Deferred But Not Forgotten

I never imagined it would take this long.

Just this week, a week in October of 2021, I made my final student loan payment. Not for any of my children, mind you, for myself, twenty-five years after I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

I was a bright eyed optimistic young gal when I graduated from college with a degree in communications in May of 1996. I had just secured a part-time job at a Johnstown television station and was looking for an apartment. 

It would be a few months before I would have to start paying back my thousands of dollars of student loans but I didn’t care. I had a job. I would be living on my own. I was taking the world by storm. (Ok, by world I mean Cambria County, Pennsylvania.)

When the loan bills started coming in, I couldn’t afford to pay them. I was paying rent on an apartment. I had electric, gas and car insurance bills. Plus, I needed to eat. That’s important, right? Money was tight. I had been warned by college professors about the line of work I was planning to choose. I was not going to get rich as a reporter at a 106 Nielsen Designated Market Rated television station. (New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are the top 3.)

But wait, I had an option. I could put off the payments until I was making more money. It’s a funny English word that seems like a parachute, when you are trying to make ends meet, but it malfunctions before you get to the ground. 

Deferment.

This parachute was something I was able to rely on for a few years. Each time I resubmitted the paperwork, cue the sound of a cash register, cha-ching, the interest only increased. Looking at my final student loan bill, the amount of interest I’ve paid is close to $9,000. Staggering, isn’t it? 

But there’s more to the story. I didn’t just go to post-secondary school once, I went a second time when I was in my 30’s. By this time, I was living in Virginia and had added radio to my career experience. I decided I wanted to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a weather person so in 2001, I enrolled in Mississippi State University to earn my Broadcast Meteorology Certificate. 

(Again, cue the cash register. But, in my defense, I thought getting a TV weather gig would help pay my loans off in no time. )

The program took three years. I did my course work remotely, watching lectures on VHS tapes, and submitting work via early 2000’s style email. In order to complete the program, we, my husband, our two-year-old and I, had to drive to Birmingham, Alabama in August of 2004 to take the final exam. I was eight months pregnant with our second child. 

Here is the sad part of the story. I never used that certificate. I never got a broadcast meteorology job. A few months after our Alabama trip, my husband accepted a television job back home in Pittsburgh. We packed up our life down south and returned to the Steel City with our two babies in tow. 

I immersed myself in raising our kids, while doing radio part-time. We struggled to make my monthly student loan payments which had now accumulated and had been refinanced a couple of times. I remember I had a repayment plan that had graduated payments. They were divided in three tiers from lowest to highest. It sounded good initially but when we got to tier three, ah, that was tough. 

Luckily, we only had one student loan to worry about. But even back then, I never would have imagined it would have taken me this long to resolve this debt. But I was the first child in my family to go to college. Neither of my parents did nor my grandparents. They were not schooled in college financing and we all paid the price for it. 

As Frank Sinatra sang so poignantly , “regrets….I have a few. But then again, too few to mention.” 

Am I sorry I never got my meteorology job? Yes, but then I would have missed out on all of the time I was able to spend with my baby girl. Am I sorry I did use my communication degree to its full capacity? Yes, but then I would have missed raising our family back home.

My mistakes have translated into better decisions in pursuing post-secondary education for our son. I have made it my mission to keep my kids from being bogged down in decades of loan payments. I sound like a broken record around our house but I don’t care. I did not suffer this cross in vain. I will make a better path for them. 

My final loan payment was a bit anticlimactic. Due to online bill pay, with a couple of clicks that was it. But I intend to frame my final bill. I intend to rejoice in the freedom of being unshackled from this loan that has been my shadow for the past 25 years.  

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll dust off that certificate and deliver your morning forecast. But until then I hope your day is partly sunny with a chance of happy.