Stuck in a job I hate because of the contract I signed — help?

In May, 2022, I was laid off from my job as a mortgage sales manager. One day corporate showed up in our office unannounced and told us that our branch was closed effective immediately. I was making $120-170k/y (granted this was during covid but even as the market turned, I still would’ve been at around $100k as my base salary was $50k). I’m 28 BTW.

It took me about three months and one rescinded job offer to find an offer that worked for me. I was approaching, and paying for a lot of, my wedding, which was in October. I interviewed for an underwriting job at a very big bank. They offered me the job over the phone: a $20k sign on bonus and $70k salary. It took them 4 weeks to send the offer to me in writing but when it came, I signed and started on September 1st. The contract stipulated that if I resigned or was fired within the first year of employment, I would have to return the $20 bonus.

I’ve been in the job now for ~2.5 months and I’m pretty unhappy. The training lasted about 6 or 8 weeks and during which I learned how antiquated, manual, and nitpicky the job is. It’s archaic. I enter a ton of data into an excel workbook along with 2 other programs that hardly communicate/work with one another. My manager is brand new and has her plate full a lot of the time, so I go to my mentor for help on files. The mentor has several years of experience, but not much recent experience with basic loans, the likes of which I’m assigned currently, so his advice is sometimes wishy washy, over explained to the point where he loses me with jargon and rambling and redundancy, and inaccurate because my manager will return a file to me, asking me to fix things on which he directed me. In short, I didn’t feel adequately prepared from training and feel like I have to beg for support, and I feel like i’m being told different things from different people. Plus, the work is not for me. I’m a numbers person, but I realized that I miss sales. I’m not a sales-ey guy, I might not be the type to succeed in every sales job, but I miss it and now I’m stuck crunching numbers in an office of people that don’t really speak to me. It’s super corporate and often (because I’m new) I don’t have ANYTHING to work on.

After about 3-4 weeks of working, I learned that the signing bonus offered by the bank was an accident. They DID honor the bonus and they have paid me, however one manager asked me that I not disclose my job offer to any other employees as they would likely lose a lot of staff if they found out I was offered a bonus, let alone a $20 thousand one.

Of course it’s possible that the job gets better as I strengthen my skills, and it’s probable that they will be looking to promote me to an underwriter 2, and 3 later on, once I master my current work complexity, but I’m not sure I’m in it to win it here. I really miss my old job. My coworkers were great friends, small office, we worked kinda hard and played hard, no looming corporate/HR watching our every move and word spoken, it was a part of my identity (being in mortgage), and the pay was much better and an aspect of my lifestyle to which I had grown quite accustomed.

I’d like to look for another job but I’m stuck because of my employment contract. Is there a way out of that without paying the employer $20k back? Is there any other advice that can be offered to me? This is kind of becoming a drag on my quality of life, but maybe In just being a brat..

tl;dr

After being laid off in may, I was offered a job by a big bank that paid half of what I’m used to as well as a $20k bonus contingent that I stick with them for a year. I hate the job but seem to be stuck with them until next September. Seeking advice on getting out of the job or otherwise.

PS – the reason I did not continue in the mortgage industry is because it’s real rough right now. I also knew that I would not find a managing job in the field; lenders weren’t looking to take on a salaried position in this market – I had a few offers from banks to come originate as a loan officer but the market felt too rocky to jump back into.



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