The federal student loan interest deduction — capped at $2,500 per year under current IRS rules — was set to be a modest relief for millions of borrowers when the 2025 tax filing window opened in January 2026. For Marcus Dillard, a 34-year-old high school math teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, that deadline arrived with a particular weight. It wasn’t just a tax form. It was the first time in years he’d been forced to sit down and look at every number at once.
When I met Marcus at a coffee shop in the East Atlanta Village in early March 2026, he arrived five minutes late, apologized twice, and ordered black coffee. He had the quiet, slightly worn energy of someone who genuinely loves his job but is running on fumes at home. He teaches algebra and pre-calculus to tenth graders. He is, by his own admission, someone who understands compounding interest perfectly well in theory.
“There’s something almost embarrassing about it,” he told me, turning his cup in his hands. “I literally teach kids how interest works. And then I go home and I don’t open the bank app because I don’t want to know.”
A Master’s Degree That Didn’t Pay Off the Way He Expected
Marcus grew up in a household in Decatur, Georgia where money was not a topic of conversation. His parents paid bills, kept the lights on, and didn’t discuss the details. He absorbed the same instinct: handle it quietly, look away from the hard parts. When he finished his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Georgia State, he figured a master’s in education would bump his salary and open administrative doors. It did neither, at least not quickly.
The master’s program cost him roughly $38,000 in tuition and fees at a regional university. By the time interest accrued during a three-year deferment while he built seniority in the Atlanta school system, the balance had climbed to $62,000. His current base salary is approximately $54,000 per year before taxes — a figure that reflects Atlanta Public Schools’ pay scale for a teacher with eight years of experience and a graduate degree, according to Atlanta Public Schools.
“I thought I’d be making sixty-five or seventy thousand by now,” Marcus said. “That was the plan. The degree was supposed to get me there faster.” Instead, he’s been at $54,000 for two years, with a scheduled step increase coming in fall 2026 that will add roughly $1,800 to his annual gross pay.
His wife, Deja, worked as a licensed practical nurse before their second child was born in the summer of 2024. She cut her hours from full-time to part-time — roughly 20 hours a week — to manage childcare costs that had become nearly unworkable. Their older child, now four, attends a prekindergarten program that runs $780 a month. The infant runs another $1,110 a month at a licensed daycare near their home in the Kirkwood neighborhood. Combined, that’s $1,890 a month in childcare before a single grocery is bought.
When the Credit Cards Became a Float, Not a Tool
Marcus was direct about what happened next. As Deja’s income dropped, the household shifted to leaning on two credit cards — one with a $7,200 balance and another with roughly $4,100 — to cover gaps between paychecks. For about 18 months, they paid minimums on both.
By his estimate, the two cards were costing approximately $310 a month in minimum payments, with most of that going toward interest at rates between 22% and 26% APR. He hadn’t calculated the total interest drag until tax season forced the conversation. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the average credit card APR in late 2025 exceeded 21% — meaning Marcus’s rates were above even that elevated average.
Tax Season as a Mirror
Marcus told me that he and Deja had always filed jointly and always used a tax preparer — a woman named Gloria who works out of a storefront in Decatur and has done their taxes for six years. This past January, Gloria walked them through their numbers and Marcus sat with the full picture for the first time.
The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit offered some relief. Under IRS rules for the 2025 tax year, families can claim up to $3,000 in qualifying expenses for one child or $6,000 for two or more children, with the credit covering between 20% and 35% of those costs depending on income, according to the IRS. At their income level, Marcus and Deja qualified for a credit of approximately $1,200 — meaningful, but not transformative against $22,680 in annual childcare costs.
“Gloria showed me the breakdown and I just sat there,” Marcus recalled. “I kept thinking — we should have done this math ourselves months ago. We had help available we didn’t even know we were leaving on the table.”
The $3,440 refund was not a windfall. It went directly toward the higher-interest credit card — a meaningful dent on the $4,100 balance, which Marcus says they’ve now paid down to approximately $900. The larger card, the $7,200 one, remains a problem he and Deja are still working through.
What Marcus Is Still Carrying — and What He Learned to Stop Ignoring
When I asked Marcus what the experience had changed for him, he was careful not to oversell it. He doesn’t have the debt solved. The student loans are still there. Deja is picking up occasional extra shifts but not returning to full-time until the baby is older. The math is still tight.
What changed, he said, was the habit of avoidance. He now checks their joint bank account balance twice a week. He and Deja have a standing Sunday evening conversation — fifteen minutes, no phones, just a look at what’s coming in and going out that week.
He’s also looking at Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the federal program that cancels remaining federal student loan balances after 120 qualifying payments for borrowers employed full-time by a government or nonprofit organization. As a public school teacher in Georgia, Marcus likely qualifies as an eligible employer, according to Federal Student Aid. He submitted his employer certification form in February 2026 — the first time he’d formally engaged with the PSLF process despite teaching in a public school for eight years.
He still has $62,000 in student debt. He’s still in a household that runs lean most months. “None of this is fixed,” he told me plainly as we wrapped up. “But I know what the problem is now. That’s different than pretending it’s not there.”
There was no dramatic resolution in Marcus Dillard’s story — no windfall, no program that made the debt disappear. What I found instead was something quieter: a man who spent years applying clear mathematical thinking to other people’s problems and finally, uncomfortably, turned that same clarity toward his own. Tax season, of all things, was the moment that made him look.
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