Having helped people including family in the past with both time and money, it came to be my turn. A family member threatened to break my jaw because I asked for my money back; an ex-girlfriend who had a tough life so I put her up in a 1bed apartment for 6mths to get her life back on track, she contacted me for no real reason and I said how about helping me, told me to get lost. I worked with someone permanent on $80k/yr who became a friend and I taught her how to go contracting in finance so she at least doubled her income in a few months due to my mentoring, I later asked her to get me on one of her projects and she sent me the phone number of a random agent.
Those are a few, in most cases you get the grand total of squat. I had one very seriously event due to the stupidity of family, all it took was one act of kindness by someone to help, nothing and in some cases they made it worse. Here's the thing, all those events help push you in to the top tiers of knowledge but you find out one key fact along the way. Money isn't everything, but people put an importance on it because you can hide things with money, you can't hide them with time. You can't help anyone until you help yourself.
There are only two ways it works, people either blindly follow your advice or they at best take a tiny part of it and try and introduce it in to their approach. Sometimes in life you have to do 'the right thing', but that is experience, there are no rule books, all you can do is try your best and try not to get taken out in the process, which sometimes means walking away! Human nature is to pass problems to the next person as it is easier than passing them back to the originator, unfortunately I was always at the end of the line so had to absorb them all, the most complex option that nobody does, everyone was shocked when I decided not to do it anymore so I was 'insensitive' 'no morals' ...
Don't ever underestimate the ability of people to take you out by trying to help them, arms length seems to be the best way to approach it as usually the reason they are in the mess was either by lying to other people or lying to themselves! Is it worth helping people, yes, but you have to do it as a gift and know you are writing off time/money or both. Always assume you will get nothing in return and no-one will listen or care, sometimes you will be pleasantly surprised, I haven't been yet and doubt I will be but there's always a first for everything!
So what's the trick then, simple, you cannot pretend to have money when you are poor, but you can pretend to be poor when you have money, if you help someone, always do it via an independent third party, if it starts to go wrong you can pause or worst case walk away!
