My Student Loan “Success” Story

I received the official email congratulating me on having paid off my student loans. The company that handled my loans asked if I would be willing to share my “success story”. It doesn’t paint them in a great light and I think the whole story is more characters than they would allow on their form so I’m sharing it here, maybe it will even be helpful to someone.

Before getting into it I’d like to acknowledge that my story (every story) is anecdotal and I realize that not everyone is as fortunate to have had the same opportunities I had going into my higher education and beyond. The whole loan system is pretty terrible and broken, I think a lot of people have it much worse and so I feel very fortunate.

I arrived in Chicago for the first time on move-in day, I’ve only seen pictures and read information books on the school and the city but I’m excited to be moving to a place so different from the small Massachusetts town I grew up in. My parents and I fill out paperwork and push numbers around with advisors for 3 hours trying to make the tuition dollars work for our lower-middle-class family income. I had attended a year of classes at a local community college so it helped significantly that this prestigious art school was willing to take all my transfer credits. That combined with various grants and scholarships left me with what could be considered a manageable loan total at the end of the 4 years. That includes working two jobs (including a work-study position), over drafting bank accounts to the tune of roughly $2,000 and the modest but generous help of my wonderful grandfather. Let’s not get into the gritty details of the 4 years, suffice to say I regret nothing about my time spent but ultimately, decided not to attend grad school, taking my chances with my BFA and work experience. Later I would explain that I was not suited for academia, whatever that means. I will share that I almost left in my second year, I was severely depressed, I felt so guilty that I wasn’t able to get the most out of this education my family and I had worked so hard to make happen. I wanted to leave and come back when I was in a better place, I ended up staying, I’m still not sure if this was the right decision, but it’s what happened.

I graduated into a world of economic collapse with a BFA and my underwhelming portfolio. Shortly after graduation my much older boyfriend who lived with me (and off of me) leaves to go back to his parents in CA. He leaves me with all of the last months rent on top of what I had to pay for the deposit and first month at my new studio apartment. That, plus the Uhaul late fee he racked up and also left me with, came to about $2,000 that I just didn’t have. I paid the Uhaul and the new apartments deposit and first-month rent then begged the old apartments leasing company to allow me to make payments monthly. I cried on the way to their office and a kind woman on the bus offered me a pack of tissues and mercifully didn’t ask me any questions. The leasing company generously agreed on a manageable monthly fee until the rent was paid off. For a few months, I worked retail, box office jobs, interned for theater companies, and babysat. Then the networking I had done in school paid off and I was offered a job as a PA on a large movie that would be shooting all summer. That got me started slowly building credibility as a freelancer while I still held down box office and retail positions. I was just starting my adult life and I wasn’t even thinking about my loans.

One day, months past the 6-month “grace” period, I get a phone call at 6 am from Sallie May (the loan handler at the time). No payments had been made towards my loans and I owe thousands. I’m sick to my stomach, I hear how pathetic and stupid my voice sounds as I whimper “but my parents were paying….” to the unforgiving voice of the overworked collections agent on the other end of the line. It’s at this point in the story that I will encourage people to try to understand and take responsibility for their loans as soon as possible. At the end of the day, it’s your name, your credit that’s on the line and no one is going to care what your well-meaning but ill-equipped parents said they’d do. The woman on the phone encouraged me to default until I could figure it out. It took years to realize the full scope of the damage, to my credit score, my finances, my mental health not to mention my already complicated relationship with my parents. It was traumatic and it seemed like no one at loan companies, or the institutions that bought my loans were equipped to help me. It seemed like each agent I spoke to would contradict the last in terms of the best options for me.

One day a representative from my loan company finally suggested I apply for income-based repayment, it wouldn’t get me out from the pile of interest I had incurred but it would at least keep my head above water and my payments manageable while I worked to improve my destroyed credit and hey it’ll be forgiven by the time I’m 50 (maybe). It was a pain to apply for, the language of documents and instructions was hard to understand and I had to prove my income yearly to reapply, which is tricky when you’re freelance. In the years that followed I would make minimum payments barely covering the interest, I continued freelance work and struggled to find landlords that would accept my bad credit. Forget trying to get a credit card, yes even the safety ones you pay down the limit on. I was always declined and often talked down to about how “really bad” my credit was. It was humiliating, I was making decent money working on commercials and could easily pay rent and card balances, but many people and institutions weren’t willing to risk it, my credit was too bad, so my word and bank account balance were worth nothing. Five years later I get a “steady” job on a TV show that pays pretty well and makes me no longer eligible for the income-based repayment plan. So no more potential of forgiveness when I’m 50 and at this point my loans are finally back to somewhere around the original amount I owed, to begin with. My wonderful grandfather dies leaving me a small inheritance, I put half into savings and throw the rest at my loans. I’m a nervous person, I can’t stand the looming debt on top of car payments, rent, bills, and the memory of what happened before. So I get an idea to start chipping away at each loan one by one starting with the smallest. I live mainly off my savings for a while and, when possible, throw whole paychecks at the loans, paying the majority into one and the minimum on the rest to keep the interest in check. One by one the balances reached 0.

Nearly a decade after graduation, I have paid off the last of my loans, maintained some savings, my credit score has almost recovered and I was even able to get a credit card with a decent limit. I’m not debt-free and I see a therapist regularly about my relationship with my parents.
That’s my story, for what it’s worth.