Niachloe Bowman knew she didn’t want to be one of the millions of student loan borrowers who continue to make payments into their 30s and 40s.
During a freshman accounting class at Babson College, Bowman researched how long it would take to pay back the $19,000 she borrowed for tuition and how much interest she would pay if she followed a standard 10-year repayment plan.
“I projected what my loan debt would be, and at that point it was going to be $25,000,” the 28-year-old told CNBC Make It. Bowman vowed to get rid of the balance as soon as possible to avoid additional interest charges along the way.
Bowman’s concerns are a reality for many of the roughly 43 million Americans who carry student loan debt. About 3.5 million of these borrowers are over the age of 60 and owe a total of $125 billion, according to the National Consumer Law Center. Nearly one-third of borrowers age 62 and older have been repaying their loans for more than 25 years.
For Bowman, avoiding loans altogether wasn’t an option. Borrowing money to pay for her education “was the only way I could get out of poverty,” she says. “At the time, I had no choice but to take out student loans or stay at the bottom.”
Learn how Bowman strategically paid off her student loans early and why she doesn’t regret her choice.
“I… wanted to start a life for myself.”
Thanks to a strategic approach that focused on aggressive early payments to minimize additional interest payments, Bowman paid off all of her loans by October 2020, just 16 months after graduating from college in May 2019.
Toward the end of her senior year, Bowman used the money she earned from her part-time job to pay off an unsubsidized loan that was already accruing interest, rather than a subsidized loan. The federal government will pay subsidized borrowers interest during certain grace periods, including a six-month grace period during their time in school and after graduation.
Bowman then used the grace period as an opportunity to continue reducing the balance while avoiding accruing additional interest, she said. She graduated with about $18,000 in debt, but used her job bonus to pay off her unsubsidized loans immediately after leaving school.
Bowman started The $hmoney Coach while working in corporate finance and now teaches full-time through partnerships with brands and in schools in the Bronx.
Nia Chloe Bowman
In addition to paying off her debt while she was in school, Bowman calculated how much she would need to contribute each month to be debt-free about two years after graduation. From there, she calculated how much she would need to earn to be able to cover these payments on top of her living expenses after graduation.
“If I wanted to pay off my debt in two years and start my own life, I couldn’t accept a salary of less than $70,000,” she says. “I had to move into my own house after I graduated. The luxury of having a place to call my mom and dad was not part of my story.”
“If you have a goal, that’s where you’re going to put most of your money.”
As a senior, Bowman secured a graduate student position at American Express, where she previously interned, with a salary of $70,000. After I graduated, I also set up automatic payments on my loans.
Bowman continued making payments even when the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 and President Donald Trump declared payment and interest deferrals on all federal loans to provide relief to borrowers during the crisis.
Due to the pandemic, Bowman wasn’t looking to do extensive travel or other social activities that might have made it difficult to keep her debt a priority. Her friends also knew that paying off her debt was a top priority and that Bowman was likely not going on any nights out or expensive dinners.
“My friends knew not to ask me,” she says. “They knew I was going to say no, because they knew that if I had a goal, that’s where I would put most of my money.”
“I didn’t know any other way out of poverty.”
Although she wishes she had started investing sooner, Bowman says she has “no regrets” about relying on loans to pay for her education.
She grew up in a low-income, single-parent household between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens in New York. Her mother worked as a nurse at a nursing home until Bowman was a senior in high school. She became ill when Bowman was still in high school and died while he was in college.
“Financial aid and a part-time job supported me by the time I entered university. I was responsible for paying part of my university fees and sent money home,” she says. “I decided to study business because without understanding how money flows in America, there was no other way out of poverty.”
Bowman was fired from American Express in 2024 and now teaches finance full-time at a school in the Bronx, New York City. She also runs The $hmoney Coach, a business she started in 2020 that partners with schools and nonprofits to provide culturally relevant financial education.
After paying off the loan in October 2020, Bowman began investing further in both the market and herself, including starting treatment.
“I felt that in order to become a better person, I needed to change and process some things that I hadn’t had a chance to process before,” she says.
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