Federal student loan payments resume this month after a three-year pause. WBEZ is answering questions from Illinois borrowers and sharing their reflections on what the pandemic-era pause has meant to them, how they’re managing the payment restart and whether their debt was worth it.

On a recent morning in the living room of her Bolingbrook home, 16-month-old Teresa Menickelly-Palomo shows off her stuff: an animal puzzle missing a horse, a Pokemon snorlax, a shape sorter. She waddles over to her parents, who are beaming.

“Her demeanor just changes when she sees one of us,” says her dad, Andrew Palomo. “It just kind of melts my heart.”

Palomo and his husband adopted Teresa, who has deep dimples and brown curls, in early 2022. They attended her birth in a hospital in Florida, then took her home to Chicago’s southwest suburbs a week later.

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It was a surreal moment, Palomo said, “Coming here and being like, ‘Oh my God, we’re a family. This is it.’ ”

That moment was made possible, in part, he says, by the three-year pause on federal student loan payments. It freed up $650 of Palomo’s budget each month to help cover the high cost of adoption.

But it didn’t get rid of his student debt. And this month, Palomo and more than a million other Illinois residents are back on the hook for payments as the pandemic-era pause comes to an end.

“As of today if I paid it all off, I would have to pay $186,000, which is a house,” said Palomo, a 41-year-old social worker.

Though he’s been paying off his debt for nearly a decade, Palomo owes five times what’s owed by the average student borrower in Illinois. Residents in the state owe more than $61.6 billion in student debt, according to the nonprofit Education Data Initiative. That’s an average of nearly $38,000 per borrower.

“How does this figure into … what’s going on in my current life, like paying for daycare,” said Palomo, the anxiety rising in his voice. “Everything is costing more, so you’re constantly trying to juggle. It’s almost like I can’t get my head above water.”

While in college at Villanova University in Philadelphia’s suburbs, Palomo worked 30 to 40 hours a week but says he made only enough to pay for books and basic needs. He covered tuition and other costs the way more and more Americans do each year:

“Loans. It’s basically right, like 100% loans,” he said, shuffling through a stack of papers. “I actually brought this out right now … this never ending list of payments.”

His parents immigrated from Guatemala. They had their own bills to pay and couldn’t help with his tuition. The expectation that he go to college came from other places.

“Because I was in honors classes … my guidance counselors just assumed that’s the direction I wanted to go,” said Palomo, who grew up in New York and Pennsylvania. “Especially being first [generation]… this is how you improve, right? You just get an education and get a degree.”

His experience has been more complicated.

Palomo, like so many other students in his generation, was told student debt is “good debt.” He took out even more to go to graduate school. He wanted to be a social worker but couldn’t without a master’s degree.

He says he didn’t grasp the magnitude of what he owed until he reached his mid-20s.

“That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, man, I have to pay these loans … and I just don’t have enough,’ ” he said. “I was still working and experiencing housing instability because I was living in my car.”

He was helping pay his family’s bills while trying to cover his own, all on a social worker’s salary.

“I was like, ‘I have this college degree, and I can’t survive on my own two feet,’ ” he said.

It took him years to become financially stable. He now works for a national nonprofit to combat youth homelessness. He and his husband, a mathematician at Argonne National Laboratory, own their house.

But the weight of his debt has not gone away. With payments starting back up this month, he’s doing mental gymnastics to figure out where to cut back.

“I’m constantly worrying and constantly trying to figure out … how am I going to pay for all of it,” he said.

Palomo expects a third of his loans to be canceled through a federal relief program for non-profit workers, but he still has to make a year’s worth of payments to qualify.

Despite it all, Palomo is glad he went to college. He says it’s helped him provide for his daughter. He and his husband have already opened a college savings account for her.

But Palomo wants Teresa to know the decision to go is hers.

“We’ll see if she even goes to college,” he said, turning to the toddler. “You don’t have to.”

Lisa Philip covers higher education for WBEZ, in partnership with Open Campus. Follow her on Twitter @WBEZeducation and @LAPhilip.