Put It in Writing!: Creating Agreements Between Family and Friends

by Deborah Hutchison, Lynn Toler, Deborah Hutchison

Two media-savvy authors—Lynn Toler, Judge of TV’s Divorce Court, and Deborah Hutchison, creator of the award-winning “Bill Your Ex” system—offer concrete, conflict-free solutions to the difficult situations that arise between family and friends.

Did you ever lose a friend over an unpaid debt? Get stuck with a houseguest who has no intention of moving out? Quarrel with a relative over use of the family car? For those who follow Toler and Hutchison’s wise counsel, these common disputes need never happen.  Through dozens of true stories, they show how “putting it in writing”—creating a clear written agreement—prevents the kinds of bitter misunderstandings that can destroy relationships and devastate families. Here’s detailed advice on how to choose the right words—and enforce them, too. To make it really easy, they provide perforated forms with model agreements for lending money or property, adult children moving home, sharing a pet, taking care of aging parents, and more.

 

Genres: Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2009

Reviews

[Sirish]

This is a book in my local library system has about contracts. Much of the book deals with family agreements particularly between parent guardian and children, with the major theme of the book being possibly adopted or divorced parenting. Some of the advice includes writing objectively instead of emotionally when dealing with agreements and disagreements, as a way to increase the possibility of getting favorable replies. A common reply to that would be to talk normal. The final agreement in the book is a simple form for making a do-it-yourself agreement as a written promise to do or not do something, which really does a nice job of summing up the central idea of the book making simple agreements. It does contrast to many of the previous example agreements which can have many, many checkbox statements that all or some have to be agreed to that someone may not be able to imagine in advance. The best chapter in the book, in my opinion, is the personal confidentiality agreement chapter, which really builds on many of the previous examples while maintaining a simple language approach to useful elements like persons involved, time limits, what to do in case of death, etc. I would have liked to have seen more examples of common agreements between friends, as what seemed to be primarily family agreements were the majority of the book.

[Danielle]

This is a great resource for anyone (with or without a legal background) to write up agreements. I really like how the book is organized with the first section being short and talking about the importance of having written agreements and the second section divided into chapters for the types of agreements: loan of money, loan of property (whether a painting, vacation house, car, etc.), adult children living with parents, teenage children using the car, and so on.