Comment by to11mtm
14 hours ago
There's actually a mortgage company that does worse; They call it the 'People Promise', and it sounds like a bonus, but;
1. It's actually a loan.
2. If you leave or are terminated at any point for the period, you have to pay back the ENTIRE loan amount.
3. Because it's a loan, if you -do- survive employment through the term, guess what, you now have to pay tax on the 'forgiven loan'.
4. If you don't take it, you don't get hired.
There’s a whole “pillar7” subreddit about United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) if you’re interested in reading about their employment practices. They were forcing people into the office five days a week during peak COVID. It sounds like it’s a mess over there.
I personally know some lower income people who have been negatively impacted by the people promise.
Why not name the company?
UWM, United Wholesale Mortgage. Their location near me (Detroit suburbs) has closed, but not after getting an awful reputation that's somehow worse than Quicken or Rocket Mortgage.
Well, they still have their Pontiac HQ.
I've never worked there, I've only had the pleasure of knowing some former employees that were way happier at RKT, and the observation that the most toxic manager I have ever worked under [0] apparently had a pretty good run there after he got booted from our org [1]. What was more striking was, I had a very short stint at an org that tried to 'Emulate' their management style and it was the fastest I ever left a job.
[0] - The kind of guy who's previous wives both left him so hard they didn't even try for custody, so he was having a 'thing' with a different department's manager while her husband was dying of cancer. The creepiest moment was when she brought her kid to the office and the <10 year old kid was dressed up in the same outfit as this 40-50 something dude.
[1] - He eventually got too bold and turned on his 'lieutenant' (who also for a time would dress just like him). Once that dev lead finished the HR 'Training' that they were subjected to, he stopped the behavior of preventing the dev groups from communicating with each other. That cross communication led to a bit of a quiet internal revolt across the whole Dev org.
https://www.uwm.com/
Number 3 sounds like nothing out of the ordinary? Any bonus you get from an employer, granted or otherwise, has to be taxed at some point. This just sounds like a weird signing bonus.
Yeah, at one point, an ex-employer gave me a relatively substantial loan (low-mid 5 digits). They were willing to give it to me interest-free, but the accountant said they had to charge me at least prime rate, otherwise that interest would have been taxable. Which was all fine by me, I was going through a divorce that tanked my credit (now ex let a car get repossessed that was in both our names), so no-one was giving me that kind of loan unsecured, let alone at prime rate.
Each of your points escalated over the last one, somehow.
Sounds like a typical retention/signing bonus, except structured so that you get the bonus up front and pay the tax later. The main question I would have is whether people who took it understood what they signed up for (i.e. were they misled somehow?). It's a bit weird for it to be mandatory but if you don't want to be on the hook for it, you could just keep the money in a savings account until the term expires.
> They call it the 'People Promise', and it sounds like a bonus, but
> Because it's a loan, if you -do- survive employment through the term, guess what, you now have to pay tax on the 'forgiven loan'.
Did you have a point to make here? Do you think you don't have to pay income taxes on bonuses?
The point is that this bonus is effectively a condition of hiring that has strings attached