Roughly 57% of Americans report feeling anxious about their personal finances, according to the American Psychological Association — but that number climbs sharply among adults under 35 who are navigating entry-level wages in high-cost cities. Brittany Holloway is one of them, and her situation is more common than most people admit out loud.
When I sat down with Brittany at a coffee shop off Charlotte Pike in Nashville on a Tuesday afternoon in late March 2026, she had just come off a full shift at the dental office where she works as a dental assistant. She was still in her scrubs. She ordered a plain coffee — “I’m trying to cut back,” she said with a small laugh — and within minutes, she was talking about money with the kind of candid exhaustion that only comes from carrying a problem you haven’t been able to solve.
Brittany is 25 years old. She earns $17 an hour. She is the first person in her family to complete any college coursework, having finished an associate’s degree at Nashville State Community College in 2023. And she has $11,000 in debt split between two accounts: $8,000 in federal student loans and a $3,000 balance on a credit card she opened at 19, mostly for textbooks and a used laptop.
A City That Keeps Getting More Expensive
Nashville’s cost of living has surged over the past five years. The city that once offered relative affordability compared to coastal metros has seen median rent climb steadily, driven by population growth and a construction pipeline that hasn’t kept pace with demand. For someone earning $17 an hour — roughly $2,720 per month before taxes — the math is tight in a way that doesn’t leave much room for financial strategy.
Brittany shares a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate in the Antioch neighborhood. Her share of rent is $750 a month. After taxes, her take-home pay is approximately $2,200 to $2,300 monthly, depending on her hours. Once she accounts for rent, utilities, groceries, transportation, and her minimum debt payments, she told me she typically has between $150 and $250 left over each month.
“I feel like I’m doing everything right on paper,” Brittany told me. “I’m not going out every weekend, I’m not buying designer stuff. But at the end of the month, there’s still almost nothing left, and I don’t know if I should put that $200 toward my credit card, or start saving it, or open a Roth IRA like the TikToks say.”
That last sentence captures the central tension of Brittany’s financial life. She is not reckless. She is not uninformed. She is, in fact, actively trying to educate herself — and that effort has paradoxically made things harder.
The TikTok Problem: Too Much Advice, Not Enough Context
Brittany told me she spends roughly 30 to 45 minutes each evening watching personal finance content on TikTok and YouTube. She follows several well-known creators. She has heard of the debt avalanche method, the debt snowball, the 50/30/20 budget rule, and the concept of “paying yourself first.” She knows what a Roth IRA is. She has looked up her federal student loan servicer’s website at least a dozen times.
The problem, as she described it to me, is that the advice is almost always contradictory — and almost never accounts for someone in her exact position.
She is not wrong that the advice conflicts. The personal finance content ecosystem is largely built around creators who are either selling courses, optimizing for engagement, or speaking to audiences with significantly more disposable income than Brittany has. The “invest early” crowd rarely specifies what to do when your monthly surplus is $200 and your credit card APR is 24.99%.
Brittany’s credit card — which she opened through her bank at 19 — carries an interest rate she described as “somewhere around 25 percent.” She has been making minimum payments of roughly $60 a month. At that rate, according to general amortization estimates, she would pay the $3,000 balance off in well over five years and pay hundreds of dollars in interest beyond the principal.
Growing Up Without a Financial Roadmap
To understand why Brittany finds herself at this crossroads, it helps to understand where she came from. She grew up in a household where money was managed paycheck to paycheck, and where conversations about credit scores, interest rates, or retirement accounts simply didn’t happen. Her parents, she said, were not irresponsible — they were just surviving.
“Nobody sat me down and explained what a credit card actually does,” she told me. “I got one at 19 because everyone said you need to build credit. I used it, I paid the minimum, and I thought that was fine. I didn’t understand what interest meant in real dollars until I was like 23.”
This is a gap that researchers have documented extensively. According to the TIAA Institute’s Personal Finance Index, adults from lower-income households consistently score lower on financial literacy assessments — not because of intelligence, but because of exposure. Financial concepts are often transmitted informally through family, and when that transmission doesn’t happen, young adults enter the workforce without the vocabulary to navigate even basic decisions.
Brittany finished her associate’s degree in dental assisting in 2023. She borrowed modestly — her $8,000 in federal loans is well below the national average for community college borrowers — but on her income, even a modest loan balance creates pressure. Her monthly student loan payment under a standard repayment plan is approximately $88.
The Social Media Comparison Trap
There is another layer to Brittany’s story that she brought up without prompting, and it was the moment in our conversation when her voice shifted from frustrated to something closer to defeated. She told me she follows several people on Instagram who are her age, also working in healthcare-adjacent fields, who appear to be investing, traveling, and building savings simultaneously.
“I know social media isn’t real,” she said. “I know that. But when I see someone my age posting about maxing out their Roth IRA, I genuinely don’t understand how that’s possible. Like, are they making way more than me? Do they have help from their parents? I can’t tell, and it makes me feel like I’m failing.”
This comparison dynamic is well-documented among younger adults. What social media rarely shows is the full picture: the parental support, the lower cost-of-living city, the partner’s income, or the inherited savings that make those milestones possible. Brittany’s situation — first-generation college graduate, modest income, no family financial safety net — is statistically far more common than the curated feeds suggest.
She is not behind by any objective measure. She has modest debt, a stable job with benefits, and the financial awareness to be asking these questions at 25. But the emotional experience of financial confusion in a city that feels increasingly out of reach is its own burden — separate from the numbers.
Where Things Stand Now — and What Brittany Is Trying
By the end of our conversation, Brittany had not arrived at a resolution. That is the honest truth of her story. She has not paid off her credit card. She has not opened a retirement account. She is still making minimum payments on both debts and watching her small monthly surplus sit in a checking account because she cannot decide what to do with it.
What she has done is make one concrete change. In February 2026, she called her federal student loan servicer and asked about income-driven repayment options. She was told she may qualify for the SAVE plan — the Saving on a Valuable Education repayment plan — which could reduce her monthly student loan payment based on her discretionary income. She had not yet submitted the application when we spoke, but she had downloaded the paperwork.
“That felt like the first time I actually did something instead of just watching videos about doing something,” she told me.
She is also considering asking her employer about any retirement matching benefits she may not have enrolled in. She has worked at the dental office for nearly two years and admitted she never looked closely at her benefits paperwork during onboarding. “I was just so relieved to have the job,” she said. “I signed everything and didn’t ask questions.”
When I left Brittany that afternoon, she was heading back to her car to drive home before her roommate got off work. She seemed lighter than when she arrived — not because anything had changed, but because, as she put it, “it helps to just say it out loud to someone who isn’t going to tell me I’m stupid for not knowing this stuff already.”
She is not stupid. She is 25, earning a modest wage in an expensive city, carrying debt that is smaller than most of her peers’, and trying to build a financial life without the scaffolding that many people take for granted. That is not a failure. It is just a hard starting point — and one that millions of Americans share without ever saying so publicly.
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