Title: Attorney, U.S. Federal Government
Age:39
Experience: 10 years
Salary: with the 1% raise and about 0.4% locality adjustment for 2016, I'll be at around $103,300. That's not exact, since the Office of Personnel Management hasn't posted the official salaries for 2016 yet. I'm on the GS pay scale; my salary is public (with my name, too) by law.
Education: J.D. (3 years), MBA (2 years), B.S. (4 years) - I currently have about $120K in student loans, ALL from law school. I had other student loans, but paid them back. If I could go back in time and attend a different, less expensive law school that offered me a near-full scholarship, I would (I had that opportunity). But I was young, naïve, and wanted to live in a big, fancy city and go to a "Tier 1" law school.
I worked for 5 years in private practice and I would be making a lot more right now had I stayed. You don't work for the U.S. Federal government as an attorney and expect to get comparatively compensated. It's not going to happen. The Federal salary cap is about $50K less than what I would probably be making right now had I stayed in private practice. But I traded money for a modicum of sanity (not that the lack of resources and staffing doesn't make my current job more stressful than it needs to be).