What would it take for you to ask for help — really ask, not just Google it at midnight and close the tab? That question stayed with me for weeks after a chance encounter at a Chevron station off Division Street in Spokane, Washington, on a cold Tuesday morning in early February 2026.
I was filling my tank, half-listening to nothing, when the woman behind me at the pump started talking quietly but urgently into her phone. I caught fragments: “I can’t float another co-pay,” “the payment posted and I don’t know where it came from,” “I just need someone to tell me there’s something I’m missing.” When she hung up, she looked at me — not embarrassed exactly, just tired of pretending. I handed her my card. Two days later, she called.
That woman was Theresa Parker, 46, a bank teller at a regional credit union in Spokane. Divorced, rebuilding, and carrying a financial burden most people couldn’t see from the outside. When I sat down with her at a diner on Sprague Avenue the following week, coffee going cold between us, she laid it all out.
The Debt Nobody Warned Her About
Theresa spent five years saving to go back to school. She enrolled in a Master of Public Administration program at Eastern Washington University in 2015, finishing in 2018 with a degree she was proud of and approximately $54,000 in federal student loan debt. The plan was to move into local government work. The salary didn’t materialize. She stayed in banking.
“I kept thinking the degree would open a door,” Theresa told me. “It just didn’t open the right ones in time.” By early 2026, her loan balance — swelled by interest during periods of deferment and a complicated transfer between servicers — sat at just over $61,000. Her monthly income as a bank teller was roughly $2,980 after taxes.
She had enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan through Federal Student Aid and was making reduced payments based on her discretionary income. For most of 2024 and into 2025, she was on the SAVE plan — the Biden-era repayment program that dramatically lowered monthly obligations for borrowers at her income level. Her payment had dropped to $47 per month.
Then the legal challenges to the SAVE plan froze the program. Her account entered an administrative forbearance limbo. “I didn’t know if I owed $47 or $400,” she said. “Nobody could give me a straight answer. I called three times in one week.”
The Cosigned Loan Nobody Talks About
The student debt alone would have been manageable — barely, but manageable. What pushed Theresa to the edge was a different debt entirely, one she hadn’t taken out for herself.
In 2021, her younger brother Marcus needed a personal loan to cover a business equipment purchase. He had a thin credit file. Theresa, with her longer credit history and stable employment, agreed to cosign a $14,500 personal loan through an online lender. Marcus made payments for about fourteen months. Then he didn’t.
“He lost his contract work during a slow period and just… stopped,” Theresa told me, without bitterness, which somehow made it worse to hear. “He didn’t tell me. I found out when the lender called my number.”
By the time Theresa discovered the default in late 2022, the balance had ballooned to approximately $13,200 with late fees and penalty interest. As the cosigner, she was equally liable. The lender moved to collect from her. Her credit score dropped over 90 points within two reporting cycles, according to what she told me she saw on her credit monitoring app.
She negotiated a settlement with the lender in mid-2023, paying a lump sum of $7,800 — money she had saved carefully over two years — to resolve the account for less than the full balance. The settled account still showed on her credit report. The savings were gone.
When There Is No Safety Net at Work
The financial stress would have been difficult under any circumstances. Without employer-sponsored health insurance, it became genuinely precarious. Theresa’s credit union position was a part-time-to-full-time conversion role — technically full-time by hours, but structured in a way that placed her outside the benefits tier for her first eighteen months. By the time she qualified for review, she told me, the premium share the employer offered was $318 per month for the cheapest plan with a $6,500 deductible.
“I did the math,” she said flatly. “Three hundred eighteen dollars a month, and I’d still owe six thousand five hundred before insurance covered a single thing. I opted out. Which I know sounds crazy, but the math was the math.”
For approximately fourteen months between late 2022 and early 2024, Theresa Parker had no health coverage at all. She skipped a follow-up appointment for a thyroid nodule she’d been monitoring. She paid $127 out of pocket for a three-month supply of a generic medication she needed. She did not go to the dentist.
Finding Washington Apple Health — and What It Actually Covered
The turning point came indirectly, through a coworker who mentioned offhandedly that she’d enrolled in something called Washington Apple Health — the state’s Medicaid program — after her own income dropped during a reduced-hours period.
Theresa had assumed she wouldn’t qualify. “I have a graduate degree. I have a full-time job,” she told me. “I thought Medicaid was for people in a completely different situation than me.” She was wrong, and it’s a misconception that costs a significant number of working adults access to coverage they’re entitled to.
Washington State expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and eligibility for single adults in 2025 extended to those earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level — approximately $20,783 per year for a single-person household. Theresa’s gross annual income as a bank teller was roughly $35,800, which placed her above that threshold.
She did not qualify for Apple Health. But a navigator at the Washington State Health Care Authority walked her through the ACA Marketplace options and applied her income toward a premium tax credit subsidy. She enrolled in a silver-tier plan for $89 per month with a $1,750 deductible — a plan she could actually use.
“I cried on the phone,” she told me. “Which is embarrassing to admit. But I had gone so long just hoping nothing would happen to me.”
Where Things Stand — and What She Still Carries
When I spoke with Theresa again in late March 2026, she had been enrolled in her Marketplace plan for just over two months. The thyroid follow-up had finally happened — the nodule was unchanged, no intervention needed. She had started seeing a primary care physician for the first time in three years.
The student loan situation remained unresolved in practical terms. She was in forbearance, her servicer had changed, and she was waiting for clarity on what repayment would look like once the SAVE litigation settled. Her credit score, once above 720, had recovered partially to around 671 — enough to avoid the worst lending tiers, but still marked by the settled debt from Marcus’s loan.
She was, as she put it to me, “stable but not safe.” One unexpected car repair or medical bill at the wrong moment could still tip things. She knew that. She talked about it the way someone talks about weather — not with panic, but with a watchfulness that never quite leaves.
What she wanted me to understand — and what I think is worth sitting with — is that her situation was not the product of recklessness. She earned a degree. She showed up to work. She helped someone she loved. And still, the math barely worked. “There are a lot of people at my teller window every day,” she told me as we wrapped up, “who are in exactly the same spot and have no idea there’s anything out there for them. That’s the part that gets me.”
I drove back to my hotel thinking about that line. About how many people are standing at their own version of a gas station pump, holding a phone, hoping someone will hand them a card. Theresa Parker was fortunate that someone did. That shouldn’t be luck.
Benefit Reporter does not provide financial, legal, or medical advice. If you are navigating student loan repayment options, visit studentaid.gov for current program information. For health coverage questions, the Washington State Health Care Authority offers free navigator assistance.
Related: She’s 63, Uninsured, and Two Years Away From Medicare — This Is What That Actually Costs
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