Kim Baker shares her experience navigating the loan forgiveness system and recently achieved student debt cancellation. Kim tells Nikki about listening to the experiences of others with student debt inspired her to take action on her own. Kim’s years in academia are intrinsically tied to her student debt not only in the monetary cost but also in the weight of decisions often made when student debt makes it feel impossible to move forward.
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Transcript –
Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast. It is so good to have you here.
Kim Baker: I’m excited to be here. Actually, when I first heard the first episode that I listened to, I was picturing myself talking to you. So it’s kind of fun to be here.
Nikki Nolan: That is so exciting. Yeah. We found each other through Twitter and your story is super interesting. And we’re going to get into that, but first we’re going to get into the thing I ask everyone, how much student debt do you have right now?
Kim Baker: Right now? I have none. And that’s the new thing. I would say it still hasn’t totally sunk in.
Nikki Nolan: I am so excited to get into this because I think when we were talking last time, I think you still had some debt, maybe how much debt did you have?
Kim Baker: I originally took out about $140,000 in federal loans. I had $10,000 in a Texas state loan program. And then I had, we’ll talk about it later, I’m sure, but I also had some of my sister’s debt. And that was probably about $8,000. So that was everything altogether. And I paid off the Texas thing and my sister’s thing, and then my federal debt was just canceled. I guess now about two months ago was when it all sort of started to happen. And, I had $131,833 canceled.
Nikki Nolan: We are absolutely going to get into all the details of how you did that. But before we do, what has been the impact of student debt on your life?
Kim Baker: Mostly, I was always aware of it. I was always thinking about it. I recently said something to my spouse about how, this is so exciting because now if I were to die, you don’t have to pay off any of this debt. You wouldn’t have to put life insurance toward it. None of this would be yours to deal with. And he looked at me rather horrified, that I even thought about my death. But I was just no, this was something I thought about, leaving you with this monster. And it was all accumulated before we were together, but I don’t know what all the rules are. And it was that’s the extent to which I thought about it.
I didn’t have a retirement account until I was 37 because I moved to a state that had a state pension program. So that’s the first time I had any kind of retirement. I only have ever really traveled related to work. And then sometimes, tack on something extra, but I’ve never just taken a trip. And then, my mom got really ill. A few years ago she had early onset dementia. She went from full-time employed, preparing for retirement and at 62 she suddenly takes a turn. And by the time she’s 64, she’s in a nursing home and she’s been in a nursing home for, I think about five years now.
Kim Baker: And, she’s in Texas and I’m an Iowa. And I can only visit once a year. That’s all I can afford. So it’s just the debt was just a thing that just stood in the way of being with my family and doing something interesting and planning for my future and really being kind of the adult I thought I would be, it really held me back.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: And you did an interview with Melissa Byrne, where she talked about changes to higher ed funding under Clinton, and especially changes to the student loan system. And, as she was describing it, I was like, I didn’t realize all that was happening. I didn’t really tell my story. It is just right at that time that higher ed funding changes and all of a sudden they take the cap off of student loans and they let people borrow as much as they can.
But also in that interview, where she talked about her experience with Reverend Jesse Jackson, where he told her not to hide her debt. To say the numbers out loud and to recognize that it’s, it’s not a personal failing. That it is a reflection of an unjust system and we need to call it what it is, and we need to name it with our numbers.
And, that was the first time that I really started actually looking at my balance. And I started saying my balance out loud to people. It was a little embarrassing at first, but it was helpful. People who were in a similar situation were like, oh, I know that. But also people who really didn’t understand the scope of the problem were able to see the problem for the first time.I paid for 10 years, I paid every month to pay it on time. I paid a little under $60,000 and my balance went from $140,000 to $131,000.
Nikki Nolan: Well, it went down though.
Kim Baker: I did make a dent in my principal, but also I’m a white woman.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: Like the research is showing that, I’m actually in a better off position as terrible as it is, that I actually am getting to my principal. And if I hadn’t had cancellation, honestly, I mean, it would have been tough, but I would have been able to pay it off. I mean, I would have paid for it for another 15 years.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: But I would have paid it off. That is not true for, particularly for black borrowers and especially black women, who have higher levels of debt, have often debt that is much more out of alignment with their income, who never get to the principal. So I feel like the fact that I got cancellation and the fact that I actually chipped away at my principal a bit is a reflection of the privileged position I have. It’s not a reflection of oh, hey, this is good. I did something good, right? This is a structural situation that is unjust. And all evidence is showing us that cancellation will benefit borrowers and especially will benefit black borrowers. It will boost the economy. I look forward to spending money. I look forward to saving money, to the extent that we want capitalism to function. This is part of how to do it.
