How To Make Your Student Loans Disappear

Making your law school debts go away isn’t easy. You can toil away in Biglaw for a few years. You can work in public service for more than a few years (ten, to be exact). You can marry into money.

Or you can win the annual contest sponsored by SoFi, an innovative lending and wealth-management company that helps successful young professionals refinance their student loans (among other things). We wrote about the SoFi competition last year, highlighting the candidacy of Gibson Dunn associate Joseph Tillman — who went on to win the whole thing, resulting in SoFi paying off all his remaining student loans. (A few months later, Tillman’s life got even better, when he married the woman of his dreams — and got written up in the Vows column of the New York Times.)

In this year’s contest, called #WhyISoFi, the company is celebrating the milestone of 200,000 members by giving away $200,000 in cash. There are 25 finalists, whose contest videos you can view here. The contestant whose video gets the most votes will win $150,000, and the five runner-up contestants will win $10,000 each.

How did we hear about the contest? One of the finalists, Lauren Powell, reached out to us:

I was recently selected as a finalist in a national contest where my student loan company, SoFi, is paying off the student loan of one lucky grand-prize winner. I am an attorney in Madison, Wisconsin, and my husband is a City of Madison firefighter and a part-time instructor at Madison Area Technical College. We have three-year old twins who keep us very busy.

Winning this contest would be absolutely huge for us. My monthly student loan payment is more than our monthly mortgage payment. With the everyday stresses of being a mommy to twins, working as an attorney and being the wife of a firefighter, it’s a chaotic life, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

Lauren graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2013, which is also the year she had her (adorable) twins. She has a wonderful family and a great job as an in-house lawyer at an insurance company. But as she explains in her great contest video, she’s not quite living the dream:

Yay, I made it! But not so fast. Now I’m $165,000 in debt from student loans.

Now I’m not complaining. We have been very blessed and fortunate. But we also work very hard. We juggle our hectic schedules around jobs, soccer practice, swim lessons, and ballet — but somehow we manage to keep our heads above water.

I’m asking all of you to take one minute out of your busy lives that are just like ours because we’re just like you, and vote for me and my family in the #WhyISoFi contest.

Thank you!

You can support Lauren by visiting her contest page and casting your vote.

Are there other lawyers or law students in this contest? Probably; in last year’s contest, there were at least five. Alas, SoFi has made the (somewhat annoying) decision to replace written submissions with videos. Sorry, but we’re not going to watch all 25 videos in search of the law-related contestants.

Why should we watch all the videos when we can rely upon you, devoted Above the Law readers, to let us know who they are? If you know of other law school students or graduates in the #WhyISoFi contest, please email us, subject line “Lawyer in SoFi contest.” Please be sure to include those words somewhere in your email (or text message), because searching for those terms is how we’ll locate these tips in our inundated inbox.

Thanks in advance for your help. If we hear about more law students or lawyers in the contest, we’ll do a follow-up story about them. Good luck to Lauren Powell and to any other legal eagles in this contest!

(Disclosure: As noted last year, SoFi is an ATL advertiser — but the idea for this post came from Lauren Powell, not SoFi.)

UPDATE (12/5/2016, 5:15 p.m.): Huge news from Lauren Powell:

I wanted to share an exciting update regarding the SoFi contest…. I WON!!!! SoFi actually showed up to my house to surprise me and my family/friends to announce that I was the winner. It still feels like a dream, honestly. Pretty exciting that two attorneys have won back-to-back! 🙂

Lauren sends her thanks to Above the Law and to all of you, our readers, for the support. Congratulations on your victory, Lauren!

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David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].