Income Share Agreements Looking Up

The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond has a good piece reviewing income share agreements, aka income-contingent loans, including a timely example:

ISAs provide students with funding to cover their education expenses in exchange for a portion of their income once they start working. Under a typical contract, recipients pledge to pay a fixed percentage of their incomes for a set period of time up to an agreed cap. For example, a student who has $10,000 of his or her tuition covered through an ISA might agree to repay 5 percent of his or her monthly income for the next 120 months (10 years), up to a maximum of $20,000. ISAs typically also have a minimum income threshold before payments kick in; if the recipient earns less than the minimum, he or she pays nothing. This means that ISAs offer students more downside protection than a traditional loan.

This downside protection is what attracted Andrew Hoyler to Purdue’s “Back a Boiler” ISA program, which launched in the fall of 2016. Hoyler, who graduated from Purdue’s professional flight program in 2017, signed up for Back a Boiler in his senior year. He received $21,263 in reduced tuition and flight fees in exchange for agreeing to repay 7.83 percent of his monthly income for 104 months, or until he had paid back 2.5 times the amount he originally received. Now a pilot for PSA Airlines, a subsidiary of American Airlines, he has been making payments on his ISA for about 30 months.

…Hoyler is particularly grateful to have that safety net now, as the airline industry is being rocked by the COVID-19 outbreak. “The ISA is giving me a sense of relief. If I find myself furloughed, my payments stop with zero interest,” he says.