This is Planet Money from NPR.

Celeste Camilla is 25 years old and a stage manager at a non-profit theater company.

She works with teenagers to put on productions like Ragtime and Shrek.

Oh, I love it so much.

It's definitely something I wanted to do.

I love teaching and I love theater, so it was a perfect marriage of those two things.

But it doesn't pay the rent in Oakland, California where she lives.

I still have to have a supplementary income job.

I nanny on the side and sometimes I work retail on the side.

Both of her parents are also artists, so she didn't grow up with a lot of money.

And when she went off to college, she had to take out some loans.

So I graduated in the end of 2017 and I owed $25,000 in student debt, so not the worst,

but also not nothing.

Do you know what your interest rate is?

Oh, it's not terrible.

I have not checked back in on that thing since 2020.

That is because back in March 2020, the pandemic shut down the economy.

Everyone was losing their jobs.

So as one of many emergency measures, the government froze student loan repayments for most borrowers.

You didn't have to pay the loans.

There was no interest piling up, which for Celeste, it was kind of magical.

I couldn't afford to pay the student loan and I didn't pay very much per month either.

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