Jodi and Paul Sprague raised their daughters with a guiding principle: understand the value of a dollar. By elementary school, Evelyn and Olivia were learning about mortgages, car insurance, and basic accounting in the carpool lane.
Early one June morning, before Evelyn, 17, and Olivia, 19, left for their summer jobs, Jodi sat them down with news that threw the Spragues’ carefully managed budget into question. The student-loan payments the family had budgeted for since 2015 were surging from $404 to $1,014 monthly, starting in September.
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She and Olivia began to cry. Olivia was about to start her sophomore year at Georgia Southern University, and while her parents helped her pay for housing, that likely wouldn’t be possible in the upcoming semester. Her first thought when she learned of Jodi’s payment increase: how would she afford her rent?
The 150% increase comes from President Donald Trump’s student-loan repayment overhaul, which took effect on July 1. It eliminated the Biden-era SAVE repayment plan, which gave Jodi and millions of other borrowers affordable monthly payments.
The administration said its changes are intended to curb excessive borrowing, simplify a complex repayment system, and compel colleges to lower their tuition. Over the past year, more than a thousand borrowers have told Business Insider that they’re taking on extra work, postponing retirement, and worrying they’ll default because of higher monthly bills.
The payment is in Jodi’s name, but it will reshape decisions across the household. As Olivia prepares to borrow more for college and Evelyn weighs an expensive career path, Jodi and Paul have to decide how much more work, debt, and sacrifice the family can absorb.
“When the kids were little, and there was a dollar in our checking account until payday, we made it,” said Jodi, 54. Her student loans are no different.
“It’s going to hurt,” she said, “but I’m going to pay them.”
Jodi’s parents saw college as the key to wealth and pushed their daughters to attend. At 18, she borrowed a minimal amount to pursue a two-year degree at a small Bible college. Looking back, Jodi’s shocked it was that easy to take on debt.
After seven years as a stay-at-home mom left her depressed and unfulfilled, Jodi decided to go back to school. Teaching would offer the challenge she needed and the career she wanted. Paul, a city employee, worried about managing the cost of a degree while raising a family, but he had faith in Jodi. “She’s always been very driven. Very smart.”
Jodi now has a $144,000 student-loan balance, from a history degree at Kennesaw State University and a master’s in teaching from the University of West Georgia.
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“We took the maximum out,” Jodi, now a middle school teacher, said. “We were able to survive because of the student-loan money.”
Survival has shaped the Spragues. Two years ago, a tree split open the roof of their home. For a whole school year, the family of four lived in a small rental with their dog Bailey, while their home underwent repairs.
“It was absolutely devastating for our family to be literally displaced,” Jodi said. “But again, we learned so much from it. We learned that we don’t need that much.”
The first moment Evelyn and Olivia knew they weren’t rich was when everyone at kindergarten had American Girl Dolls, but they didn’t.
They asked for Christmas presents in July to give their parents more time to save up; one year, Olivia got a bottle of Chick-fil-A Polynesian sauce while her friends were getting iPads and cash. When Evelyn’s friends wanted to go out to dinner, she was often the one to say no — she had to wait for her next paycheck from Whataburger.
In 2011, when the daughters were toddlers, Jodi accumulated credit card debt she couldn’t repay, and the Spragues filed for bankruptcy. One day, she didn’t know how she’d afford groceries — until an $80 refund check from a dentist appointment arrived in the mail.
“I just broke down,” Jodi said. “That’s how tight it was.”
We’ve always had an open dialogue about money because my parents were the opposite.
Evelyn and Olivia were too young to understand what bankruptcy meant. Jodi and Paul made it their mission to do what their parents hadn’t.
“We’ve always had an open dialogue about money because my parents were the opposite,” Jodi said. “They didn’t teach us anything. Everything was secret, secret.”
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Olivia recalled an added pressure that came with those financial lessons.
“I remember being in the car line in the morning, and my mom was like, ‘You have to get good grades so you can go to school for free,'” Olivia said. “So it’s always been in the back of my mind that school is really expensive.”
In high school, Olivia got an 89% on a biology test and cried so much that she had to go home; she worried the B+ would ruin her chances at a scholarship. In 7th grade, Evelyn started a spreadsheet mapping out potential college courses and their costs.
“Unfortunately, it’s probably put a lot of pressure on them,” Paul said. “But that’s what it is.”
Olivia received Georgia’s HOPE scholarship, but it didn’t cover her full tuition. So Jodi took out $19,000 in parent PLUS loans for Olivia’s first year.
Now, with the family’s tighter budget, Olivia is taking out $6,000 this semester — the most she can borrow federally — to cover her rent and other expenses and prevent Jodi from borrowing further.
“I can’t really take the time to pick up another job because I’d be putting my schoolwork on the back burner,” said Olivia, who’s studying public relations. “So I’d rather just deal with it later, with my student loans.”
Evelyn is now applying to colleges, and while she dreams of playing in a band, she’s pursuing forensic pathology instead. However, the cost of a medical degree has her second-guessing that route.
Paul, 60, has looked into taking on a second job. He said retirement is “just not a reality right now.” If it came down to it, he said he would look at using his life insurance to help his daughters pay off any debt they accumulate.
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The family has also started making smaller sacrifices. They’ve cut back on their streaming subscriptions and canceled their September vacation to Florida. Paul is learning simple mechanical fixes for his car instead of taking it to the shop. Olivia decided not to rush a sorority because of the cost.
Jodi has about three years of payments left toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers, like teachers, after 10 years of qualifying payments. She’s concerned that the higher payments will push back that timeline if she falls behind. The stakes are also higher because the Education Department now requires PSLF payments on new income-driven repayment plans to be made exactly on the due date — there was previously a grace period — or they will not count toward PSLF progress.
Other student-loan borrowers are facing similar pressures. More will start transitioning off the SAVE plan in the coming months and face higher payments. Some borrowers said they’re concerned about defaulting and facing wage garnishment and the seizure of federal benefits, such as Social Security.
Paul and Jodi said that while they believed setting Evelyn and Olivia up for college was in their best interests, they would still support them if they decided not to go. Jodi teaches her seventh-grade students that college isn’t always worth the investment, and that they could be better off pursuing trade school.
Paul learned that lesson decades ago. He paid his own way through a stint at community college before he met Jodi, but he quickly realized that his career mapping for city government didn’t require a degree. So he dropped out — and avoided student debt of his own.
“It was the greatest decision I ever made,” Paul said.
