Loans Unpaid

A court official told us today that the government is using the Family Courts to arbitrate with students who have not repaid their student loans. Khon Kaen Family Court has set aside 9 days to hear all the the outstanding debt cases. Today, Sunday, was a quiet day…only 80 cases to wade through. On avearge there has been more than 100 cases per day and they have not yet finished.
Its a sensible approach to use the Family Court in a non agressive manner to secure repayment on non performing loans. A couple of things strike me here when it was made known to me that some students were claiming that they did not know they had to repay the loan and that every westerner should think very seriously about lending money in Thailand to anybody and that includes expats.
We have heard horror stories of farangs getting into the money lending game and loosing over a million baht after being ripped offf by another farang. I have had people from the village knocking on my door and asking to borrow 300,000 baht and they would let me keep the pick up as security. The fact that it was a heap was irrelevant because they owed 6 months on it and the repo guys were after it. I asked for them to transfer their land into my wifes name and off they shot. Truth is repayment is something that most Thais do not understand the importance of and you maybe a lifetime getting your money back, the intention is there to pay but other committments take precedence and your bill gets put to the bottom of the in tray.
Digressing from the original news item made forget to say that this event is not unique to Khon Kaen it is happening in every courthouse in every major city in Thailand. Yo.u do the maths