Most people assume that if you’re working full-time and earning a decent income, you’ve already figured out what the government owes you. Samantha Reeves is proof of exactly how wrong that assumption can be — and how expensive it is to believe it.
I met Samantha, 31, on a Thursday morning at a coffee shop near Denver Health, where she works as a registered nurse. She had just come off a 12-hour overnight shift and was still in scrubs. She ordered black coffee, sat down, and said, without much preamble: “I don’t really know what I’m doing with the money side of things. I just know I never have enough of it.”
The Math That Doesn’t Add Up for Solo Parents
On paper, Samantha looks like someone who should be fine. She earns roughly $72,000 a year as a full-time RN, with overtime pushing that closer to $81,000 in 2025. But Denver’s cost of living doesn’t grade on a curve. Her rent for a two-bedroom apartment runs $1,850 a month. Daycare for her five-year-old daughter, Maya, costs $1,400 a month — nearly matching rent.
Her student loan balance sits at $38,000, left over from nursing school. Her ex-partner, Maya’s father, stopped contributing financially two years ago and has been effectively unreachable since. “I filed for child support,” Samantha told me, “but you can’t collect from someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
Add groceries, utilities, car insurance, and loan minimums, and Samantha’s overhead leaves almost nothing. She picks up overtime shifts when she can — sometimes three extra shifts a month — but she described a ceiling she keeps bumping into. “At a certain point, I’m so tired that I make mistakes at work,” she said. “And I’m a nurse. I can’t afford mistakes.”
Three Years of Leaving Money on the Table
For three consecutive tax years — 2022, 2023, and 2024 — Samantha filed her federal return using a free self-guided online tool. She answered the questions it asked, uploaded her W-2, and accepted whatever refund came back. The amounts were modest: a few hundred dollars each year. She assumed that was simply what she was owed.
It wasn’t. When I spoke with Samantha in February 2026, she had just completed her 2025 taxes for the first time with a paid professional preparer — a CPA referred to her by a coworker. The difference was stark.
According to the IRS, the Child Tax Credit for tax year 2025 provides up to $2,000 per qualifying child under age 17, with up to $1,700 of that potentially refundable as the Additional Child Tax Credit. Samantha had claimed a partial version of this in prior years but had not structured her filing to maximize the refundable portion.
She had also never claimed the Child and Dependent Care Credit, which according to the IRS Topic 602, allows working parents to claim a percentage of qualifying childcare expenses — up to $3,000 for one child — directly against their tax liability. With $16,800 in annual daycare costs, Samantha had been sitting on a significant unclaimed credit for years.
What the CPA Found That the Software Missed
Samantha’s CPA identified three separate credits she had under-claimed or missed entirely. The process took about two hours, and Samantha described it as equal parts relieving and infuriating.
“I kept thinking, why didn’t the software ask me this? Why didn’t anyone tell me?” she said. “And then I remembered — nobody told me anything. I was just supposed to know.”
The EITC, as the IRS notes, phases out at higher income levels — for a single filer with one child in 2025, the cutoff sits around $46,560, meaning Samantha’s income made her ineligible. But the combination of the maximized Child Tax Credit, the Care Credit, and the student loan interest deduction still produced a dramatically different outcome than previous years.
Her 2025 refund came to $2,847. Her prior three returns had averaged roughly $380.
The Refund Arrived — and So Did the Complicated Feelings
When Samantha’s refund hit her account in late February 2026, she didn’t celebrate. She paid two months of Maya’s daycare in advance, put $500 toward her loan balance, and set the rest aside for a car repair she’d been delaying since October.
“It felt good and it felt terrible at the same time,” she told me, wrapping her hands around her coffee cup. “Good because I could breathe for a second. Terrible because I kept doing the math on what I’d missed the three years before.”
She also told me she looked into filing amended returns for prior years — a process the IRS allows up to three years back — but ultimately decided against it after weighing the cost of additional CPA time against the likely recovery. That’s a decision she carries with some regret. “I probably left $2,000 to $3,000 on the table over those three years,” she estimated. “That’s Maya’s summer camp. That’s a chunk of a loan payment. It’s not nothing.”
What Samantha Wants Other Solo Parents to Hear
As I packed up to leave, I asked Samantha what she’d say to another single parent — another nurse, another essential worker grinding through double shifts — who was handling their own taxes and assuming the software had caught everything.
She didn’t hesitate. “Ask someone. Ask a real person. Not because you’re dumb — because the system is complicated on purpose, and the only people who figure it out are the people who can afford to pay someone to explain it.” She paused. “I was too proud to pay for help for three years. That pride cost me.”
Samantha’s story isn’t a tale of dramatic rescue. Her loans are still there. Daycare still costs $1,400 a month. Denver is still expensive. But she walked out of tax season 2026 with $2,847 she wouldn’t have had otherwise — and, maybe more importantly, with a clearer picture of what she’s entitled to. That clarity, she told me, is its own kind of relief.
I drove home thinking about how many Samanthas there are: competent, exhausted people who assume the system will catch what they’re owed. Most of the time, it won’t. The credits exist. The eligibility is real. The gap, more often than not, is simply information — and information, unlike daycare, doesn’t have to cost $1,400 a month.
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