My signing bonus was structured in 13 separate payments, one attached to my first paycheck roughly equal to half the total bonus, and the other half distributed

My signing bonus was structured in 13 separate payments, one attached to my first paycheck roughly equal to half the total bonus, and the other half distributed evenly over each paycheck in my second year of employment. If I had quit in my first year, I would have had to pay back the lump sum payment proportional to how long I had been at the company. The "bonus" paid out over the course of the second year never needs to be paid back under any circumstances. Relocation bonus would have had to have been repaid in full if I had left during my first year. From the perspective of not taking advantage of the financial irresponsibility of recent grads, this is an improvement over the structure described in TFA, but the right solution is make sure that recent grads know what compensation agreement they're signing and can resist the urge to spend it all, that can't be left to employers, whose every incentives push against that. Big lump sum payment right out of college are very useful as emergency slush funds even if you can't responsibly do much with them for a few months.