Living under an ever-growing cloud… of student debt

SARAHA Pool sings loudly in the car, escapes into books and tries, best as she can, not to think too much about the monster outside her door.

The one who demands every extra cent she earns. The one she keeps trying to appease, but fears she will never be free of. The one she acquired when she was 25, pregnant and determined to make a good life for the baby on the way.

Three years ago, when she finished her master’s degree, Sarah’s student loans totalled $60 000. She has paid steadily ever since and now owes $69 000 – more than twice the annual income she earns working as a children’s librarian.

When her pregnancy test came back positive, she enrolled in graduate school to get a master’s in education. Sarah went to work part-time and continued to work at a library and coffee shop in Staunton, Virginia.

Her boyfriend took care of their baby, Max, during the day and worked at a bakery overnight. Student loans took care of tuition, books and left-over living expenses. In 2014, Sarah graduated and, after a terrible student-teaching experience, got the sinking feeling that teaching wasn’t for her.

A few months later, she and her boyfriend broke up. The debt, and all of Max’s expenses, were on her.

After a while, Sarah was hired full-time as a library assistant in a neighbouring town. She is now a children’s librarian, presiding over toddler story times and teen reading groups.

“I love my job because I feel like I help people. And it’s tangible,” says Sarah. She would not have this job, she knows, if she didn’t have an advanced degree. Yet she has a hard time convincing herself that it was worth the price she continues to pay.

She feels perpetually on the edge of peril – one car breakdown away from disaster.

“It’s just a constant worry in my mind,” she says of the debt.

In the first five years of Max’s life, they moved six times and wound up living with multiple room-mates.

“When a house across the street from her best friend went on the market for just over $100 000, Sarah held her breath and applied for a mortgage.

“And I still don’t really understand how I got approved,” Sarah says while sitting on a hand-medown couch in that house, which now belongs to her. There are cheerful yellow walls and no rugs on the floors, but Max wears slippers as he plays with his Lego and Sarah puts socks over her stockings for extra warmth.

Though there aren’t any luxuries, Sarah says she and Max don’t lack anything they really need. And what they have, now, is an extra bedroom and love to spare.

When she can block out anxiety about the debt, what Sarah feels, mostly, is lucky. She lives in a town that feels like home, has a job she loves and is the mother of a happy, charismatic little boy.

Plus she’s got that flickering faith that if she keeps working hard, life will somehow turn out all right. – Washington Post