Woman With 4 Jobs Who Can’t Pay $250K Debt Asked Caleb Hammer for Help

Caleb Hammer spoke to Insider about one of his most extreme interviews ever.
A woman named Teryca explained she had a quarter of a million in student loan debts to pay off.
Hammer said her story haunts him and “continues to terrify me.”
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When financial YouTuber Caleb Hammer looked back on all the interviews he’s done so far, one person sticks out as “one that terrified and continues to terrify me.”
He told Insider that Teryca Brooks-Long was one of the first people he invited on his show “Financial Audit,” where he helps people deal with their debts.
With Brooks-Long, he worked out she had over $250,000 of debt just from student loans, with a host of other obligations on top of that.
“It’s gonna be a million dollars before she knows it,” Hammer told Insider, reliving the situation as he filmed the episode which went out in June 2022.
“She’s not making progress on it. She got into credit card debt and car debt as well. So I mean, that is just dire. That’s where it gets to the point where it feels like it’s impossible to get out of.”
In the interview, posted on June 15 last year, Brooks-Long told Hammer she had four jobs: a virtual assistant for a realtor, an enrollment advisor for an online university, working at an ad agency, and also modeling and acting gigs.
She said at least 50% of her week was spent working at these various roles, and she brought in around $3,500 per month in total.
Brooks-Long said she split her bills with her roommate who is her cousin, but sometimes had to pay more because her cousin didn’t currently have a job.
Hammer told her she couldn’t do this anymore because she was spending almost double what she was bringing in.
She had also paid 13 overdraft fees in one month.
But the biggest issue was the private student loans Brooks-Long took out for her undergrad degree at Baylor in family and consumer sciences.
She had initially taken out three loans worth $176,000 in total from Sallie Mae, but that ballooned to $250,000 with interest and fees. The smallest student loan was $37,000.
In total the student loans were costing $1,694 in monthly payments.
“This is going to absolutely balloon, isn’t it?” Hammer told Brooks-Long. “This is going to be half a million before you know it, then a million.”
Hammer told her she needed to make double, if not triple, what she was making now to have any hope of paying off this debt.
“If you don’t you’re not going to be able to do anything for the rest of your life,” he said.
He also recommended Brooks-Long sell her car, which she had taken out a $13,500 loan on. But she refused, even though it was costing her $300 per month, she had paid late fees, and it had sunk her credit rating from 720 to 549.
“You literally cannot afford this car,” Hammer said.
But Brooks-Long stood firm, saying the car was not the problem. “It’s this,” she said, gesturing to the student debt.
Brooks-Long said a family situation to do with contested inheritance meant she wasn’t able to access federal loans, leaving her with only expensive private options.
Hammer spoke to Insider about her situation in April 2023, and said he didn’t have an update on her situation since they spoke the previous year.
He told Insider he hoped Brooks-Long didn’t have a variable interest rate because repeated rate hikes over the past year would make the payments more expensive.
At the time of the video, the interest rate on the three loans was 11.75% on the two larger ones, and 9% on the smaller one.
“That really sticks with me,” he said of Brooks-Long’s story. “That was a scary one.”