Law firm paying off Student Loans as a signing bonus? Forum
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Anonymous posting is only appropriate when you are revealing sensitive employment related information about a firm, job, etc. You may anonymously respond on topic to these threads. Unacceptable uses include: harassing another user, joking around, testing the feature, or other things that are more appropriate in the lounge.
Failure to follow these rules will get you outed, warned, or banned.
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Anonymous User
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Law firm paying off Student Loans as a signing bonus?
An ex-big law attorney told me he wiped out his student loans when his old firm paid it off as a signing bonus. That sounds like a pipedream to me. Anyone else ever hear of this?
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Sackboy
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Re: Law firm paying off Student Loans as a signing bonus?
I'm sure you could ask for your lateral firm to do this, but it'd be pretty pointless. They're not going to pay off $100k in debt for you to come. Maybe you have $50k in debt, and they go sure we'll pay that off, which is within the realm of reasonable lateral signing bonuses. They still get their $50k deduction, and you get your loans wiped out, but then it's also income to you so you're probably going to have a tax liability of at least $20,000 (assuming the 32% federal bracket + 7.65% FICA + state taxes, if any). Who knows, maybe you rather be on a repayment plan with the IRS if you can't pay your liability in full when your taxes are due, but it all seems kind of pointless.
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Anonymous User
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Re: Law firm paying off Student Loans as a signing bonus?
For the next five years, employers can pay about $5,000 in student loan payments on behalf of their employees without that payment counting as employee income (and with it being deductible to the employer). I’m a little surprised some biglaw firms haven’t offered this as a very low cost benefit - we’ll chip away $5k of student loans each December if you stick around, tax free.
