The break room at a dental practice in east Nashville is not where most people expect to have a revelatory conversation about federal loan repayment. But when I sat down with Brittany Holloway on a Tuesday afternoon in late February, she pulled out her phone, opened a saved TikTok, and said: “This one told me to invest first. That one said pay off the credit card. This other guy said my loans don’t even matter until I have three months of savings. I don’t know who to listen to.”
Brittany is 25 years old, the first person in her family to finish any college, and she makes $17 an hour as a dental assistant — a job she genuinely loves. She has $8,000 remaining in federal student loans from a two-year community college program and $3,000 on a credit card she opened at 19 when she needed to cover a car repair. She is not in crisis. But she is stuck, and she has been stuck for a while.
A City That Keeps Getting More Expensive
Nashville’s rent has climbed steadily over the past several years. Brittany pays $1,350 a month for a one-bedroom apartment she shares occasionally with her younger sister when she visits. That number alone represents roughly 49 percent of Brittany’s take-home pay after taxes — a figure that financial professionals generally consider a red flag, though Brittany told me she considers it just “the reality of living here now.”
At $17 an hour working 40-hour weeks, Brittany earns approximately $35,360 annually before taxes. After federal and state withholding, her actual take-home lands around $2,750 a month. Once rent, utilities, groceries, and her car payment are accounted for, she said she is left with “maybe $200 or $300 that I’m trying to decide what to do with.”
She grew up in a household where money was managed paycheck to paycheck and nobody discussed retirement accounts, credit scores, or loan servicers. “My mom worked really hard,” Brittany told me. “But we didn’t really talk about money like that. It wasn’t something you planned. You just handled it when it came.”
What the TikTok Algorithm Does Not Tell You
Brittany watches financial content online almost every day. She named three or four creators by handle without hesitating. The problem, as she described it, is not a lack of information — it is that the information contradicts itself depending on who she follows that week.
What none of the creators she had been watching appeared to cover was federal student loan repayment programs — specifically Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) options that are available through the U.S. Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office. Brittany told me she had heard of income-based repayment vaguely, but assumed it was something “for people with like $60,000 in loans, not me.”
That assumption, as she would come to find out, was not accurate.
What Income-Driven Repayment Actually Means for Her Numbers
Income-Driven Repayment plans set a borrower’s monthly payment as a percentage of their discretionary income — not as a fixed amount based on what was borrowed. Under the Income-Based Repayment plan (IBR), most new borrowers pay 10 percent of their discretionary income. Discretionary income, for federal loan purposes, is calculated as the difference between a borrower’s adjusted gross income and 150 percent of the federal poverty guideline for their household size.
For a single-person household in 2025, 150 percent of the federal poverty guideline is approximately $22,590. Brittany’s gross income of $35,360 minus $22,590 leaves approximately $12,770 in discretionary income. Ten percent of that is roughly $1,277 per year — or about $106 per month.
Brittany had been making sporadic payments of around $180 a month on her student loans — an amount she chose somewhat arbitrarily based on what she thought she could afford. She had not enrolled in any formal repayment plan. As she explained to me: “I just set up autopay for what felt manageable and tried not to think about it too much.”
The Process of Actually Applying
When I met with Brittany, she had recently spent about two hours on the Federal Student Aid website for the first time, walking through the Loan Simulator tool that estimates monthly payments under different plans. She described the experience as equal parts relieving and frustrating.
The relief was real, but it came wrapped in something more complicated. Brittany told me she felt a flicker of frustration that this option had existed throughout the years she had been quietly stressing about payments. “I wish someone had just told me this existed when I finished school,” she said. “That would have been nice.”
What Changed — and What Didn’t
By the time I followed up with Brittany in mid-March 2026, her IDR enrollment had processed. Her new required monthly payment on her student loans had been set at $98 — down from the $180 she had been paying voluntarily. That freed up roughly $82 a month, which she said she planned to redirect toward her $3,000 credit card balance, which carries an 22.9 percent interest rate.
She is not out of the woods. Her rent has not dropped. Her credit card interest is still accumulating. The structural pressures of a $17-an-hour salary in one of the country’s fastest-growing cities have not disappeared. But something smaller and perhaps more durable shifted: she now has a clearer picture of what she actually owes and on what terms.
What struck me most about Brittany’s story was not the dollar amount involved — $8,000 is, by the scale of the student debt crisis, relatively modest. According to Federal Student Aid’s data center, the average federal loan balance per borrower in the United States sits well above $37,000. Brittany’s situation is arguably easier than most. And yet the confusion she experienced, the paralysis in the face of conflicting information, is not unusual at all.
She is not an outlier. She is a fairly typical young borrower who aged out of the education system without anyone ever walking her through what came next. That gap — between borrowing and understanding what you borrowed — is where a lot of people lose years.
When I left that break room in east Nashville, Brittany was scrolling through the studentaid.gov site again, this time looking up what would happen to any remaining loan balance after 20 years on IBR. She was asking the right questions now. Whether the answers will change her financial trajectory meaningfully remains to be seen. But she was no longer just watching someone else explain it on her phone.
Related: First in Her Family to Finish College, Now $11K in Debt at 25 — A Nashville Dental Assistant’s Financial Tug-of-War
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