How to sign a personal loan agreement online

What to put in a personal loan agreement

A loan between friends or family works best when both of you can point to the same written terms. Plain language is fine. Cover:

• who lends and who borrows;
• the amount, and the date the money is handed over;
• how it is repaid: the amount and due date of each payment, or a single date for the whole sum;
• the interest rate, or that there is none;
• what happens if a payment is late, and whether the borrower may repay early;
• anything else you agreed, such as what happens if plans change.

Save it as a PDF of up to 8 MB.

Sign it in a few minutes, even from different cities

Either of you can send it. Say the lender, Mary Ruiz, sends it to the borrower:

1. Mary goes to attest.datahubz.com/sign, clicks Start free, signs in with her email and sets up her signing key once on the Security page, with a passkey and a recovery phrase.
2. She opens Documents, clicks New agreement, titles it "Loan agreement" and clicks Attach the document to be signed.
3. Under Signers, she types the borrower's email address and checks Add me as a signer (sign in-app, no email).
4. Under Verification, she chooses Private.
5. She clicks Next: place the fields, places a signature field and a date signed field for each of them, and clicks Create and send.
6. The borrower opens the email whose subject starts with "Signature requested", taps Review and sign and sets up a passkey. Attest emails Mary, who taps Unlock it for … (or opens the agreement in Attest), confirms, and approves with her passkey, so her browser, never Attest, releases it to the borrower.
7. The borrower reviews the agreement, adopts a signature and taps Sign with your passkey. Mary, who gets no signing email, finds the agreement under Action needed, clicks Sign on its row and approves with hers. Each of you then opens the signed copy and clicks Download signed copy.

A passkey is a cryptographic key only the signer controls, unlocked with Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello or the device PIN. Neither of you installs anything, and the borrower needs no account and pays nothing.

What the signed copy proves

• The amount and the schedule. Each passkey signs a statement that names the agreement's fingerprint (a SHA-256 hash, a short code calculated from the file's contents) and everything that signer entered. A copy with a different amount, rate or due date wouldn't match it.
• Whose approval. Each signature is made by a passkey registered to the signer's email address, so the lender's and the borrower's approvals are each their own.
• The date you agreed. The signing time is part of what each passkey signs, and the completed agreement is anchored on Horizen, a public blockchain, so the date the terms were agreed is on record.
• That it hasn't changed. Change one byte of the agreement, of either signer's entries or of the signed pages, and verification fails.

You both download the same sealed PDF, which carries its own evidence, the original document and an open-source verifier inside it. A loan can run for years, and the copy doesn't depend on Attest staying around: the verifier runs in any browser, even if Attest is gone, and checks each signer's passkey signature, the original document, the pages you see and Attest's anchored record on Horizen. Anyone you choose to show it to can also check it for free at attest.datahubz.com/verify, with no account.

Interest, taxes and state rules to check first

Attest records your agreement; it doesn't give tax or legal advice. In the United States, two sets of rules are worth checking before you set the interest rate:

• Below-market loans (federal tax). IRS Publication 550 says a loan is generally a below-market loan if, for a demand loan, "interest is payable on the loan at a rate less than the applicable federal rate", or, for a term loan, the amount lent exceeds the present value of all the payments due, discounted at that rate. It adds: "A gift loan is any below-market loan where the forgone interest is in the nature of a gift." The IRS publishes the applicable federal rates every month. The publication describes exceptions, including one for any day on which gift loans between two individuals total $10,000 or less, if the money isn't used to buy or carry income-producing assets; it says this exception doesn't apply to term loans.
• Interest rate caps (state law). Some states limit the interest a lender may charge. In New York, for example, Banking Law 14-a sets the maximum rate for its usury rule (General Obligations Law 5-501) at "sixteen per centum per annum", and that rule doesn't apply to loans of $250,000 or more, other than loans secured mainly by a one or two family home.

For larger amounts, ask a tax adviser or a lawyer which rules apply to your loan.

Loan agreement or promissory note?

Some loans are written as a negotiable promissory note: under the Uniform Commercial Code, a promise to pay a fixed amount of money that, among other conditions, "Is payable to bearer or to order" (as Delaware enacts it, 6 Del. C. 3-104(a)(1)). Negotiable instruments fall under UCC Article 3, which the ESIGN Act and UETA exclude (15 U.S.C. 7003(a)(3); UETA section 3(b)(2)). If you want a negotiable note, ask a lawyer how it must be signed. A loan agreement that isn't a negotiable instrument falls outside that exclusion.

When it's repaid: a signed release

When the last payment arrives, put that in writing too: a short release in which the lender confirms the loan is paid in full. Send it the same way, as its own document: the borrower can send it with the lender as the signer, or either of you can send it with both of you as signers. Either way you are both parties, so with the two sealed copies, the loan agreement and its release, you both hold the whole story, signed and dated.

Keep it between the two of you

Family finances are private. The agreement is encrypted in the sender's browser before upload and decrypted only in your two browsers, so Attest stores it only as ciphertext it can't read. Attest does see the information around it, such as its title, file name and your names and email addresses, so keep the title plain. Choosing Private means only the two of you see the agreement's certificate; a public one would show anyone with its link the title and each signer's name and signing time, among other details.

What it costs

Your first 2 documents are free, in total, and each also uses one of that month's 10 records on a free account. The person who signs a document sent to them never pays. If you need more, the Signing plan is $5 a month for 20 documents, and you can cancel any time.