- Amaiya Camillo is a 26-year-old nurse who graduated with $110,000 debt from student loans, an auto loan and cost of living expenses.
- Camillo began posting her debt journey on TikTok to raise awareness of her situation and connect with others who may be in a similar financial position.
- In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Camillo opens up about her debt journey and looks back at some of the things she could’ve done to prevent her debt from getting so bad.
Amaiya Camillo always knew she wanted to work in medicine. It was a lifelong calling that she was determined to pursue while in college. Now at 26, she has achieved her dreams and works as a nurse, but with it has come $110,000 worth of debt.
Camillo is not alone in her struggles. In September 2024, the Pew Research Center reported that one in four adults in the U.S. under 40 years old has student loan debt, and that number is only set to increase as the cost of living and higher education rise.
“Going into the medical field as a nurse, I knew I was never going to become a millionaire,” Camillo tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. “We don’t do this job for the money. It can provide financial stability and good benefits, depending on the hospital. But it wasn’t a top priority.”
Growing up, Camillo remembers being able to see “two different sides of finances” after her parents divorced when she was 13 years old. “My mom always has had good credit, but my dad had no debt and was really good with finances,” she says. “I learned to buy things for instant gratification early on and developed that bad habit, which absolutely contributed to the financial situation I’m in today.”
Both of her parents would tell her how to manage her finances, but since she was so young, she didn’t fully understand “the why” behind those financial decisions. “[Both of my parents] were good [financial] role models, but because I was so young, I just chose to learn from my own mistakes rather than what I saw [from them].”
Camillo’s debt first accumulated when she started college in 2016 and continued to grow as she earned three degrees. Her current total debt includes her auto loan, two credit cards, five federal student loans with an interest rate between four and six percent and five private student loans with the highest interest rate at 16 percent.
“I was basically trying to afford a lifestyle that was well above my pay grade,” she reflects. “I was living outside of my means because [of the lifestyle I’m] used to.” While she had some credit card debt from a two-year gap she took while in school, she notes that her dad was able to help her pay that off, but she’s since accumulated more debt — and still has a long way to go.
She didn’t fully realize just how bad her debt had become until after she graduated from nursing school in December 2024 and added everything up. “When you are in nursing school, you just do what you have to do,” she says. “You have to take out the loans and be able to survive. You have to get this degree done so that you can afford yourself a better lifestyle later on. So I just did that and turned a blind eye.”
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Camillo began making TikToks in July 2024, where she opened up about her life as a nursing student and her daily life experiences. But she didn’t go viral until January 2025, when she posted a TikTok adding up all of her debt for the first time.
“Since totaling up my debt, I don’t think I’ve actually gotten one good breath of fresh oxygen in the last 24 hours,” she said in the video. “I feel like there’s an elephant sitting on my chest… all of this debt was racked up because of decisions I made between the ages of 18 and 26.”
“I don’t regret any of the experiences I had between the ages of 18 and 26 or any of the things that I’ve done,” she continued. “But I do wish I managed my finances way better.”
Online, she totals her debt at $95,000, which includes just her student loans and various living expenses over the years, but clarified with PEOPLE that she left out her car loan in the total debt amount shared in her videos. When she decided to open up about her experience, Camillo says she realized that debt is a common issue that many face, but aren’t openly sharing it online.
“A lot of these private loan companies prey on young adults at the time because they know that if we’re reaching out to private student loan companies, it’s because we desperately need it,” she explains. “[I didn’t post about my debt] for sympathy or for anyone to help me with my debt. I wanted to raise awareness of the fact that the decisions you make early on in your life 100% affect you in the future.”
As she’s shared her journey online, most of the feedback she’s received has been positive and allowed her to feel less alone in her own journey. “It was nice to be able to reach out to certain people who were providing advice on how to refinance loans,” she says. “I was able to get a lot of information that I necessarily wouldn’t have learned if I stayed quiet and tried to figure it out on my own.”
Now with 400,000 followers on TikTok, Camillo has also been able to tap into the creator fund as an additional means to pay her debt off, along with her regular salary from her nursing job. She never thought it would be possible to have such a wide reach until she started posting more about her debt and experience as a nurse, but now she’s been able to “build a community” online.
Even with the extra income, Camillo doesn’t have plans to step away from nursing in pursuit of a full-time creator role. For her, the additional income is a bonus as she pays her debt down with her primary income from nursing.
“I am a big proponent of always having a backup plan and keeping your full-time job first, then having the luxury of social media to add to your income,” she explains. “That way, you never get into a situation where there might be a ban and people are freaking out because they [rely solely on] social media.”
In her debt journey, Camillo is working to refinance her private student loans and bring down her credit card usage. She’s managed to pay off one credit card and is working towards paying off the other in the meantime. With the plan she’s created with the help of her family and boyfriend — who works as a financial advisor — Camillo estimates she will likely pay all of her debt off by 2032.
She adds that she doesn’t regret any of the choices she made about her educational pursuits, but wishes she had built better spending habits and worked more to chip away at her debt while she was in school. She realizes now that if she had made smaller changes at the beginning, her debt would’ve probably been a lot less once she graduated.
“Debt sucks, but if you can do what you need to reduce that amount, you will pull out at the end of the day,” she says. “I recommend that people sit down and understand how they need to live to minimize the amount of debt they’re pulling out for their education before they pull out these student loans. Also, pay back your student loans the minute they disperse. Send what you can afford to that student loan every single month so that you don’t walk out with more than you borrowed.”
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