The April 15 tax filing deadline was six weeks out when I sat down with Samantha Reeves at a coffee shop near her apartment in Denver’s Sunnyside neighborhood. She’d just come off a twelve-hour overnight shift at the community hospital where she works as a registered nurse. She ordered a black coffee, set her phone face-down on the table, and told me she hadn’t filed her taxes yet — not because she was avoiding it, but because she genuinely wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.
“I figured I make a decent living, I probably just owe money,” she told me. “I didn’t think there was anything there for me.” She was wrong. And the gap between what she believed and what she was actually owed turned out to be a story worth telling.
A Budget That Does Not Add Up on Paper
Samantha Reeves is 31 years old and has been a registered nurse for five years. She earns what most people would consider a livable wage in most American cities. In Denver, it is a different calculation entirely. The city’s cost of living has climbed sharply in recent years, and her paycheck absorbs the impact before she can save much of it.
Her most punishing line item is childcare. She pays $1,400 a month — roughly $16,800 a year — to keep her five-year-old daughter, Maya, in a licensed daycare center near their apartment. That figure is not unusual for Denver. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, center-based childcare for one child now costs more than the average annual in-state college tuition in many states. Samantha’s daycare bill is nearly equal to her monthly rent.
On top of that, she carries $38,000 in federal student loans from nursing school. Her ex-partner left two years ago and has not contributed financially since. She picks up overtime shifts when she can, but she told me that exhaustion has started to compete with necessity. “There are weeks where I just can’t do another overnight,” she said. “I’m a better nurse when I sleep.”
The Credits She Did Not Know She Had
When Samantha told me she had been filing her own taxes using a basic online tool, I asked whether she had ever claimed the Child and Dependent Care Credit. She paused. “I think I skipped that section,” she said. “I didn’t understand what it was asking.”
That credit — formally the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit — allows working parents to claim a percentage of qualifying childcare expenses paid so they can work or look for work. For one qualifying child, the maximum eligible expense is $3,000. The percentage varies based on adjusted gross income, but for many middle-income earners, the IRS sets the rate at 20 percent, according to IRS Topic No. 602. At that rate, a parent paying $16,800 a year in daycare could still claim the maximum $600 credit — because the credit is calculated on the $3,000 cap, not the full amount paid.
Samantha had also under-examined her eligibility for the Child Tax Credit. For the 2025 tax year, the Child Tax Credit remains at $2,000 per qualifying child, with up to $1,700 refundable through the Additional Child Tax Credit, as outlined by the IRS Child Tax Credit page. Whether she could claim the full refundable portion depended on her earned income and whether her tax liability had already absorbed part of the non-refundable amount — details she had never walked through carefully.
What Changed — and What It Cost Her Not to Know Sooner
After our conversation, Samantha connected with a volunteer tax preparer through a local VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) site — a free IRS-sponsored program available to taxpayers who generally earn under $67,000. She came back to me three weeks later with her completed return.
The result was not transformational, but it was real. She received a $1,240 federal refund — a combination of the Child and Dependent Care Credit and the refundable portion of the Additional Child Tax Credit. She had expected to owe roughly $200 based on her rough math. The swing was about $1,440 in her favor.
What Samantha also learned — and what stung — was that she had likely been eligible for the same credits in prior years. In 2024 and 2023, she had filed her own returns and skipped the childcare sections. She estimates she may have left $1,200 to $1,400 unclaimed over those two years combined. The IRS generally allows taxpayers to file amended returns within three years of the original filing deadline, meaning she could potentially recapture some of that money by filing a Form 1040-X for prior tax years before the window closes.
The Bigger Picture: What Samantha’s Story Reflects
Samantha’s situation is not rare. Millions of working parents — particularly single earners in high-cost cities — file their own returns each year and miss credits they’re eligible for, either because the language is confusing or because they assume the credits don’t apply to someone at their income level. The Child and Dependent Care Credit phases in benefits starting at the lowest income brackets, but it does not phase out entirely until adjusted gross income exceeds $438,000 for married filers, meaning most working adults qualify for at least the base 20 percent rate.
As Samantha explained it, the issue wasn’t stubbornness — it was exhaustion. “I work twelve-hour shifts. I come home, I’m a mom. I don’t have four hours on a Sunday to read IRS instructions.” That dynamic — competent, capable people making costly errors of omission — is exactly what VITA sites and programs like IRS Free File are designed to address.
I also asked Samantha whether she had looked into the Earned Income Tax Credit. She thought she made too much to qualify. Depending on her exact adjusted gross income and filing status as a head of household, she may or may not be right — the EITC income thresholds for head-of-household filers with one qualifying child extend into the lower-to-mid income range for 2025, and the VITA preparer had confirmed she was just above the cutoff. That was a genuinely mixed outcome: she was close, but not eligible.
“I asked the preparer to double-check it twice,” she told me, laughing quietly. “I really wanted that one.”
Closing the Distance Between What She Earned and What She Kept
When I asked Samantha what she planned to do with the $1,240 refund, she didn’t hesitate. “Two months of Maya’s daycare,” she said. “That’s it. That’s the whole plan.” There was no exotic vacation, no splurge. The refund would buy her approximately 54 days of breathing room in a budget that rarely offers any.
She told me she had also flagged her calendar for next January — the earliest she can begin gathering documents for the 2025 tax year return. She intends to go back to the VITA site. She wants to file in February, as early as possible. “I spent two years thinking taxes were just another thing that took from me,” she said. “I didn’t know they could give something back.”
Reporting Samantha’s story, I kept coming back to one number: the three years the IRS gives taxpayers to amend a prior return and reclaim a refund they missed. That window does not stay open indefinitely. For taxpayers who filed their 2022 returns by the April 2023 deadline, the amendment window closes in April 2026 — which is now only weeks away. For someone in Samantha’s position, that’s not an abstraction. It’s a closing door.
She is still exhausted. The student loans are still there. Daycare is still $1,400 a month. But for the first time in two tax seasons, Samantha Reeves filed a return that acknowledged the full weight of what she carries — and gave her something back for it.
Related: She’s a Nurse Making $68K a Year in Denver — and She Still Qualified for SNAP
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