The Woman Who Quit Her Job to Take Care of Her Dad

My family immigrated to California from India when I was in high school, and we didn’t have a lot of financial literacy. I worked fast-food jobs, basically anything I could get my hands on. We all pitched in to help pay the bills. For college, I had some financial aid and scholarships, but I had to take out a decent amount of student loans as well, and I used credit cards to cover my expenses. Luckily, I got a job at a tech company right out of college, making about $50,000 annually, and I was able to pay off my credit-card debt within a year.

Over time, I got promoted at work, moved into an apartment by myself, and started putting money away regularly. I got to the point where I had a good credit score and about $20,000 in savings. The only debt I had was my car loan, which was about $780 a month, and my student loans, which were $100 a month. Then my dad got really sick. My parents face a language barrier in the U.S., and they needed help at home. My workplace wasn’t very supportive of that, so I decided to quit. I was unhappy at that job and felt like I had enough savings to cover myself for a few months.

Things didn’t work out how I’d planned. For starters, my parents needed more financial help than I had anticipated. My dad got major heart surgery, and even though most of his medical expenses were covered by Medicare, we needed to buy a lot of equipment after he got out of the hospital — a special kind of bed to support his back and some other things for his recovery. It added up to more than $4,000, and I covered it all. I was still paying my rent, about $1,600 a month, and driving more than an hour to my parents’ apartment multiple times a week. I really didn’t want to lose my place because I pay way below market rate. So I was using my cash savings to cover that and putting everything else, including gas and groceries, on credit cards.

That same year, my brother got married in India, and I had a lot of expenses for that, too — airplane tickets and other travel costs. Luckily, my dad was well enough by then that the whole family could go. But pretty soon, I had spent my $20,000 of savings and was still out of a job even though I was applying for everything. I didn’t work for eight months. The anxiety of all that debt was debilitating. I remember looking at the interest rates on my credit cards — 19 percent, 20 percent, 22 percent — and just feeling sick.

When I came back from my brother’s wedding at the beginning of 2024, I was incredibly lucky to find a great new job doing product marketing for a tech company. My salary is just under $150,000 a year. I knew I needed to tackle my debt, so I made spreadsheets and wrote everything down. My credit-card debt was more than $30,000 in total, spread across ten cards. I also had about $20,000 left on my car loan. And my remaining student debt was a little under $10,000.

I made charts of my basic expenses and budgeted aggressively. I was already living cheaply, because I hadn’t been working, but I also did a lot of research. I started listening to Ramit Sethi’s podcast and reading books and following personal-finance people on social media. That helped me see the bigger picture and start thinking beyond getting out of debt. Like, what is it that I want to do in my life? How do I want to set myself up? I don’t want to be struggling day to-day. I made a plan for paying off all my debt in 14 months.

There’s a lot of noise on social media about debt payoff. It’s aggressive to the point of shaming people for having debt, and that wasn’t helpful to me. Every time I thought about money, I was like, I’m going to die poor. If I tried to talk about it, I would start crying uncontrollably. Most of my friends here in the Bay Area are engineers who make a lot more money than I do. Their lifestyles are very different. They’re not worrying about how to save $2,000. Compared to them, I felt like I was failing at life.

One thing that helped a lot was seeing a therapist, which I did even when I was unemployed. A lot of people might consider that a luxury I couldn’t afford, but it was one of the few things that kept me sane and helped me manage my anxiety.

Another common piece of advice is to get a second job — like, “Sure, you won’t sleep for a year, but you’ll pay off your debt, and that’s what’s most important.” But I knew if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to perform at my actual job, which was paying me really well. Figuring out which advice to take and which to shut out took a while. But eventually it freed up a lot of mental space so that I could focus on what was working.

I started by paying off the card with the highest interest and made minimum payments with everything else. Then as soon as I paid off one card, I switched to the next-highest-interest one and worked down the ladder. Halfway through the year, I got a bonus at work that I wasn’t expecting, about $5,500, and was able to clear an entire card with it. That enabled me to get ahead of my timeline.

It was hard, not going out to dinner or shopping for anything besides the bare essentials. I did buy myself a few things, like a sewing machine to mend my own clothes. But I felt really guilty about it. One thing that helped was keeping a tab on my money spreadsheet dedicated to things I want. Every time I want to buy something that’s outside my budget, I put a link to it in that document. I let it sit there, and I research and add links to reviews. I make it fun, with emoji and tags — like, is it a wardrobe thing, a kitchen thing, a décor thing? Sometimes this process is enough to distract me, and after a few months I don’t want to buy the thing anymore. But if a few months go by and I still want it, then I might figure out how to work it into the budget and what tradeoffs I’ll make.

At the end of last year, I turned 30 and was ready to be done with my debt. My employer offers a stock-purchase plan that vested in December, so I decided to liquidate that and use it to clear the last of what I owed: my car loan, which was about $6,000. Now I just have my student loans left, but my employer reimburses a portion of that, so I’m not in a rush to pay it off.

When I wiped out my debt, I thought I would celebrate, but I just sat on my couch and cried. It was such an immense weight to have been carrying. Now I’m rebuilding an emergency fund, so all the payments that had been going toward debt are instead going toward savings. I increased my 401(k) contributions as well. I still haven’t done anything extravagant. I get to travel for work a lot, so I had a lot of points, and I used them to take a small vacation that didn’t cost me anything. As of a few weeks ago, I have a three-month emergency fund, so I can think about doing fun things again. It still hasn’t really sunk in.

My dad has recovered, but it took a long time. He’s back to work as a driver. My mom works at a warehouse. They still don’t really have savings. Now that I’ve learned a lot more about personal finance, I’m teaching them more, and they’ve been receptive, which is great.They have never asked for my help. But I never want them to be in a position where they have to ask, either. I’ve been very open with them about my finances, so they’ve started opening up to me about theirs too.