Flatmate says I owe her £600

[Digestivesandcheese]

I was meeting my flatmate (who is also a good friend) in London recently and agreed to bring her weekend bag with me on the train (She was meeting her DM earlier in the day for a trip to the Theatre) I had a rucksack containing my things for the weekend.
I got off the train in London and realised I had stupidly left her bag on the train. I got back on the train but the bag was gone! It hasn't turned up in lost property. I have chased up several times.
My friend says I owe her £600 for the bag and contents. I agree it was my fault but can I claim compensation from the rail company as the bag hasn't turned up? If not, I will have to borrow money to pay my friend for her things

You aren’t required to like them, and nor are you required to approve of anyone else liking them. You asked for bags that £600 would only cover half the cost of a second hand one. You didn’t stipulate ‘non designer’, although I’m not sure why you would considering people do in fact buy and use them.

You really should work on your insults. You’re right, the friend was foolish to trust OP with her belongings, and believing her to be capable of treating them with a basic level of care. She also should have expected OP to need a full list of T&C when asking a favour of her, as that is common practice between friends.

Then she shouldn’t have been careless with her friend’s belongings that were entrusted to her.

OP wasn't deliberated careless- she made a mistake and a thief took advantage. The friend on the other hand rather than transporting her stuff herself or paying for insurance deliberately asked her to transport the stuff without making it clear that it was apparently worth over a thousand pounds even second hand.

find me a bag of secondhand clothes and cosmetics that is worth £600 without containing things like big-ticket designer items that flatmate should either have kept in her own possession, or warned OP about before she asked her to carry her bag

reading comprehension please.

Doesn’t change the fact she was careless.

Op didn’t say the friend has asked her to cover the cost of a bag worth over a thousand pounds second hand. She’s asked her to cover the cost/a proportion of a cost of the bag and its contents.

The friend asked OP to do her a simple favour. Presumably OP could have said no. OP also lives with her and is aware her friend has ‘expensive taste’, so I doubt the cost of replacement has come as a great surprise to her.

I wasn’t aware I had to take exact instruction from you ☺️

Why would I need to look for the above, when the friend’s belongings may well have been designer? Or are we only considering what you would prefer to be the reality?

because, if they WERE massively expensive designer bags/belongings worth £1200 even when secondhand, something like "these are very expensive please dont leave them out of reach" would have helped OP out. you fail to understand very simple concepts, responsibilities and expectations. and at the end of the day, if you're the person who values ugly designer tat over a friendship and reasonable fairness, then youre the one who has to live with being that person.

But why are people so mean . It's only when I came to this country that I've heard people ask to pay for things . Once my DS friend broke our flower vase by mistake when they were just playing football and when the mother came asked me how much would it cost to replace I was shocked and I said nothing
they are only kids (10 year olds )
it's ridiculous I find why everything has to be pay back time and people can't let go

Wow.

I think it's worth considering is that £600 seems to be a lot more money to the OP than it is to her friend whose bag it was, and that this is KatJarratt's point. As I've said before, the friend may not truly NEED all the contents of that bag, so even if their finances were the same and neither of them can truly afford to say 'let's just forget it eh?', the OP probably has more to lose in paying £600 than the friend has to lose by losing a bag.

Going back to what my Dad would say, he also said if a friend wants to borrow money and you doubt they'll pay you back, if you value the friend a lot and you can afford to, you just GIVE the friend the money. End of. Take the hit. And if the OP were my friend and willing to repay, I'd appreciate the sentiment but wouldn't accept the money.

Obvs someone's going to lose out here because there is a bag of stuff missing, but among me and my friends, I think we'd consider that whoever could afford the loss most easily would probably take the hit, though tea and cake would be appreciated.

Do we know in fact know that she didn’t? There’s a lot of assuming going on based on little information.

I do value those things over someone that wouldn’t take responsibility for losing my belongings, and replace them, yes. I wouldn’t consider the loss of such a person to be a loss. Thankfully my friends would replace what I lost in that situation, as I would for them.

I do live quite happily with being that person, incidentally. It’s fucking excellent tbf.

I’ve been in a similar situation a few times whether it was someone’s expensive designer (used) crockery I broke or their one of a kind, end of line lamp (that was a former best friend who also happened to be my landlord at one point). The lamp was an absolute pain in the ass to replace as it was discontinued and took me a month to find a near enough (new) equivalent she was happy with. But my point is, I TOOK RESPONSIBILITY for my actions. Yes they were mistakes, a bit out of my budget and an annoying expense of time. But I absolutely replaced them with new (not second hand) because I FUCKED UP not the other person! That’s called being a mature adult.
In this case you agreed to take her stuff which it sounds like you knew was valuable, I would have had it on my lap lol as trains are so dodgy! I’d recommend deferring paying your friend anything if possible for 5-6 weeks while a crime number is being submitted as it sounds like theft or that it’s in lost property somewhere (that sounds optimistic tbh). But if nothing turns up at that point I’d be paying her back. However if it would take you two years to pay that amount I’d be honest with my friend and mention it, I would expect her to drop the price to half CONSIDERING YOUR FINANCIAL CIRCUMSTANCES. That’s only fair. If she stood strong on the £600 despite knowing the significant time it would take you to pay back (have you told her that?) I would definitely question/end the friendship and also move away from her as she is focussed more on her things then your strife at paying that back. If you could pay £600 back in a couple of months from your own salary that’s a different story and if it were me, I’d pay the full amount.

@notlucreziaborgia

The OP is taking responsibility and wants to pay in full. Her question was mostly regarding insurance. WE are the ones saying we think she's taking more responsibility than her friend deserved, and that her friend is being inconsiderate.

