You can't legally gift money above a certain value though without paying taxes on it. The situation depends a lot here, but if it were legal to just gift everybody money without interest nobody would ever have to deal with inheritance taxes.
The lifetime gift exemption is more than $10 million dollars, so unless you are really doing a lot of gifting back and forth then you are unlikely to run into that.
That is close, but not quite correct. You can gift <= $15000 per year without reporting it. You can gift > $15000 federal tax-free (state tax may apply), but must report it. Reporting it doesn't incur federal taxes until your lifetime gift total exceeds your lifetime gift exclusion of $11,700,000 (2021).
You can gift $15,000 per person, per year, without counting against the exemption. If you go above that you start to chip into the massive lifetime exemption.
Unless you have a net worth way above $10 million dollars you don't need to worry about the gift tax. If you accidentally forgot to report a $30,000 "loan" that turns into a gift to a friend, the IRS isn't going to care. You might have to go back and fix it if they notice but it isn't going to be a problem.
The gift tax exists to prevent extremely rich people from cheating the estate tax. If you've never heard of the gift tax before you don't need to worry about.
It's $15,000 to avoid filing a gift tax return. Anything over comes out of your 10 million dollar lifetime exemption though, so you're still never going to have to pay anything.
"Two things keep the IRS’ hands out of most people's candy dish: the $15,000 annual exclusion in 2020 and 2021, and the $11.58 million lifetime exclusion in 2020 ($11.7 million in 2021). Stay below those and you can be generous under the radar. Go above, and you'll have to fill out a gift tax form when filing returns — but you still might avoid having to pay any gift tax."
If you are transferring more than $10k at a time, your bank will have to file "is this a terrorist?" Paperwork with the government. So you should definitely do this A LOT to make them rifle through too much false flags.
