Most people assume that once a creditor gets a court judgment against you, they can take whatever they want from your paycheck. That assumption is wrong — and for people like Brittany Espinoza, believing it cost real money for nearly a year.
I first heard Brittany’s voice on a Tuesday afternoon in February 2026. She was a caller on Straight Talk with Omaha, a local radio program that runs a monthly segment on financial assistance programs. She wasn’t calling for sympathy. She was calling, as she put it on air, to “warn people not to bother” with relief programs because “none of it is designed for people like me.” The host moved on quickly. I didn’t.
It took me three days and a message through the station’s listener contact form to reach her. She agreed to talk, but made clear upfront she wasn’t interested in being told what to do. “I’ve been handling my own business since I was nineteen,” she said when we first spoke on the phone. “I don’t need a lecture.”
I wasn’t there to lecture. I was there to listen.
The Debt That Started With a Diagnosis
When I sat down with Brittany Espinoza at a Panera near her apartment in west Omaha on a cold Thursday in late February, she arrived ten minutes early, coffee already in hand. She is 53, compact, with the kind of posture that comes from years of hauling packages. She has driven routes for FedEx for eleven years.
In the spring of 2022, she started having severe abdominal pain during her route. She ignored it for two weeks — classic Brittany, she admitted with a short laugh — before an ER visit revealed gallstones requiring surgery. She had insurance through FedEx, but the out-of-pocket costs still landed hard.
“Between the deductible, the anesthesiologist who was out-of-network, and missing three weeks of work, I put about $8,200 on two credit cards,” she told me. “I figured I’d pay it down slowly. Then the interest started compounding and I just… couldn’t keep up.”
By mid-2023, one of the credit card accounts had been sold to a debt collection agency. By early 2024, that agency had filed suit in Douglas County. Brittany, who said she “didn’t even fully understand the paperwork,” didn’t respond in time. A default judgment was entered against her in March 2024 for approximately $6,400 — the original balance plus fees and interest.
The garnishment started in May 2024. Every two weeks, $340 disappeared from her FedEx paycheck before she ever saw it.
What She Didn’t Know About Federal Garnishment Limits
Here’s the part that matters: that $340 figure may have been illegal under federal law — or at minimum, at the outer edge of what’s permitted.
Under the Consumer Credit Protection Act, creditors collecting on most consumer debts — including credit card debt — cannot garnish more than 25% of a worker’s disposable earnings, or the amount by which disposable earnings exceed 30 times the federal minimum wage per week, whichever is less. At the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, 30 times that figure is $217.50 per week.
Brittany told me she earns roughly $22.40 per hour and typically works 40 hours a week, putting her gross weekly pay around $896. After taxes and benefits deductions, her disposable income lands around $680 per week. Twenty-five percent of that is $170 per week — or approximately $340 per biweekly pay period. So technically, the collector was at the legal ceiling. But Brittany didn’t know that ceiling existed at all.
“I just thought they could take whatever the judge said,” Brittany told me. “I didn’t know there were rules about how much. I thought I just had to eat it.”
She had been eating it for eleven months — roughly $8,840 total taken from her paychecks — before a coworker mentioned the radio show, and before she made that call that I happened to catch.
The Turning Point: A Phone Call and a Realization
After we spoke the first time, I connected Brittany with a legal aid resource in Omaha — I want to be clear that I did not give her advice, I simply pointed her toward Nebraska Legal Aid, which offers free civil legal services to qualifying low-income residents. She resisted initially.
She eventually called. What the intake review uncovered wasn’t a magic fix, but it was meaningful: the debt collector had not properly notified her of Nebraska’s state-level exemption review process, which allows debtors to formally contest the garnishment amount based on hardship. That omission was procedurally significant.
Additionally, according to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, collectors are required to provide specific disclosures in their initial communications. Brittany’s documentation, which she’d kept in a manila folder in her hall closet — “I keep everything, even if I don’t read it” — showed that one required disclosure had been missing from the original notice.
The Tax Credit She Had Been Leaving Behind
There was a second piece to Brittany’s story that neither of us had anticipated when we first sat down. During our second conversation in early March 2026, she mentioned offhandedly that she hadn’t filed her 2023 tax return yet — and that she hadn’t claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit in several years because “someone told me it was for people with kids.”
That someone was wrong. The EITC is available to workers without qualifying children, though at a reduced amount. For tax year 2024, a single filer with no children earning between roughly $9,000 and $18,600 could claim up to $632 under the childless EITC. Brittany’s income is above that range, so she wouldn’t qualify — but for her 2022 return, filed late during a period when her income temporarily dropped due to her medical leave, she might have been in range for a partial credit.
According to the IRS EITC Central, approximately one in five eligible workers fails to claim the credit each year. Brittany had never had it flagged by a preparer.
Where Things Stand — and What Brittany Regrets
As of late March 2026, Brittany’s situation is unresolved but no longer invisible to her. The legal aid office filed a motion challenging the procedural notice deficiency. A hearing is scheduled for April. The garnishment has not stopped while the challenge is pending — that is not how Nebraska’s process works, and Brittany understood that going in.
“I’m not expecting a miracle,” she told me flatly when I called for a final update. “But at least now I know what I’m fighting. Before, I didn’t even know I could fight.”
The regret in that statement was real and unperformed. Brittany is not someone who emotes easily. But the gap between what she assumed — that the system was designed to grind her down regardless — and what was actually available to her, had clearly landed.
She also said something I’ve been thinking about since. When I asked whether she’d tell other people in her situation to seek help sooner, she paused for a long time. “I’d tell them the paperwork means something,” she finally said. “That’s the only advice I’ve got. Read the paperwork.”
It’s not the tidy resolution that makes for easy headlines. The debt is still there. The garnishment is still running. The outcome of the April hearing is uncertain. But Brittany Espinoza walked into this knowing nothing about her rights under federal garnishment law, about Nebraska’s exemption process, or about the FDCPA — and she walks into that courtroom knowing all of it. That’s not nothing.
For eleven months, $340 left her paycheck every two weeks and she believed she had no recourse. She may still lose. But she knows now that losing, if it happens, will be on the merits — not because she didn’t know the rules existed.
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