She was going to visit her friend. She could hardly have drawn up t's and c's as she wasn't expecting this to happen, and it would have been weird for her to refuse the request of carrying a bag, yet now the friend is 'demanding', according to the OP, £600. This wasn't agreed, and I think if the OP had said 'I don't want to carry your bag in case it gets stolen', the friend would have agreed to hold the OP not responsible if it did happen in order to get her to carry the bag.

We don't know when the bag got stolen, so we don't even know how careless the OP was or how muddleheaded she usually is. Perhaps she's an idiot who always loses things and if so, anyone else would be foolish to ask her to do such a favour. At best, the bag was taken on the journey and there is nothing she could have done about it in that case (unless we consider it reasonable that she should have glared at it the whole way), and, at worst, it was taken when she walked off the train forgetting she had an EXTRA bag she wasn't used to carrying.

If 600 pounds is genuinely only a proportion of what the items are worth the friend should have warned OP . The cost obviously has come as a surprise to OP. That is why she is posting!

I know OP is paying the £600. I’m referring to the ones that think she shouldn’t pay that, or pay at all.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable of the friend to expect OP to compensate her for the bag being lost. Whether OP is normally careful or not, on this occasion she was careless and lost her friend’s bag that she assumed responsibility for. The friend may or may not have warned her about it’s price and what it would cost should it be lost, but equally OP is an adult and is presumably capable of working that out for herself, and capable of declining to do her friend that favour if she considered it too big a risk.

The bottom line is we disagree 🤷🏻‍♀️

@Mittleme Yep if a guest in my home broke an item I would never dream of requesting they replace it! And I would rebuff any offers they made to pay for it

I’m not reading OP as being surprised at the cost, rather than being stressed at being asked to pay it.

OP, knowing her friend has expensive taste, could have asked what would happen in such a situation. Or declined to carry it.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda - it happened, and OP has paid her friend back. Clearly there isn't unanimous agreement as to whether she should have done or not, but there doesn’t have to be.

@coffeeaddict77 sounds like having totted up the amount for stuff you'd have in a case for a weekend away you've realised that £600 isn't actually that much, if only one of your items might cost close to £100.

The relative cost of everything else is irrelevant and you know it. Clothing is not like a car - you cannot replace like for like.

How is a vase in any way comparable to a case with clothing, make up and hair styling implements? And how is a grown adult who lost a case comparable to a child knocking over a vase?

I try and keep a small capsule wardrobe. If I lost my case I'd be replacing nigh on ALL my clothes.

@notlucreziaborgia

That's alright. We can't agree on everything :)

Personal story: a friend stayed over for a few days (so in this case, I was arguably doing him a favour and not the reverse) and forgot to give me my key back. He stupidly posted it back to my address without us discussing it and then packaged it badly and it got lost... or intercepted. He should have at least not posted it to the same address as the door it fitted, but he didn't think. He was, essentially, careless; not deliberately careless because it wasn't his key but accidentally careless because he has a PhD and isn't always 100% practical.

I didn't charge him for the (inexpensive) lock cylinder that "had to" be changed because 1 he is my friend, and because 2 the cost of this would neither have made me rich nor poor. Also because it was my key and I entrusted it to him without making it absolutely clear how he was to handle it in every circumstance. I'd merely assumed a certain level of common sense, like follow Royal Mail guidelines, but he didn't have that level of common sense. He was very apologetic, and probably would have paid for reasonable costs, but I didn't want him to.

I don't think either point of view is 'wrong' and you're right from your perspective. 'Someone has to lose out and why should it be the friend?' is a valid question.

My perspective is when a friend does you what seems like a small favour by bringing you something and loses it, not because she doesn't care about it, but due to momentary inattention (or it simply got nicked - and I wouldn't have had someone else's bag on my lap either, as then it gets dropped and something gets broken and then there's nail polish all over the Japanese denim jeans or whatever), she has done the favour to the best of her ability. And if her reward for being a friend and carrying the bag is now she has to pay £5 a week for the next two years, the favour was a big ask, not a small one. And that's why I feel that the person who should be offering to lose out should be the friend.

So no, no way would I expect her to pay the £600 if I were the friend. We may still not agree, but I hope you see why I feel how I do.

EDITED to clarify a badly-worded sentence.

@Ric2013

There ought to be a like button on here because you talk a lot of sense which I'm guessing you got from your Dad. 😊

The items should be replaced for what was lost and not your opinion of the value after use. suggesting profit is ridiculous. They weren’t bought with the intention of using them and losing them.

I haven't realised that 600 isn't that much at all. Not sure how you came to that conclusion. My items in total for a weekend bag would be about £150.

Wow. I don't think I know how to respond to that in my own words so I'll go with a couple of other people:

"Some people are so poor all they have is money" - Bob Marley

And if that's a little too tricky to decipher:
"Two wrong feet and f*%king ugly shoes"(or bags in this case) - Erin Brokovich

as kind as it was of you to offer assistance, I did in fact manage to pick up the gist from the first one.

LOL though, because if being quite happy to not have a friend that wouldn’t take responsibility for losing my belonging they lost through their own carelessness and replace them means ‘all I have is money’ then….actually I’m failing to see any downside at all to this. Yeah, this more than works for me, so I’m going to go ahead and stick with this option.

You can't say that, you don't know what she had in the bag.

Personally if I lost something belonging to a friend I would want to replace it, even if I was strapped for cash. My friendships are worth way more. Besides the friend might have had something in there she has to replace herself and will have to pay out for, if her friend who lost it doesn't pay. She may also be strapped for cash.