Nikki Nolan: I’m in full agreement. I’m curious, did it help? I know it was embarrassing at first to start saying the numbers, but how do you feel it impacted your life? I think a lot of people feel so much shame. And I’m curious about that with you. What was your experience like?
Kim Baker: Well, I think it, several things happened at the same time. So, my friend Louise Seamster who’s at the University of Iowa does work on debt and race, and some of her work is specifically on student loans. Encountering her work and seeing her advocate for cancellation and so forth helped me think about my situation sociologically. Which, you know, you think I might do because I am a sociologist, but you know, you also don’t always want to take your work home. So it helped me to start to look at what was happening in structures in higher ed. What was happening with the student loan system, what was happening around fluctuations and unemployment. Cause you know, I went on the job market in 2008 just as the crash was happening.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: Once I had a job, I was just holding on. And so to sort of look at all these systems and see those systems functioning, helped me to move away from the idea that I had just made a whole lot of bad decisions. And so that helped. I had conversations that I have also heard reflected in your podcasts around, calling it a cancellation and not forgiveness. I don’t need to be forgiven. I didn’t do anything morally wrong. This is a cancellation. So then thinking about out loud, naming my debt, naming my numbers, sort of happened all around that same time. So it was a way of naming a problem rather than exposing myself. That helped because I had ways to talk about it that were about systems and failures and injustice and not about me Kim Baker, who just didn’t know any better when I was 18.
Nikki Nolan: That was the healthiest way for me to frame it. Tell me about your Public Service Loan Forgiveness path. I would love to learn what you did and how this happened.
Kim Baker: The payments started in 2009. So just on math, I would hit cancellation in 2019. There’s sort of some offsets because your loan servicers change periodically. And then they put things on a pause, you know, for a month or two, and then it goes on. But somewhere around the time that I moved here, I moved here in 2013. And there started to be a lot more talk about PSLF in circles I was following on social media and somewhat in the news coverage because we knew we would be coming up on that first round of people who could apply for cancellation in 2017. And so somewhere in 2016, I started reading a lot more and that’s when I was oh wait. So now there’s an annual certification process. And I haven’t been doing that, but also now it’s very clear. You have to be in the income-based repayment program, that graduated won’t work. So I switched my payment plan. but that means my eligibility for PSLF started in 2016, even though I had been paying since 2009.
Nikki Nolan: Oh, God.
Kim Baker: Of course, you know, that’s how it’s going to work. And, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I was just kind of resigned to it. And then in 2017, they passed the Temporary Expanded PSLF. So people that were in the wrong repayment programs, and then got in the right one, or a couple of other circumstances, but that had been working for 10 years, should qualify.
And so I come up to 2019 and I know I’m getting close. And, I started asking around how was this going to work? And no one knows. we don’t have any idea because the idea was once that pool of money was used up, it was just gone, they weren’t going to keep funding. Or there haven’t been any efforts to keep funding it.
So I don’t know if that money’s still available. I have no idea. And I remember, I know I called my loan servicer, who was, FedLoan. And so I called them and, whoever I talked to, I talked to just, the first person you talked to, you know, I didn’t get transferred around and they were yeah, I don’t think you’re going to qualify. And I was worried too, if I applied and got denied, would I get kicked out of the whole thing? What was going to be the consequence? I don’t know. And no one can tell me. And I had already been prepared to pay until 2026. Because of the shift. And so I, you know, I just kinda left it and just kept going.
And then my spouse and I, so we’ve been together since I think 2005, but we had never gotten legally married. Cause it just wasn’t important to either one of us. But around 2017, his insurance situation changed, and we needed to get him on my insurance and the only way to do that was to get legally married.
