Law Schools

If Your Parents Paid For Your Law School Expenses, You Better Help Them If They Need It

If your parents helped you pay for law school, then you have a moral responsibility to help them if they need it.

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Most of us are not fortunate enough to have parents who can assist us with our law school expenses.  Indeed, the cost to attend law school for a year far exceeds what individuals usually net annually, and only wealthy parents can typically pay for their kid’s law school costs.  However, some parents are able to help their children pay for law school, and many of these parents make incredible sacrifices to give their children advantages they themselves might not have had.  However, this arrangement can sometimes be very complex and lead to tension between parents and their children.

As I have said before on this website and my blog, many of the emails I receive each week come from parents.  Usually, parents reach out to me in order to seek advice that can help their children with student debt burdens.  However, I have received several emails over the past few months from parents who paid for their kid’s law school expenses and are now experiencing issues with their children.  I am not running an advice column, and I do not profess to know much about how to resolve tension between parents and their children.  Nevertheless, there are certain problems involving parents paying for law school that individuals reach out to me about, and there are some ways to resolve these issues.

A few parents have emailed me over the past several months to relate that they paid for their kid’s law school expenses and now wish that their child would help them out since their kid is gainfully employed.  These parents sacrificed much to pay for their child’s law school expenses, and some of them conveyed to me that they mortgaged their homes, raided retirement funds, and made other sacrifices so their kid did not need to borrow money to attend law school.  Now, their child works at a good law firm and is making decent money on their own.  However, some of these parents told me that they do not have sufficient money for retirement, mainly because of the sacrifices that the parents made to pay for their child’s law school expenses.  Nevertheless, their kid does not want to help their parents out despite the assistance that the child received when attending law school.

If your parents helped you pay for law school, then you have a moral responsibility to help them if they need it.  Parents typically have no moral duty to pay for a legal education.  When people attend law school, they are grown adults, and there is no reason for parents to continue providing support to their children at that point.  If parents go out of their way to help their kid pay for law school, their child must reciprocate if their parents require assistance.  This is even more true if parents need to make serious financial sacrifices to support their children during law school.

I do not mean that kids should take out loans to immediately pay back their parents for the entire amount that they contributed to their legal education.  One parent I communicated with discussed this option, but this is not practical and might be unfair for the kid.  However, children should pay back their parents in regular intervals if their parents need support.  Indeed, these children would need to make loan payments if their parents did not help them out in the first place.

Some other parents have also related to me that they paid for their kid’s law school expenses with an explicit understanding that the child will pay back their parents when they are able to do so.  Usually, it is agreed that the repayment will be done without interest, and this makes such an arrangement very advantageous to law students lucky enough to have parents who would help them in this way.  However, several parents have conveyed to me that once their child became gainfully employed, they refused to pay their parents back despite an agreement to do so.  Parents have reached out to me to see what I thought about this.

It should go without saying that if you have an agreement to pay your parents back for the money they fronted to pay for law school, then you should repay every dollar.  Although you might not necessarily have a legal obligation to do so, you definitely have a moral obligation to pay back this money.  In addition, not repaying your parents would create much unnecessary tension that could be eliminated by just following the prior agreement.

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However, someone should not be forced to repay their parents under terms that would be less favorable than if that kid simply borrowed student debt in the first place.  Indeed, if someone does not make enough money to comfortably pay back their parents, they should be allowed to simply pay their parents 10 to 15 percent of their discretionary income for 10 or 20 years as would be permissible under an income-driven repayment plan.  This might mean that the child does not pay back all of the money parents fronted, but this arrangement puts kids in no worse a position than if they borrowed student debt in the first place.

All told, having your parents pay for your law school expenses can create some awkward situations.  Nevertheless, if you use your moral compass, you will be able to minimize any tension that may arise.

Jordan Rothman is the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a personal finance website discussing how he paid off all $197,890.20 of his college and law school student loans over 46 months of his late 20s. You can reach him at Jordan@studentdebtdiaries.com.

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