This forum is so out of touch with reality sometimes I'm just left blinking and shaking my head. 20,000 dollars is an enormous amount of money to a supermajority of people in the developed world. Almost half an annual wage for most industrial workers in the EU and US.

That's a very privileged perspective to have... I know plenty of people for whom a sudden $20k shortfall would be existential.

Really? Try glancing the sorts of wages and earnings that literally 99% of the world's population makes on downwards and you'll quickly see that it's far, far from "paltry" for the vast majority of people.

I'm unsure why my sibling comments seem to think the sentence ends at "sum".

Is it possible to buy a real friendship for $20k? Is a friendship of many years worth more to you than $20k - would you stop being friends if someone else offered you that much to do so?

This isn't a paltry sum of money, it is a paltry sum to end a friendship over.

An interesting thought experiment to me is how much I would be willing to spend to preserve a friendship. Various situations over the past few years, including some businesses with friends made me think about hypotheticals.

I struggle to find any situation where 20k is a paltry sum