And so we did that to get him on my insurance. This is good because my insurance is awesome. And also exactly a month later he had a kidney stone that would have been very expensive had we not had good insurance. So it was totally the right decision, but putting him on my insurance is $500 a month. So a lot. Worth it, but a lot. So then I do the paperwork the next year and submit our joint tax files. My payments are just shy of $600 a month. So you know, it’s going to go to $700 or $800. That’s going to hurt. And it comes back and my new payment is just shy of $1100. So my payments doubled and it was really, wow. And then, you know, the extra $500 on insurance. All of a sudden our finances got very tight.
I’m not thankful for the pandemic, but I am super thankful for the pause because we were really, we were struggling. The pause in the student loan payments in itself was a relief, to direct money to other places. But then I actually heard your interview with Hil Kaman where he describes his experience with Temporary Expanded PSLF. And his story had a lot of similarities to mine. I knew because he had gotten a cancellation fairly recently. I was okay, so that pool of money still exists. So, check. And then he also talked about how he had to try over and over again. And he had to keep calling and he had to really hold his ground to be able to get through the whole process. And that was like, I now understand I’m going to have that battle, like, okay, I can do this. And so in April of this year, I submitted my application. I knew from Hil that I would apply for PSLF first, get rejected and then reapply for temporary expansion. So I was okay, got it. That’s fine. So that was in April and then, but even with that second one, I applied on April 27th and on April 29th, I got a rejection. No explanation for why, just says you don’t qualify.
I applied a total of four times. Every time when I would call it would be, I was often told it was something with my paperwork. Somebody had scratched out a date and put in a new one, but not initialed it. Or a signature, a person, the way they wrote their name, they wrote a shortened version of their name, but they signed to their full name.
I don’t know. I keep asking, I’m sorry, can you fill out the paperwork again? Sometimes they couldn’t even tell which tool had the problem. So I just submit both. And at some point, because I had, I had been on time since 2009, so all my payments were directly debited and I had not changed banks.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: So, you know, I had never had a disruption on my end. And so I know I made these payments. and so I attached a spreadsheet, here’s every payment I have ever made. Here’s where the pauses are. Here’s where my changes in loan services are. And here’s where I changed my payment plan. This, I know this to be true, with my application and I still get a rejection. The last one I got was the first time they declared, I was actually in the Temporary Expanded PSLF program. So I had been admitted to that program, I had two different loans cause one was the standard student loan. And one was one group that was consolidated with the standard. And then the other group was the graduate school stuff. I paid one payment, but it was broken down into two separate loans. And when I get the paperwork for temporary expanded, it says I’ve made 87 qualifying payments on one loan, but 96 qualifying payments on the other loan. And I was but I just took one payment. This doesn’t make sense. But that was odd enough for me to finally get past the first line of service. Finally got transferred to a specialist. And that’s where I had a specialist who is awesome.
I have this name written down. I say, thank you every once in a while. But he was like, huh, this seems weird. Let me go back and look at the documentation. And then he also, I loved it, he would, he would mutter out loud about what he was seeing. So he had found that, so first there was Mohela, who was my servicer, back in 2012/2013. When they directed my payments, they would direct my payments to one loan and not the other. So even though I’m just making one payment, they were paying one and not the other. And so, that’s why my number of payments was different. Then months where in the same monthly record, it would say I missed a payment or I was late on a payment, but it would also say I was an auto-debit. I’m not late and I’m not missing it. But it would say that in the same record. But he was oh yeah, we see this all the time. Like both of those things. He’s yeah, yeah, I’ve seen this before. But I couldn’t do anything about it. He had to, it turns out the office that makes the decision about whether you get cancellation is totally separate from this office who figures out these kinds of problems and they don’t communicate unless I call and I managed to get to the specialist line and I got somebody to view this for me. So he then communicated to this other office, Hey, this needs to be reviewed. And here’s the documentation. I have no documentation that this communication has actually happened.
It’s just all in a black hole on my side. And I have no way to hold anyone accountable for any of this stuff. So I’m just waiting. and he was like, you know, it’s going to take a month or so, so be patient, but luckily it didn’t. And so on July 26th, I got a letter that said I actually got three letters on the same day, that I have met my required number of payments, in fact, I’ve overpaid and that my account is going to continue to be reviewed. And then on August 20th. So almost a month later, I get a call that says the Department of Ed has approved my cancellations through TEPSLF, and then everything happens pretty quickly. So by August 23rd, I have a zero balance. When I sign in, I can’t sign into the phone app anymore.
