How Does The Secure Your Future Benefit Work

Secure Your Future (SYF) enables eligible employees who work at an employer that is participating in this benefit to receive company matching retirement contributions for qualified student loan payments they make over the course of the year. The retirement match is applied to their retirement account the following year, after they have certified all of their student loan payments.

Not all employers offer this benefit, to check, please check your employer’s benefits portal to see if they offer a Secure Your Future or Secure 2.0 style student loan payment to 401k match.

See the following example for how the SYF benefit works. Please note that the information below is based on a 6% maximum employer 401k match. If your employer participates in this benefit, they may have a different match % maximum. The below is just a general example of how this benefit works. 

Sarah’s employer provides a retirement contribution of up to 6% of her eligible pay. There are three ways Sarah can unlock her employer’s 6% retirement match.

Option 1: Individual retirement deferrals. This is money taken from Sarah’s paycheck and deposited into her retirement account. Her employer will match these funds every pay period up to 6% of her eligible income. This benefit doesn’t require enrollment in SYF. If Sarah enrolls in SYF, she will not receive an additional retirement match from her employer, as she’s already receiving the maximum match based on her individual retirement contributions.

Option 2: Secure Your Future student loan payment matching. This option is best for Sarah if she’s not currently receiving her employer’s retirement match because she can’t afford to contribute anything to retirement at the moment.

If Sarah chooses to enroll in SYF on January 1st, the amount she pays towards her student loans from January to December will be eligible for her employer’s retirement match, up to 6% of her annual income. This match will be applied to her retirement account as one lump sum payment the following year. If Sarah makes student loan payments that total 6% of her annual income, she will receive the full 6% retirement match from her employer simply by making her student loan payments.

Option 3: A combination of individual retirement deferrals and Secure Your Future matching. In this scenario, Sarah is only able to contribute 3% of her income to retirement, so she only receives a 3% match from her employer. Since she doesn’t contribute enough to receive the full 6% retirement match, Sarah decides to enroll in SYF. 

Her employer will continue to make a retirement match of 3% of her income each pay period to match her individual contributions. But by enrolling in SYF, Sarah can unlock an additional 3% match based on her student loan payments. This additional 3% match is applied to her retirement account the following year. By making her own contributions and leveraging the SYF benefit, Sarah is able to receive her employer’s full 6% match. 

Sarah must enroll in the SYF benefit on tuition.io and will need to certify her student loan payments annually for her payments to qualify for the retirement match.  

Note: Only student loans in the employee’s name are eligible for the SYF retirement matching benefit.

If you have any questions on how to optimize this benefit, we would suggest setting up a meeting with our student loan coaching team.

How to set up a student loan coaching meeting:

1. Log into your Employee.Tuition.io account.
2. Click on the "Student Loan Coaches" tile.
3. On the Student Loan Coaching Page, click on the option at the top of the page to  "Schedule Time".

You will need to fill out the Student Loan Coaching Request Form in its entirety. On the bottom of this form, you can select to complete your session via phone or email.
●  If you select an Email Session, this request will be sent to our coaching team and a coach will follow-up with you via email.
●  If you select a Phone Session, you will be directed to a scheduling tool to select a time that fits your schedule for a phone call or screen share coaching session with one of our coaches.