Have you ever worried about not being able to make your monthly student loan payment? I wonder this each month for my wife. She currently has a private student loan as well as a federal student loan. The private loan is $210 per month which we have been paying on for a while now. The federal student loan is $110,000 and requires an $800 monthly payment. We have not paid the federal loan.

 

She keeps requesting a forbearance and/or deferment because there is no way we can afford to pay that loan. As a private school teacher, her take home pay is just $1000 per month. Paying a $800 monthly bill with a $1000 take home check just doesn’t work any way you look at it. The forbearance and deferments will eventually run out.

 

You probably wonder how a school teacher racked up over $100K in student loan debt. I often ask myself the same way. She went through three years towards getting an engineering degree, but then realized it was not something she wanted to do.

 

After leaving the college of engineering, she did a couple of years getting a business degree, but she felt that was leading her somewhere else. She then started in the college of education and finally felt like she as in the right place. Eventually she received a bachelors and masters from the college of education.

 

All the while, she was accumulating this huge student loan debt. After working in the public school sector for a year, she hated it with a passion. She eventually led to teach at a private christian school where she loves to talk about God and teach the little children at the same time.

 

Life is good at this point, except that the student loan continues to grow while her salary continues to stay very low. Public school teachers are not paid very well, but private school teachers get paid about half of that. It’s quite a dilemma.

 

So what do you do when you can’t pay your monthly student loan bill and don’t anticipate ever being able to afford paying it? We struggle with that question each month and really have no answer to it. Will she be forced to switch jobs to one that pays more? Will we be forced to sell our home and rent in order to pay for this loan? I just don’t know what the future holds for us.