They won’t give me access. But honestly, I mean, it happened, but I was like real, you know, I still got a couple of weeks before I paid bills. What’s that going to look like? Cause I’ve been having on my list of bills, I have you know, my student loan was there, but I just had it a line through it, you know, waiting for the payments to resume.
And then on September 3rd, I got a letter. Out of the blue, my loan servicer says that my application has been reviewed and that I do not qualify for loan forgiveness.
Nikki Nolan: Oh my God.
Kim Baker: Yeah. I was like, what? And of course the letter, cause you know, they put the letters in, but they just push out notices at midnight. So you can’t call. What is happening? My balance still says zero, but what’s happening? And I called them and I needed the specialist’s office. I’m not dealing with the frontline staff anymore. Get me to a specialist. And the specialist is just mystified. He’s like, I can’t find any reason for this letter. Your balance, your account is closed with us. And he’s you know, the only thing I can think is that one of your previous applications didn’t officially get closed out. This was officially closing the loop and then just out of practice, it generated this letter. So I can’t get an answer. And then meanwhile, I am a member of the union Strike Debt. I’ve also, I have several friends and contacts, with some other organizations.
So I posted about this on social media and immediately I was getting advice from different people. I was getting some potential contacts with attorneys and that kind of stuff. And they were, you know, one person was you know, this sucks, but my FedLoan is going to end their contract with the federal government to do this stuff with loans in December. So basically once a month from now to March, just check-in and make sure you’re balanced as zero. And if not, then, you know, we need to get you in touch with an attorney. So it was just okay, so it’s canceled, but now I gotta sit in this limbo.
And fortunately, somebody from SBPC [Student Borrower Protection Center] contacted me with an ombudsman at the Department of Education and it was through the ombudsman office that I was finally able to get confirmation. So on September 23rd, she sent me an email saying that I can confirm that your loans are discharged and you have nothing to worry about. And that’s coming from the Department of Ed. Even if my FedLoan tries to say, I have a loan, the Department of Ed who actually holds the loan says I don’t. So that’s the first time that I was like, okay, this is all a fluke and I just have to let it go.
Nikki Nolan: Wow, what a nightmare!
Kim Baker: I really, other than just describing it, I have no adjectives that adequately capture how absurd and also painful that four months was from when I first applied to when it finally, finally happened. And, you know, meanwhile, their headline circulating that, you know, the PSLF program, it’s not working the way it’s supposed to. And that 98% of applicants have been denied. And then the Department of Ed is saying well, people are applying when they don’t actually qualify. And I’m like, no your loan services, which have had no oversight for well over a decade.
And also why the hell are we farming this out to private companies rather than the Department of Ed who is responsible for actually doing it themselves? Your company is making mistakes in people’s records with enough consistency that the person who went to look for my problem found it in under 10 minutes. You have a loan servicer problem. You do not have a borrower problem.
Nikki Nolan: Yup. Pretty consistent.
Kim Baker: Yeah. I did when I worked with them. But then, you know, I provided her with lots of detail and lots of documents. She actually had worked at SBPC. And lots of people had told me she was really good, and reliable. So, I mean, thank God I’m not dealing with DeVos Department of Ed because I think I still would not have a cancellation.
But there are some good people now that are trying to make the situation better. Of course, you know, last week they finally announced new rules and they’re going to try to be more generous. I think we should cancel it all.
Nikki Nolan: Yep.
Kim Baker: It should just all go. It should all go. We have an unjust system for financing higher ed. We need to fix how we finance higher ed. and we need to start over completely. While I think people, if they qualify in any way under the new rules of PSLF, I think should absolutely go for it and apply and get through the process. But it’s not enough. I mean, it’s not like my parents could’ve paid and just didn’t. We were poor. We could not afford it. I started college in 1994. In 2021, I was still dealing with this. It’s unjust.
Nikki Nolan: Yep. It’s totally unjust. Wow. What a wild ride. I want to know more about your story.
Kim Baker: So I grew up pretty poor, but I didn’t know it. In my early years, my family was on the path of being middle-class. Then, the recession of the eighties hit and my dad worked for Texas Instruments and he lost his job somewhere around the time I was in second or third grade.
