For Melissa and Sean Machoff, the path to paying off $127,000 of debt in the Bay Area led to Sean’s mom’s house. Moving in with her, and back to Sean’s childhood home, wasn’t the easiest choice for the newlyweds, but it was an attractive option. They were grappling with a high cost of living and a mountain of debt, which was mostly student loans, plus some credit card debt, car notes and a loan they took out for their wedding.
When they tallied up their debt and saw the six-figure total for the first time, Melissa Machoff, now 30, was floored. “If my jaw could physically drop to the floor, it would have,” she told MarketWatch. While she realized the amount of debt might seem “normal” to some people, because of how normalized debt has become in U.S. society, it did not feel normal to her. “This is not how I want to live… just giving these people half of my paycheck all the time,” she recalled. Melissa worked at a data storage company, where she had steadily grown her salary over a decade there. Sean, 36, was a project manager with a side hustle in graphic design. On their off hours, they ran …