Debt: $200,000+



Source: College, credit card



Estimated years until debt-free: Unknown

Every credit card rejection letter I get looks the same to me: a form letter, written without care or thought, releasing a new sense of failure as the paper unfolds. It’s not that my credit is bad – far from it, actually. It’s just that I’m incredibly in debt. Which is also why I can’t buy a new house, get approved for a rental or get a new car. I owe more than four times what I make in a year, and I have my education to thank for it.

I knew when I started school that college was expensive, so I applied for scholarships and loans. My first year, I had three scholarships and almost no loans. But then I changed my major, transferred schools, started a new path. I didn’t get any more scholarships. I applied for more loans. I expected I would get enough money in federal loans to cover school and I would be set, but the government had other plans.

Good old Uncle Sam denied most of what I needed. Apparently my family made too much money for me to qualify for full federal funding – never mind the fact that my mom recently got laid off and my dad’s business wasn’t doing so hot, or that they had two other kids in college at the same time that needed help. The government didn’t care. I was forced to apply for what I didn’t know then were predatory private loans to make up the difference. And I repeated that process every year, all the way through my master’s degree.

That six-month grace period when you get out of school goes fast. Suddenly I owed $2,000 in student loan payments every month. I got three jobs to try and alleviate the cost; I worked at my dad’s office during the day, a pizza place at night and a fine dining restaurant on the weekends. I didn’t want to defer my loans, but once I started missing my stop on the train because I was too tired, I knew I needed a change. I deferred all but one of my loans for six months while I found a corporate job that would pay me the same as the three jobs, but on a regular schedule.

Another six months went too fast, and soon I was paying for the original loan amount plus all the interest that racked up while I tried to better my situation. By this point, I was $100,000 in debt. That was 10 years ago.

Some things have changed in my life since then. I no longer have that corporate job (I have my own business now), I am married and we own a home. My loan debt has changed, too – it’s gone up to almost twice what it was, thanks to interest rates and another couple of deferrals while I was laid off.

My husband has no student debt, thankfully, but it tortures me that he’s now saddled with mine, with me. Then add in credit card debt from some plastic I got just out of college that was my fallback during unemployment, and my debt is more than $200,000.

We’re lucky we got this house. The debt-to-income ratio was way higher than what the mortgage company would accept, but I was able to cash out an old 401K and use that to offset the mortgage cost. The home was abandoned for three years before we got it, so it came in at dirt-cheap.

We’re paying for that now: we can’t use the water from the tap because we need a new well that we can’t afford. We can’t fix the plumbing because it’s too expensive. Our basement floods when it rains because we can’t afford waterproofing. And it’s not just the house.

I need a new car, but I can’t get approved for a loan – nor would I be able to afford payments – because of my debt. Forget putting anything we need on credit cards, either. They’re all maxed out from emergencies and I haven’t been able to get a new one in years. We can barely make the payments we have because I owe so much to my loans every month. I was at least able to get the payments down with income-based repayment, but still.

It’s not like it matters, anyway. I truly don’t know why I continue paying. With the interest rates (already refinanced to the lowest percentage) and the total I owe, I just owe more money every month regardless of what I pay. I thought about filing for bankruptcy, but student loans don’t apply.

We’ve wanted to move for two years. But we can’t. Instead, I can only sit here, watching my mass of debt grow like a cancer, applying for credit cards I’ll never get. All for an education.