And then my dad was actually never full-time employed, ever again. And it’s not something I fully understand and he’s actually passed away. So, you know, it’s not something I can really ask him about, but, you know, I think that I think it was a personal issue for him. I combined it with a massive structural issue.
But my mom, even though early years, was a stay-at-home mom and that had always been her dream. And that’s what she thought her life would look like. And then it just so happened as he got laid off, she managed to get a job as a secretary. And, they decided he was on unemployment for that first summer, so he was going to stay home with me and my sister. And then my mom as a secretary was our only income with sporadic income from my dad for, well over the next 10 years. We stayed in the same home. Before all of that happened, my parents had been able to get a mortgage.
My mom has a college degree. She went to college to find a husband. They used to call it the MRS degree. She was very disappointed to graduate with a degree rather than a husband. And, so then my mom kept us afloat. But we never had insurance.
SoI knew we didn’t go to the doctor regularly. We only went for an emergency. The house was never full of food. You know, sometimes utilities were out, but my mom would play it off as oh, silly me, I forgot. I’ll take care of it. It’s just the world I lived in and I didn’t fully understand the depth of the situation that we were in. But all of that meant that my family had no money for college. That was just not a thing. But at the same time, there was a lot of pressure to go to college. Because college was going to be my way out. My mom tried marriage. My mom thought marriage would be her way out. That didn’t work. And so the next thing was college. And I went to a pretty good school, for junior high and high school.
So everybody around me went to college. I was in honors classes. You go to college. And my mom had a small amount of student debt from her college years. but I think her payments were somewhere around $70 a month.
And I remember when she paid them off because we did a rare thing and we went out to dinner with that next month’s payment. So it was a big event for us. But you know, $70 a month, even in the eighties was a manageable amount. And so my mom was just like, you’ll take out loans. Well, it’s not really a big deal, you know, they’re low interest, you know, it’s fine. And so we start getting ready for my senior year.
I started looking at schools and, it just sort of was a mix of things that, with the scholarships that I got and, considering the cost of living and everything else, I actually went to a private school. I went to Texas Christian University, which is in Fort Worth. TCU. But it was cheaper for me to go there than to go to the University of Texas, which was the other main place I had been admitted and was planning to go to, because the cost of living in Texas, in Austin, is so high. And I didn’t get as much in terms of scholarships. And also this was 1994, so Texas was starting to defund education.
So the cost of college is going up and the other thing about TCU that I didn’t know that I now know very well, is that a private school, they tend to give you really generous, financial aid packages that first year to get you in the door and then that financial aid decreases over time, every year. This still happens everywhere. It’s happened at every private school that I have ever been a part of. But I didn’t know that then. So I thought I actually thought I would go my first year and it would get cheaper. Cause I’d get more scholarships. I’d keep applying. I didn’t track things. So I can’t tell you for sure exactly what happened. But I do know, I remember getting that next year’s financial package and being like huh? But the other thing that happened at the same time in my senior year of high school is that my parents divorced and my family kind of disintegrated. My mom got a new job and moved to a new town. The new job comes with better pay, which is excellent. And she actually has a real turn in life circumstances around new job.
She got a job working for the federal government and an administrative assistant kind of position. So benefits and all kinds of stuff. But you know, there was no saving for years and years, so it’s not that money could go towards college. Then you fill out your FAFSA and you get your Capitalize Student Aid Report and it says your family contribution is X. And it’s based on my mom’s new income. But, you know, she is paying off a decade of debt from all the stuff that had happened before. So, yeah.
I basically took out loans for anything I didn’t get a scholarship for. I was an RA through college that my housing was free and my food was free. And I always had a job, you know, to help cover some basic expenses. but I just did it all on loans. And I probably graduated college with somewhere around $20,000 in loans. Fairly small amounts, for four years at a private school. But, it was a real pivot point, of escalating me to more debt because I was afraid to be unemployed. I was afraid for my family history. Seeing what happened to my dad, I was very, very scared of being unemployed. I’d never really looked for a real adult job before.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: And I was a sociology major. So, they didn’t really help me think about what kind of jobs I might apply for. I was just well, I could just go to more school. I mean, if you think you need a bachelor’s, a master’s is even better. And so I applied to graduate school and I got in and I got a scholarship. I got a good financial package the first year and it was a private school.
