Have you ever avoided opening your bank app because you already knew the number would make your stomach drop? I asked Marcus Dillard that question when we first sat down at a coffee shop near his school in southwest Atlanta, and he laughed — a short, tired laugh that had a lot packed inside it.
“I do it all the time,” he admitted. “I know it’s bad. I literally teach my students about patterns and data every single day, and then I go home and refuse to look at my own numbers.”
Marcus is 34, a high school math teacher with a master’s degree in education, $62,000 in student loans, two young children, and a wife who cut her hours after their second baby arrived. He came to me not because he wanted to be a cautionary tale, but because he had recently spent two hours on the phone with his mother, helping her understand why her Social Security check looked different in January 2025. That conversation, he told me, cracked something open.
The Phone Call That Started Everything
In late December 2024, Marcus’s mother, Patricia — 67 and retired after decades as a school cafeteria worker — called him confused. Her January 2025 Social Security deposit looked different from what she expected, and she didn’t know if it was an error or something she should act on.
Marcus told me he spent the better part of an evening walking her through what had happened. The Social Security Administration had implemented a 2.5% Cost-of-Living Adjustment for 2025, which went into effect with January payments. For his mother, whose monthly benefit was approximately $1,880 at the time, that translated to a roughly $47 increase per month.
“She thought she was being overpaid and was worried about calling SSA to report it,” Marcus told me, shaking his head. “She’d never heard the term COLA. Nobody had ever explained to her that her check was supposed to go up every year based on inflation.”
He explained that Social Security’s COLA is calculated using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The third quarter average of the CPI-W from the prior year determines the adjustment. For 2025, that 2.5% figure was lower than the 3.2% adjustment recipients received in 2024, but still meaningful for someone living on a fixed income.
What Marcus Found When He Actually Looked
Helping his mother triggered something Marcus had been avoiding. That same night, after the phone call ended, he pulled up his own Social Security statement through the SSA’s my Social Security portal for the first time in years. What he saw sobered him.
“The projected benefit number at 67 — my full retirement age — was lower than I expected,” he said. “Because of the years I’ve been paying down loans instead of maxing out any kind of retirement savings, my earnings record has these gaps. It made me feel sick.”
Social Security retirement benefits are calculated based on your 35 highest-earning years. For someone like Marcus — who spent his late 20s in graduate school accumulating debt rather than building a salary history — those early low-earning years remain part of the calculation as zeros or near-zeros until higher-earning years replace them. The math, as Marcus knows better than most, is unforgiving.
The Household Numbers Behind the Anxiety
To understand why Marcus had been avoiding his own finances, you have to understand what the household budget actually looks like. When I asked him to walk me through it, he paused for a long moment before answering.
His teacher’s salary sits around $58,000 annually. His wife, Danielle, returned to part-time work after their second child but brings home roughly $1,100 to $1,400 a month depending on her hours. Their two children — ages 4 and 2 — are in daycare four days a week. That alone costs them $1,750 per month.
- Student loan minimum payment: approximately $620/month on the $62,000 balance
- Childcare: $1,750/month for two children
- Credit card minimums: roughly $380/month across three cards
- Mortgage: $1,210/month on a townhome they bought in 2021
“There is almost nothing left at the end of the month,” Marcus said. “Some months we make the minimums and that’s it. We’re not building anything. We’re just holding on.”
Learning the Payment Calendar for His Mother
One practical thing that came out of Marcus’s deep dive was helping his mother understand exactly when to expect her payments each month. Patricia had been checking her bank account on the first of every month — and occasionally panicking when nothing appeared.
Marcus explained to her that Social Security retirement and disability payments are distributed on a Wednesday-based schedule tied to the recipient’s birth date. Since Patricia was born on the 14th of her birth month, her payments fall on the third Wednesday of each month.
“She had no idea,” Marcus told me. “She thought it was random. I made her a little card with the dates and taped it to her refrigerator. I felt like I was doing homework with one of my students.”
There was warmth in that story, but also something heavier underneath it. Marcus spent an evening educating his mother about the system she’d paid into for 40 years — a system whose basic mechanics no one had ever walked her through.
The Reflection He Didn’t Expect
By the time our conversation wound down, Marcus had shifted from the practical details of COLAs and payment dates to something more personal. He told me that looking at his mother’s Social Security statement alongside his own had produced a kind of grief he hadn’t anticipated.
“My mom spent 40 years making lunches for other people’s kids,” he said, his voice quieter now. “She gets $1,927 a month. That’s her whole retirement. That’s everything. And I used to think — naively — that my master’s degree was going to put me in a completely different situation. But I’m not sure it has.”
He isn’t wrong to feel the tension. The promise of education as an economic escalator is complicated when the cost of that education becomes its own financial anchor. Marcus’s $62,000 in graduate loans — borrowed to earn a degree that increased his earning potential by roughly $8,000 a year — has so far cost him more in interest and minimum payments than it has returned in salary difference. The math, again, does not flatter the outcome.
I left Marcus’s coffee shop that afternoon thinking about the gap between what financial systems promise and what they deliver to people who follow the expected path. His mother’s $47 COLA increase is real and meaningful. His own Social Security statement, 33 years before he can collect it, tells a story that is still being written — but not yet in his favor.
What stayed with me was not the numbers, but the moment Marcus described making a refrigerator card for his mother. In a household where money was never discussed when he was growing up, he became the person who finally explained how the system worked — even as he was still figuring out his own place in it.
Related: My Social Security COLA Raise Arrived — Then Medicare Took Most of It Back
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