'I just keep hoping that it will just magically go away or I'll just die': A growing feature of the nation's $1.7 trillion student-debt crisis is Americans living with student loans for their entire adult lives
Tammy Sabens (left) and Tala Henry-Halab have had their student loans for decades. Borrowers like them are becoming a growing feature of the $1.7 trillion student-debt crisis.
Tala Henry-Halabi has been repaying her student loans for some 40 years. She graduated from the University of South Florida in 1985 owing $9,924; now, at age 62, she owes more than she borrowed in the first place to attend a four-year public state university.
"I've been working my whole life and I still owe $11,700," said Henry-Halabi. "My whole life has been a comedy of this going through the cracks no matter what I do, no matter how much I try."
In 1986 - the same year that "Top Gun" was released in movie theatres and the New York Mets last won the World Series - Henry-Halabi started to try to repay her student loans. She put what she could toward the debt, but struggled to find enough money between rent, car payments and healthcare to stay current on the loans, even while working three jobs.
She married, had children and for many years worked as a librarian in a public library in upstate New York. Finding the resources to manage the debt remained a challenge. At one point, Henry-Halabi received calls from a collection agency that she says came without a warning from her loan holder. Henry-Halabi agreed to pay $400 a month, forking over essentially all of the money she was making at the time. Still, the payments didn't appear to make a dent in her loan balance, she said.
Later, the U.S. government garnished money from the wages Henry-Halabi earned working as a public librarian to repay her loans. That lasted for about 10 years until the pandemic paused student-loan collection activity. Earlier this year, Henry-Halabi's grown children told her they'd like to help her pay off her student loans. The offer made her cry, both because it was so kind and because she felt it was the wrong order of things.
Now, Henry-Halabi's best hope is to continue working as a children's librarian for another four years. If she makes it until 2030, her debt will be canceled under Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a program where borrowers can have their federal student loans wiped out after 10 years of working for the government or certain nonprofits. She struggled to navigate the program's requirements in the past. Her husband, a cancer survivor, wants to move to Florida to be closer to their adult children - but Henry-Halabi is hesitant to make any moves in part because of the loans.
"I'm like, I don't know if I'll be alive in 2030," she said.
A growing feature of the nation's $1.7 trillion student-loan crisis is that some Americans are now living with student loans for their entire adult lives. It's hard to know how many people have been saddled with this lifetime burden.
Those who, like Henry-Halabi, have had their student loans for at least two decades make up 5% of borrowers, or nearly 2 million people, according to credit data analyzed by the California Policy Lab at the University of California. That's up from 1% of borrowers in 2015. But the data likely underestimate the scope of the issue because, for borrowers who consolidated their debt, the credit data show the consolidation date as a loan's origination date - rather than the date when the borrower originally took out the loan, which could have been years earlier.
Regardless, the existence of these lifetime borrowers exemplifies a broken system that's meant to use a combination of government and individual funding to kickstart a successful life. There's evidence throughout the student-loan program that policymakers never intended for borrowers to be dogged by a student loan for their whole lives. The standard term for repaying a student loan is 10 years - a reasonable amount of time for someone to establish their career after college. Under alternative repayment plans, borrowers are supposed to have the debt wiped out after at least 20 or 25 years of payments.
At the same time, those provisions do not align with other features of the student-loan system that can allow the debt to fester for decades. These conflicting provisions are aimed at ensuring borrowers don't avoid their responsibilities to taxpayers and the government.
The repayment structure can be challenging for borrowers to navigate and, unlike most consumer debt, there's no statute of limitations on a student loan, meaning the government can pursue a borrower for their entire life. Student loans are famously difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. The government also has extraordinary power to collect on the loans, including by taking borrowers' Social Security benefits, tax refunds and wages - but borrowers may not experience those consequences until they're actually making enough money for the government to claw away.
The result is that, according to the California Policy Lab, 40% of borrowers have had at least one loan for more than a decade - the standard repayment term - up from 22% a decade ago.
'That damn loan - it weighs on me so heavy, I just cry'
Tammy Sabens is 65 years old, but retirement is far from her mind - in large part because of her student debt. Instead, she's considering taking on more jobs to help pay it down.