So I got into Vanderbilt. I got a degree called a Masters of Theological Studies. That saved me from having to look for a job and being worried about my loan thing too, and how I was going to make enough money to cover them. I could just tuck them away and forget about them and then go to this new school and yeah, I’m going to get more debt, but you know, I’ll get a better job. There is recent talk, Anne Helen Petersen has done a nice series of articles on this topic, and a couple of other people, predatory master’s degrees. And I didn’t know then that’s what I was getting into. Which is a master’s degree that, it’s usually simultaneous to a more prestigious academic or professional degree.
So I was in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt. Divinity school is where they train ministers, but it’s a college within a university and a seminary is a standalone school. It’s not under the university umbrella. So it was in a divinity school which is for people who want to be ministers. They take that program. And then they’ve created a thing called an MTS as a Master’s of Theological Studies. And it’s all the same stuff, but without you know, all the work in a church to actually become a minister.So that was the practical work. But that also means now I know it has absolutely no application. It doesn’t lead to any kind of job.
Nikki Nolan: Wow.
Kim Baker: Vanderbilt, I don’t even know what it was then, but somewhere probably around $45,000 a year. Which is an extraordinary amount of money. but at the time, everybody’s like loans are no big deal. College debt is good debt, interest rates are low, your payments will be low, it’s okay. So not a single person suggested I pause and think about this. Everybody that I talked to said this is amazing. Keep going. I got there and very quickly knew it’s not the right place.
I also, I’m not a quitter. I didn’t stop. And again, I’m afraid to just drop out because then my loan starts being due, and I just didn’t have a job plan. And so it really, it was very intense therapy for being raised as a fundamentalist because Vanderbilt is a super progressive school, which I didn’t really know. I was just going for prestige.
So I applied to fancy schools. But, yeah, it definitely was a 180 from every kind of religious and specifically Christian, the training I had ever had. And it really radically changed my belief system and kind of my way in the world. And I appreciate it a lot, but I probably could have gotten a lot of that with a really good therapist who would’ve actually been cheaper.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: So then my specialization, there was, it’s called HACTOR and it’s “Historical and Critical Theories of Religion”. And I pretty quickly know I want to be a professor. And I want to do it in sociology. I definitely don’t want to do it in religion. I’m done with this. The New School for Social Research in New York City is how critical theory came to the US. The major critical theorists from Europe, came over, in the thirties, they were escaping the Nazis, and set up the school in New York City.
And it was originally just this graduate program. It’s now part of the university, but at the time it was a graduate program. And so I was okay. That’s where I’m going to go. I actually moved to New York City without ever having been, I didn’t know anything about it. But I go to New York City. I work full time during the day. I do my master’s degree at night. It’s exhausting. so I’m able to pay more in my expenses. I can’t pay my tuition, but I can pay all my other expenses. I had a savings account for the first time.
Nikki Nolan: Wow.
Kim Baker: And made pretty good money. Embarrassingly, initially selling test prep for Kaplan. And then I realized I can’t, I can’t sustain a PhD program. And also higher ed, finding a professor position, there’s sort of some rules about you’re probably not going to be able to teach at a school that is higher rank than where you graduated. And the New School, while it was an amazing program, its overall graduate school ranking was fairly low. And so that really limited the kind of jobs I would go for. So it was well, let me see if I can find another program. So I got into a few and I went to the University of Texas where I was fully funded the whole time. I had maintained my residency in Texas because I had only gone out of state for school.
And so I am still a Texas resident. And so all my funding was able to cover all my tuition. Plus I would have various kinds of fellowships or research positions or teaching positions that then paid my living expenses. and so I say that I mean, when you total it up and look at my tax returns from that time, I was making about $15,000 a year. But if you have a small apartment and, you know, eat out of boxes and cans, so you can make that work, at least then. That was 2002. So I only, at the end there, I took out loans just a couple of times once to cover a summer when I wasn’t funded. And once right at the end where I was, if I don’t stop doing all this work, I’m never going to finish this dissertation and I have to finish. So that’s how I got to over $150,000 in debt. Faculty, I think at the schools I had been at, TCU and Vanderbilt, even the New School, faculty were paid very well. So I thought I would go into my first job and it would be a windfall and I’d pay off that debt and live a nice, professorially life. The other thing I didn’t understand about professors is the kind of job you have makes a really big difference in your pay. So if you’re in, on the research trajectory and working at especially the more elite, research, heavy universities, often state schools and stuff, or elite private schools, the pay there can be quite good. And so my best friend, she went out the year before me and she got a job, her first job, her offer is I think $70,000 a year.
