Play · surety
The Surety Trap
Updated 2026-10-28 · Concept: a cosigned debt is the whole debt
Someone you care about asks you to cosign. The form feels like a favor and a vote of confidence. The arithmetic is plainer than the feeling: if they pay, you owe nothing more (though the loan sits on your credit report as yours too). If they do not, you owe the balance they cannot pay, not a polite slice of it, the balance. This page does not know how likely that is for your friend. You do. Put your own estimate in, and read what the signature is actually offering.
Predict first
You cosign an $8,000 balance. You believe there is a 20% chance they cannot pay. What should you expect the signature to cost you?
Pick an estimate, or skip to your own numbers.
The 20% is a starting guess on the slider, not a national default rate. No published figure is claimed here, because the chance that matters is the one for this person and this debt. Expected cost is that chance times the whole balance. It is the average outcome, not the worst one: the worst is still the whole balance, and it arrives all at once. Fees and collection costs are not counted, and they can push the real number higher.
Be not thou one of them that strike hands, or of them that are sureties for debts. If thou hast nothing to pay, why should he take away thy bed from under thee?Proverbs 22:26-27
KJV. Surety is treated as an emergency elsewhere in the same book (Proverbs 6:1-5), not as a kindness that stays on paper. The bed in verse 27 is the point: the consequence lands on the signer, and it is a household consequence.