My take: contracts, agreement and money

Presenting opinions on my blog where I should note that I'm not pretending to be an expert on money matters, nor am I a legal expert. Simply musing about some things as I work through how I wish to do certain things. I find that talking things out on my blogs helps me figure things out.

And in various posts I've mentioned contracts, but haven't tried to define them, and will not here. Easy enough for someone to look them up and do research from plenty of sources I'm sure. Yet I do need to focus on one aspect of them which is agreement.

To me when you have a valid contract between two parties one can assume they agreed upon it, and that's a huge issue in and of itself, so will move on to consider my view that in contracts that matter to me, you have agreement upfront from both parties.

If that seems like a lot of words for nothing, consider a squeegee man. And I think it so AWESOME that I can link to a Wikipedia article on the subject, but plenty of people probably know about people who in major cities may go up to cars to clean their windows, and ask for money in return.

And my point of view is that if money is to change hands it should be primarily on a contractual basis with prior agreement. That lets both parties outline the boundaries of an agreement and allows for an equal exchange.

An area of relevance here is that if I put out ideas, where others may see value, like on this blog, there is no contract as far as I'm concerned at all, as those conditions are not met.

The other way to look at it is, say someone does you a favor, without asking, and then asks you to pay for it. My default answer is, no. There are limited instances say with a close friend or family member who helps you out by paying for something, like you ran out of milk or something and just pay them back, but otherwise, no way.

That some people will do you a "favor" and expect payment when you didn't ask for it, is the issue addressed here. I don't do it, and I don't recognize it.

And that's it. Fascinating to me how I can go from simple description to complex in talking this out and feel like I need every bit of it. And again, NOT an expert, nor am I pretending to be one. Just expressing some opinions.


James Harris