Nikki Nolan: Wow.
Kim Baker: And, you know, and then I had a partner, so my partner would also have an income. So I was, we’re in the money! This is so exciting, right? This is coming. And I had a teaching focus. I wanted to be a teacher. I’d always wanted to be a teacher. So I go on the market and my job offers are $50,000 to $55,000. Good. Definitely, more than my parents ever made. Difficult to consider, $150,000 in debt. Mortgage, car.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: And so it was really, it was a big shock. My first job was at Ithaca College in upstate New York. And my spouse was able to actually get a job at the same school. But his income was also, you know, not high. So, you know, together we were it just kind of made it by and the thing is with academia. So first you have to move across the country for your job.
It’s really rare that you get a good job that posts to where either, where you grew up or where you did your grad work. And so generally you’re moving across the country. unless you’re in a very elite school and the schools aren’t going to give you enough money to do that. So I think my move budget was somewhere around $1,500 to move from Texas to upstate New York.
So I don’t have money. Where does that go? That goes on a credit card. And then, and then you are expected to present at conferences, those conferences they’re often expensive. They’re in big cities. So early on, I thought I had to go to the big national sociological conference that ASA, the American Sociological Association.
Your dues are, I don’t know, $250. Your registration is $250. And then you still have hotel and travel and food and you know, whatever else is involved and.my school would give me $1,500 a year. But I was going to probably two conferences a year. There’s no money to cover all of this and yet it’s a normal expectation of my job. So when I was working in New York City and had a job for the first time, that’s about the time my sister went to college and, my sister, I don’t really know exactly what all happened but my sister ended up taking out private loans.
Nikki Nolan: Oh God. Yeah.
Kim Baker: I think the loan market had changed by then. And you know, my mom just wasn’t super sophisticated about handling it and you know, you’re just financial game aid that gives you the paperwork and asks you to sign it. And my mom didn’t get approved as a co-signer. Because of her own personal debt and finance issues. And so she just called me and she was hey, you know, you have a job, do you mind signing this? And I was sure. I want my sister to go to college, look at the life I’m living. And so I co-signed her loan. Around 2009 is when my loans first come due and I’m consolidating all my loans from different lenders, they’re federal, but they’re all over the place.
So in 2009, we learned about PSLF and I asked around about how this works and what I need to do. I talked to my loan servicer. I talked to people I know in financial aid and everybody’s like, I don’t know, in 10 years it’ll be forgiven. Like, there wasn’t regular paperwork yet. They didn’t really have a clear annual process set up yet. I remember reading online and then also someone told me that you need to enroll in an income-based repayment program or the equivalent.
Nikki Nolan: Oh, interesting. The equivalent. What does that even mean?
Kim Baker: For me, there was a graduated-payment program where the initial payments were much lower. My payments on that would have been around $350 a month. And on the income base, it was $500 a month. And so there is a gap. But then on graduated, it goes up. So over time I would end up paying more than I would have paid on the income-based. So I joined the graduated repayment program instead. People told me yeah, that’s gonna work. That’s fine. And then in 2010, I’m looking at my credit report and I have these loans that I don’t recognize. And it turns out that my dear sister just isn’t paying her student loans. And because I was the co-signer on two of them, they’re on my credit report and I didn’t know that’s how it works.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: And she just, for various reasons, she just wasn’t going to pay them and wasn’t going to pay them regularly and on time. And so I just took over. I can’t, you know, can’t have this happen. So from 2010 to 2014, I paid off two of my sister’s loans. So money I can put towards my own. Cause I also had that Texas loan. For like $10,000. I could have paid that off early or something. but so no, I was paying off my sister’s loans. And then at least at Ithaca College. We got regular raises.
Nikki Nolan: That’s good.
