight Canada covers the common-law provinces and territories, priced in CAD and built on Canadian law.

No. A loan isn't income — it arrives with an obligation to repay, so there's nothing to tax on receipt. (That's one more reason to document that it is a loan.)

Yes — interest you receive is savings income. The Personal Savings Allowance (£1,000 for basic-rate taxpayers, £500 for higher-rate, nil for additional-rate) may cover it; above that it must be reported to HMRC, usually via Self Assessment. An interest-free loan creates no income-tax charge for either side.

If nothing's in writing, yes — that's the classic fight. Money from a parent to a child can even be presumed a gift (the presumption of advancement) unless there's evidence of a loan. It matters for inheritance tax too: an outstanding loan stays in your estate, while forgiving it is a gift — a potentially exempt transfer that leaves your estate only if you survive seven years, and a waiver is best done formally by deed. A signed agreement naming the parties, amount and repayment terms is the clearest evidence that it was a loan.

Yes. If borrowed money is going into a property deposit, the borrower must tell their mortgage lender and conveyancer — lenders treat a loaned deposit differently from a gifted one, and concealing it is mortgage fraud. A written agreement makes that disclosure clean instead of awkward.