What would you sacrifice to give your family a better life — and what happens when the sacrifice itself becomes the crisis? That question followed me out of a block party in Richmond’s Northside neighborhood last October, long after the conversation that started it ended.
I’d been talking with a mutual neighbor when she mentioned the woman two houses down — a barber, a mother of four, quietly managing a debt load that would buckle most households. A few days later, Tanya Kirby agreed to sit down with me at her shop on Brookland Park Boulevard, clippers humming in the next room, and tell me exactly how she got there.
The Degree She Thought Would Change Everything
Tanya Kirby has been cutting hair since she was nineteen. By the time she turned thirty, she owned her own shop, had a loyal client base, and was pulling in roughly $4,100 a month in net income after expenses. On paper, it looked like progress. In practice, she knew the ceiling was low.
“I wanted to understand the business side of things,” she told me, leaning back in the barber’s chair across from her own workstation. “I thought if I got the MBA, I could maybe open a second location, hire staff properly, stop flying blind with the finances.”
In the fall of 2018, Tanya enrolled in an evening MBA program at a private university in the Richmond metro area. She graduated in May 2021 — mid-pandemic, mid-chaos — with a diploma she was proud of and $68,000 in federal student loan debt she hadn’t fully reckoned with.
Under the standard 10-year federal repayment plan, her servicer calculated a monthly payment of $720. Combined with $1,400 a month in childcare costs for three of her four children — her blended family includes two kids from her husband Marcus’s previous relationship and two of her own — that single bill represented a financial trap she hadn’t seen coming.
“I remember the first statement,” she said. “I just sat there. Seven hundred and twenty dollars. I make money, but I’m self-employed. Some months are great. Some months I’m praying the booth rentals come in on time.”
A Blended Family Budget With No Room for Error
Understanding Tanya’s situation requires understanding the arithmetic. She walked me through her monthly budget on a notepad — the kind of informal ledger that tells you more about a person’s financial life than any spreadsheet.
Rent for the family’s four-bedroom house in Northside runs $1,650 a month. Groceries for six people average around $900. Utilities, Marcus’s car payment, and school fees for the older kids chip away at whatever remains. By the time Tanya accounted for everything in early 2022, she was regularly finishing the month with less than $200 in her checking account.
“I wasn’t saving anything,” she told me, her voice flat with the memory of it. “Not a dollar. And I kept thinking — I did everything right. I went back to school. I built a business. What did I miss?”
What she missed, as she would later learn, was a set of federal repayment options she hadn’t been clearly informed about when she took out her loans. She’d received the standard promissory note disclosures, she said, but nothing that made income-driven repayment feel like a real, accessible option for someone in her situation.
The Application That Changed the Math
In March 2022, Tanya’s accountant — who also does taxes for several small business owners in her neighborhood — flagged the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan during a routine meeting. It was the first time, Tanya told me, that anyone had explained IDR in plain language rather than federal boilerplate.
She submitted her IBR application through StudentAid.gov in early April 2022. The process required documentation of her adjusted gross income from her 2021 tax return and her household size — six people, which made a significant difference in how her discretionary income was calculated.
The approval came in May 2022. Her new monthly payment: $194. The relief, Tanya told me, was almost physical. “I cried in my car in the parking lot,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of that. Five hundred and twenty-six dollars a month back in my life — that’s groceries. That’s a car repair. That’s breathing.”
The Part Nobody Talks About: What IBR Doesn’t Fix
Here is where Tanya’s story becomes more complicated — and more honest — than most financial turnaround narratives.
IBR reduced her payment, but it did not reduce her balance. Because her income-based payment is lower than the interest accruing on $68,000 in loans, her balance has actually grown since 2022. As of this past March, she owes approximately $71,400. Under IBR, any remaining balance is forgiven after 25 years of qualifying payments — but that puts Tanya at age 62 before she sees relief, assuming nothing changes.
She also explored the SAVE plan — the Saving on a Valuable Education repayment option introduced in 2023 — which offered more favorable interest subsidy terms. But as Tanya discovered when she tried to switch in early 2024, the SAVE plan became entangled in federal court litigation that effectively froze enrollment and processing for many borrowers. According to Federal Student Aid’s court action updates, legal challenges to SAVE have continued into 2026, leaving many borrowers in limbo.
Tanya stayed on IBR rather than risk losing her current payment structure during the uncertainty. It was a cautious call, and she knows it may have cost her some interest subsidy benefits. “I couldn’t afford to experiment,” she told me.
What Tanya Would Tell Her Younger Self
By the time our conversation reached this point, the shop had quieted down. A younger barber who rents a booth from Tanya was sweeping up, and the late afternoon light was coming through the front window in long slants. Tanya looked tired in the way that people who carry a lot look tired — not defeated, just worn at the edges.
She doesn’t regret the MBA. That part surprised me. The knowledge she gained helped her renegotiate a lease on the shop space, restructure her booth rental agreements, and avoid what she now recognizes would have been a disastrous expansion attempt in 2022. “The degree taught me things I use every week,” she said. “The debt taught me things I wish I’d known before I signed.”
What she wishes she’d known falls into a specific list she rattled off without hesitation:
- That income-driven repayment plans exist and are available to self-employed borrowers
- That family size — not just individual income — factors into IDR payment calculations
- That interest continues to accrue on an IDR plan, meaning the balance can grow even while making payments
- That servicers are not always proactive about presenting IDR as an option at disbursement
- That the repayment landscape changes through legislation and litigation, often with little warning to borrowers
Childcare costs remain the second weight on the scale. With three children still requiring paid care at various levels, the family spends approximately $1,200 a month — down from $1,400 as the oldest of Marcus’s children aged out of full-time care last year. Tanya looked into the Child Care and Development Fund subsidy program through Virginia’s Department of Social Services but found the family’s combined income placed them just above the eligibility threshold for their household size.
“We make too much to qualify and not enough to be comfortable,” she said, and laughed in a way that wasn’t entirely humor. “That’s the story of a lot of people I know.”
She’s not wrong. That band of income — too high for most means-tested programs, too low to absorb large fixed expenses — is where many working families in mid-sized American cities find themselves, and it’s a gap that rarely makes headlines.
When I left Tanya’s shop that afternoon, she was already with her next client, clippers back in hand, talking about something completely unrelated to loans or payments or government programs. She’d moved on, the way people do when they have no choice but to keep going. The debt is still there. The balance is still climbing. But so, I noticed, was the business — and so was she.
Related: She Owed $47,000 in Student Loans and Faced a 30% Rent Hike. Then a Tax Clinic Changed Her Math.
Related: A Baltimore Bank Teller Was Drowning in Two Loans at 50 — She Thought Relief Programs Were for Someone Else
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