Kim Baker: But then I moved to Iowa. So the trade-off in Iowa is that the cost of living is much lower. I mentioned before that Iowa has a state pension program that is solid. And I saw that as my first time ever to have the potential of a real retirement plan. Because honestly, no matter how much I put in the 401k, average earning individuals can’t put enough aside to pay for retirement in a 401k, or for education. That’s a 403B. So I was like, wow, a pension. And it’s a good pension. If I worked for 25 years, which is really close to when I hit 65. And I get my max pension, it’s really generous. The other side is I took a pay cut to come here. At Ithaca College I started at $55,000 and I had worked up into the sixties and then I came here and I started at $55,000.
So I dropped that down and then we basically don’t get raises. I might get a percent, a single percent. My annual income doesn’t really go up more than a thousand dollars except for when I get a promotion. So when I went from assistant to associate professor, I got a chunk there. And then I’ll get a chunk when I go up for full. The good news is my spouse has ended up in a job that’s much better. So now without our debt, things are, things are starting to look different. and also, so the pandemic put loans on pause. So I wasn’t making payments. And then, and so all that money I could just put toward our credit card debt.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah,
Kim Baker: We can’t travel, so I don’t have to pay for these conferences I have to go to. So it’s sort of starting to get to a point for the first time, like ever in my whole entire life that I’m like I could do this. It’s starting to be a new world.
Nikki Nolan: Is there any advice that you would give to your younger self knowing what you know now?
Kim Baker: I would say to myself, one, community college and state schools are a great place to get an education and they are less expensive and that’s a good thing. I’m a big fan of public education, and I want to see it much better funded. I would like to see it free, or very near free. But even in the circumstances I was in, I didn’t have to choose the University of Texas. There were a lot of other smaller, or less expensive state schools to choose from. So I would have encouraged myself to have an appreciation for public education. And then also, to be bolder. I was so afraid. I was so afraid to look for a job. I was so afraid to leave education, which was a space where I had been successful and that was not terribly challenging for me. And I was afraid to do things that were new and hard and different. And now I’m in a job that is kind of like after you spent, let’s see, 14 years getting degrees, it’s really hard to just be like, yeah I’m not going to do this anymore.
Now without the debt, I’m starting to get the room to kind of imagine a different future. To see what that could be like. And I have no idea. But you know, even early on, I was so afraid.
I was so afraid of becoming my parents. I ended up financially better off than my parents. I have insurance. I have a retirement account. I can weather emergencies to a degree, and that will start to improve over the next few years.
I probably had $40,000 in credit card debt. So being afraid and trying to make safe decisions, didn’t get me out of anything. So I would say I could’ve been bolder. Even if it’s just been working a couple of years and then going to grad school. I wish I had tried.
Nikki Nolan: Well, we’ll check back in with you in a year just to see what’s happened. So we’ve come to the end. Is there anything you want to promote?
Kim Baker: I think the main thing I want to say is that, whatever kind of debt you might be dealing with, find groups you can be a part of. I’m a part of Strike Debt. Which is a union, who currently is focused on student loans, that they have their sights much higher, in addressing other kinds of debt, medical debt and so forth.
So that’s one that works for me, but there are a number of different organizations that have active local chapters that are doing work around student loans. So looking at your community, look for groups who are doing the work. Look online, you can find them also through social media and stuff. But find groups to be a part of, because this is not a problem we’re going to solve on our own.
Nikki Nolan: Yeah.
Kim Baker: Occasionally I hear people say I’m just not going to pay my debt anymore. You know, I’m not going to pay my loans anymore. And I’m just like, oh, that’s going to get you personally into a complicated situation.
But if you work with a group and the group is striking, the group is organizing, the group is going after those legislators and things like that, it’s meaningfully different and can have different consequences. So look for ways to resist. Look for ways to make a change, but do it with a group.
Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here. It was wonderful having this conversation.
Kim Baker: Thank you. so much for having me and letting me share a lot.
Nikki Nolan: Matter of Life and Debt is produced by me, Nikki Nolan. Special, thanks to Efe Akmen for creating the music and mastering the audio with additional support. And thanks to Emma Klauber who writes the information and transcripts about each episode. This podcast would not be possible without them. Visit our website for more information. Matteroflifeanddebt.com where you can listen, read transcripts, get additional context for the subjects you just heard about. Subscribe absolutely for free. That website again, matteroflifeanddebt.com. Thanks again for listening.
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