Susan Bowen, now 27, expects to be paying on her $130,000 worth of debt into her 50s.
After spending seven years in school, Susan Bowen was required to submit her first student loan payment Saturday.
The bill was for her three Sallie Mae loans, which will cost her $650 per month and will take her 20 to 25 years to pay off. That’s not including her federal loans, which will cost her $200 a month and take her 10 years to pay off, if she gets the government pardon she is applying for.
“I would’ve sat down and looked at how much my tuition was to figure out what I needed and only take out that much,” Bowen said.
Bowen, 27, said she wishes someone would have educated her on the logistics of loans.
“I never thought about what an interest rate means,” she said. “That would’ve been good knowledge to have because I don’t know what I’m going to do (to pay off the loans).”
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Bowen graduated from OU in 2010 with a degree in therapeutic recreation and attended graduate school at Mount Vernon Nazarene University. She has $100,000 in debt from her time at OU and $30,000 from graduate school.
She got help from family initially, but later took out loans.
“My parents paid for the first year, but couldn’t keep that up so I took out loans just out of necessity,” Bowen said.
Bowen said she got a full-time job at Muskingum Recreation Center in Zanesville, Ohio, in 2013, a 35-minute drive from her home in Newark, Ohio. Although she pays for transportation to and from work, she can’t move closer because of her debt.
“The cost of living there is cheap, but I can’t get approved for a loan because of my student loans,” she said.
She said she is planning to move after paying some of her loans off.
“The plan is to stay where I’m at now and try to pay off some of those loans, the ones with the higher interest rates, then move,” Bowen said.
She has seven Department of Education loans and three from Sallie Mae.
“I took out a DOE loan every year I was in college,” Bowen said. “I took out a Sallie Mae loan every year I was at OU.”
She said that the Department of Education gives up to $20,500 a year to graduate students, but that she opted to only take how much she needed to cover tuition.
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Bowen said it was common for students to take out loans, but most people she knew had jobs to offset the loans. While she was in college she said she worked, but her earnings were not enough to help pay her loans off at the time.
“I shudder to think how much that loan payment is going to be,” Bowen said. “With my other expenses, I’m just making it work.”
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