"That damn loan - it weighs on me so heavy, I just cry," she said. "There just doesn't seem any way out. It just keeps magically growing like 'Jack and the Giant Beanstalk.'"
Sabens took on the loans in 2002 to become a nurse. At the time, she was 46 and a single mom, and she thought switching careers would help provide economic stability for herself and her kids. But in the years since, Sabens has struggled to make meaningful progress toward repaying the debt. She originally borrowed nearly $25,000, but the loans have now ballooned to more than $50,000.
Now she's worried that changes coming to the student-loan program as a result of this year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will make the debt more difficult to pay off. Sabens has already felt the impact of the politics surrounding the student-loan program. She had tried to switch to a more affordable repayment plan during a period when the Trump administration had stopped processing applications. The pause in processing was related to litigation surrounding SAVE, a Biden-era repayment program. The experience left Sabens in limbo for months.
She's now looking at fewer repayment options thanks to changes to the student-loan program from the Republican megabill and the Trump administration's decision to officially end SAVE. "They keep changing the game, they keep changing the rules," Sabens said. "That is so unfair - we're just at their mercy."
Meanwhile, Sabens, who lives in Kentucky, is balancing budgeting for her loan payments with other expenses. In 2022, she was pinched financially, so she sold her house to have some extra funds. But now, she's contending with high rent. Sabens said she's worried about how long she'll be able to continue working full time because of her health, and she doesn't have any money saved in a retirement account because she had to cash out her savings at one point when she lost her job.
"I just keep hoping that it will just magically go away or I'll just die," Sabens said of her student debt.
There are plans that borrowers can use to manage their student loans long term. Policymakers began developing those programs decades ago when they started to realize that many borrowers were buckling under the 10-year standard repayment timeline, said David Bergeron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.
Bergeron, who worked at the U.S. Education Department for more than 30 years, described these plans that extend the repayment horizon for 20 or 25 years as "technocratic solutions to the problem of college costing too much."
"Those were Band-Aids to recognize that the original idea of people being able to pay off their educational debt in 10 years wasn't living up to the reality that so many borrowers were facing," he said.
But these programs can be challenging to navigate. Borrowers who have their student loans for decades have often cycled in and out of repayment - putting money toward the loan when they can afford it or when there aren't other pressing bills - and in some cases have experienced periods of debt-collection activity. Many of these borrowers have paid back their original balance and then some, experts note.
"Whether they paid voluntarily or through collections, most Americans would probably agree that if you've paid back what you've owed, you've paid enough," said Rich Williams, the chief customer officer at Summer, a company that works with employers and cities to connect people with student-loan benefits. "But the system is not built that way."
As borrowers get older, the challenges of repayment become even more acute, added Williams. That's both because older Americans tend to have more limited income and because they're more likely to be dealing with health conditions that come with old age - for example, weak eyesight or cognitive decline - that can make it challenging to navigate student-loan repayment programs. In 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that nearly 40% of student-loan borrowers over the age of 65 were in default.
"The quantity of those borrowers who are in default is really alarming," said Williams, who served as deputy assistant secretary of planning, policy and innovation at the Education Department during the Biden administration.
Part of the reason why student loans can hang on for so long is because borrowers get discouraged and are occupied by other, more imminent needs.
"If you're pressed between whether you pay back your student loan from 20 years ago or your utility bill, or your gas bill, or a ballet lesson for your grandkid, it decreases its urgency," said Eleni Schirmer, an organizer with the Debt Collective, a debtor activist organization, who is working on a book about older debtors.
The experience of paying the debt can be also demoralizing for older borrowers, Schirmer said, because in many cases they've seen little evidence that the money they're throwing at the loan is helping to bring the balance down. "The interest can really screw people, and if you fall behind or if you go into default for any period of time, it just gets worse."
Even if the debt started out small, years of making payments that are so low they don't hit the principal, or cycling through default and facing collection costs and fees, can drive up the balance significantly, experts say.
"There isn't really any value in paying it in a way, because can you really pay it off?" said Johnson Tyler, a senior staff attorney at Legal Services NYC who works with student-loan borrowers. "It can get so out of control quickly."
