Most people assume that carrying student loan debt into your sixties is a problem reserved for people who made poor decisions. Terrence Mendez didn’t make poor decisions. He made a graduate degree, built a 30-year union career, and still found himself, at 61, staring at a spreadsheet that didn’t add up.
I was introduced to Terrence through Pastor Dale Watkins at Riverside Community Church in Des Moines — a man who’d watched several of his congregation members silently drowning in retirement anxiety while presenting fine on Sunday mornings. When Watkins mentioned Terrence by name, he said, “He’s not the kind of man who asks for help. But he needs someone to hear him.” I drove out to meet Terrence at his kitchen table on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2026.
A Career Built on Overtime That Quietly Disappeared
Terrence Mendez has been a union electrician — Local 347 IBEW — since 1994. For most of that time, the work was steady and the overtime was reliable. He told me he’d averaged somewhere between $108,000 and $116,000 a year in total compensation over the past decade, with his base union wage sitting around $88,000 and overtime pushing the rest.
Then, in late 2024, a major commercial construction contract that had kept his crew busy for three years wrapped up. The follow-on work didn’t materialize the way the union hall had projected. His overtime dropped to near zero almost overnight.
“I knew the project was ending,” he told me, stirring his coffee without drinking it. “I just thought there’d be something else lined up. There usually is. This time there wasn’t.”
The loss wasn’t catastrophic on paper — he still earns a solid union wage with full benefits. But the family had structured their finances around that higher number. The mortgage refinance in 2021. His son Marcus’s college savings plan. The accelerated payments on a $47,000 student loan balance left over from a master’s degree in construction management Terrence completed in 2017 — a degree he took on to move into project supervision, a move that never fully materialized.
The Student Loan Nobody Talks About
The narrative around student debt rarely includes 61-year-old tradesmen. But according to Federal Student Aid data, borrowers aged 50 and older collectively hold over $260 billion in federal student loan debt — a number that’s grown steadily over the past decade. Terrence is part of that cohort, and the emotional weight of it came through clearly when we talked.
He took out $54,000 in federal loans to complete his master’s at Iowa State. By 2026, he’d paid it down to roughly $47,000 — slower progress than he’d hoped because the degree never translated into the salary bump he’d anticipated. The interest alone costs him about $290 a month.
With overtime gone, Terrence dropped his loan payment from $600 a month back to the minimum. The payoff date, which had been projected for late 2027, now stretches past 2030 — potentially into his retirement years.
The Social Security Question He Can’t Stop Asking
This is where Terrence’s situation gets genuinely complicated. He’s four years from his full retirement age of 67 under current Social Security Administration rules. His estimated benefit at 67 is approximately $2,940 per month. If he claims at 62 — the earliest eligible age — that number drops to roughly $2,060 per month, a permanent 30% reduction for the rest of his life.
He knows the math. He’s looked it up more times than he can count. The break-even point between claiming early versus waiting for full retirement age falls somewhere around age 78 to 79, depending on cost-of-living adjustments. If he lives into his mid-eighties — which is plausible given his health — waiting pays off significantly.
But Terrence isn’t asking a theoretical question. He’s asking a survival question. His son Marcus starts college in the fall of 2027. His wife Linda works part-time as a dental hygienist, bringing in roughly $34,000 a year. Their combined monthly obligations — mortgage, loan minimums, utilities, insurance — run about $4,800. Without overtime, the margin is thin.
“I can’t tell you I’m going to wait until 67,” he said. “I want to. Every calculator I run says I should. But if something happens — my back goes, the union slows down — I need to know there’s something there.”
The Union Pension Factor He Keeps Forgetting to Count
What Terrence tends to underweight — and he acknowledged this with a small, tired laugh — is his IBEW pension. After 32 years of contributions, his union pension is projected to pay approximately $1,850 per month beginning at age 65, indexed modestly for inflation. He has a 401(k) with a balance of about $183,000, which he’s contributed to through the union’s supplemental savings plan.
Together, those assets tell a different story than the one Terrence carries around in his head. But anxiety isn’t arithmetic, and when I asked him how he actually feels when he thinks about retirement, he paused for a long time before answering.
That sense of groundlessness — of plans dissolving before they solidify — runs through every part of Terrence’s financial story. He’s not reckless. He’s not uninformed. He’s someone who built a reasonable plan on reasonable assumptions, and the assumptions shifted.
Where Things Stand Now
When I left Terrence’s house that afternoon, Marcus was pulling into the driveway from baseball practice, backpack hanging off one shoulder. Terrence watched him through the kitchen window with the particular expression of a parent who has decided, quietly and without fanfare, that their kid isn’t going to feel the weight of the thing they’re carrying.
He told me before I left that he’d recently signed up for a free benefits counseling session through his union, something he’d been putting off for two years. He’d also started tracking his monthly expenses in a spreadsheet — not optimizing, just finally looking. “I needed to see what the real number was,” he said. “Not the number I was afraid of. The actual number.”
The actual number, it turned out, was more manageable than the one living in his head. Not comfortable. Not solved. But real and workable in a way that fear had prevented him from seeing.
He hasn’t decided when to claim Social Security. He may wait until 67. He may not make it that long in the trade — his lower back has been giving him trouble since a fall on a commercial job in 2022, and physical work at 61 is different than it was at 41. He knows both of these things simultaneously and sits with the contradiction.
What stays with me about Terrence isn’t the debt or the lost overtime or the timing spreadsheets. It’s the way he described showing up to work every morning knowing that the financial picture was unresolved — not panicking, not catastrophizing, just carrying it. Thirty years of showing up will do that to a person. It teaches you how to carry things.
Pastor Watkins was right. He didn’t need advice. He needed someone to hear him. I did, and I’m glad.
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