This is a truly #BFD. Tell your friends.
Thanks to a provision in the Secure 2.0 Act, legislation aimed at improving retirement benefits nationwide, in 2024 employers will be able to start counting student loan payments as qualifying contributions toward retirement matching programs.
That means if your employer offers to match your 401(k) contributions, you could get that matched money without ever depositing funds in your retirement account.
@Animeraider leveraging one's retirement to pay off predatory, government debt that most of us acquired when we were literally teenagers is a terrible deal.
Most employer matches are 50% your contributions -- which if you don't contribute means only 33% of what should be saved is going into your 401k. Plus, presumably folks are funneling those funds during their 20s & 30s which is when people should be sacking away as much as possible to feed the beast that is compounding interest.
@Animeraider right but those payments being redirected to debt payments are pulling from future retirement income. And with social security facing insolvency and/or the retirement age being bumped to 90 in the coming decades, that's necessary moneys.
If Biden wants a win on this, he needs to get Congress to forgive the debt flat out OR at the very least forgive the interest on the debt and stop charging it moving forward. Usury is a sin, after all.
@Smersh "get congress to..."
Okay, I laughed. Congress has to get interested in governing and as of this moment they show no signs of want to do so - at least half of them anyway.
None of the arguments anyone in this thread (who isn't me) has made are incorrect. I personally think that all student loans should be forgiven, and future ones too.
But if you're going to pay the damned bill anyway, why not get your employer to match it?
@Smersh
The way I read it, what the provision does is that for every payment you make towards your student debt, your employer does a matching payment at whatever rate you're at into your 401(k). It's not leveraging anything from what I read. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
Biden keeps getting stymied every time he comes up with a workaround for student debt relief by the (ahem) courts, so this struck me as a novel approach. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it's not nothing.