'It's something that I regret'
After more than 10 years of payments on student loans that were originally about $22,000, Laura Steinke Simms still owes $20,000.
Steinke Simms, 70, acquired the debt when she decided to go back to school in 2007 after being laid off from the job where she'd worked for more than 20 years. At the time, she was a single mom with a child at home.
"I didn't have any other experience, so I went back to school," she recalled.
Laura Steinke Simms borrowed student loans to retool her career skills, but she's struggled with the debt for more than a decade.
But the education didn't deliver the economic boost she'd anticipated. Steinke Simms, who lives in Graettinger, Iowa, said she ended up making less money than she had at her previous job and had trouble managing her bills. She ultimately lost her house and had to rebuild her life.
Now, Steinke Simms is retired - and pulls money out of her IRA, 401(k) and Social Security benefits to pay her student loans. She'd like to be able to set the loans on auto-pay, so that she can receive the quarter-point interest-rate deduction the government offers for paying your loans automatically. But Steinke Simms can't risk losing the money she may need to pay another bill.
"I have other things coming out that are more important to me, like my phone bill and my utility bill," she said. "If ... they did auto-debit and for some reason I had a huge hospital bill, and I didn't have that money in the account, then I'm in trouble."
It's crucial her monthly payment stays the same, but Steinke Simms is concerned that she won't be able to navigate the process to maintain her current loan payment, which requires recertifying her income. "I've gotten no information from them whatsoever," Steinke Simms said of her student-loan servicer. "I used to call them, but you can hardly ever get through unless you want to wait on the phone for 45 minutes to an hour."
Kathleen McFadden was only able to find a solution to the student loans that dogged her for decades after working with a legal-aid attorney. McFadden, who lives in Philadelphia, first took on her student loans in 1994 when she was in her early 20s, a period when she made multiple attempts to get a degree. She started at cosmetology school, but didn't finish because the fumes from acrylic nails sent her to the hospital, she said. Then she took a stab at community college, but the stress of balancing full-time work with school made it difficult for her to finish.
When McFadden's loans first went into repayment, she struggled to afford the monthly bill. Eventually, she defaulted on the debt and began hearing from collection agencies. She tried to call the companies to make payment arrangements, but they would never accept less than a certain amount of money, which she couldn't afford.
"I remember several times during the course of the years deciding, 'I'll try it again and see if they can offer me a better plan,'" McFadden, now 56, said.
Kathleen McFadden struggled to make progress on her student loans for decades.
She finally landed a steady job working at an ophthalmology practice as a technician and retinal photographer. But the student loans caught up with her, and the government garnished her wages to repay them. McFadden was able to suspend the garnishment by applying for a financial-hardship exemption from the government.
Every six months, McFadden said, she'd need to take time out of her workday to go over her finances in depth with someone over the phone, in order to maintain the exemption. "I'd have to ask my boss if I could sit in the office and be on the phone with this guy," she recalled. "My whole day, it was all I could focus on at work."
After several years of working in the ophthalmology office, McFadden was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and suffered from other health challenges, including struggling to walk, and she stopped working. She put the student loans in the back of her mind for a period and went on disability. But suddenly, she noticed that the federal government was taking $150 out of the $1,100 in disability she relied on to pay for her living expenses.
"That was just insane to me," she said. "The money I was getting from the government because I was physically unable to work and pay for myself" was now being taken by the government. At the time, McFadden was using the money to cover expenses for herself and her daughter.
"Now they're taking money away from her - now she can't go on some school trip, can't get some pair of sneakers that she's been waiting all year for Christmas," she said.
This year, McFadden's student loans were finally discharged through a program that allows borrowers who have a severe disability to have their debt canceled. She was only able to access the program with help from a legal-aid attorney.
When she learned her roughly $30,000 in debt would be cancelled, McFadden said she wasn't as excited as she expected. She'd always thought of the loans as her responsibility to repay, but she struggled to make enough money to afford them and to navigate the options available that could have made the loans more manageable.
"It's kind of bittersweet," McFadden said of having the debt wiped out. "It feels like it was something that needed to happen, and it's something that I regret. I'm glad that it's not going to follow me around until I drop dead."
https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251219199/theyre-in-their-60s-and-still-paying-off-2
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