Most divorced parents assume the custodial parent automatically holds all the tax advantages. That assumption, as Tommy Bianchi learned the hard way, can cost a non-custodial parent thousands of dollars across multiple tax years — money that quietly vanishes into an unclaimed refund that never arrives.
When I sat down with Tommy Bianchi in late February 2026, he was on a lunch break from a commercial HVAC job in north Phoenix, eating a sandwich out of a cooler in his work van. He’d agreed to talk because, as he put it, he figured his situation wasn’t unique and someone else might benefit from hearing it. He was right on both counts.
A Divorce That Kept Billing Long After the Papers Were Signed
Tommy is 46, broad-shouldered, and has the particular brand of exhausted optimism that belongs to people who’ve taken a serious financial hit and are still standing. His divorce finalized in early 2023 after a two-year legal process that left him with $22,000 in attorney fees charged across three credit cards.
He lost the house — a three-bedroom in Chandler he and his ex-wife had bought in 2017 — as part of the settlement. His two kids, ages 11 and 14 at the time of our conversation, live primarily with their mother. Tommy has them every other weekend and split holidays.
His gross monthly income runs around $6,400 — roughly $76,800 a year as a licensed HVAC technician. After child support, taxes, and rent on a two-bedroom apartment he keeps specifically so his kids have their own room when they visit, he clears somewhere around $2,900 a month for everything else. The credit cards, with interest rates between 21% and 24%, eat another $400 to $500 of that.
Tommy describes his weekend spending on his kids as something between love and self-sabotage. He knows it sets him back. He does it anyway. “That’s the only time I feel like their dad,” he told me. “Not some guy who sends a check.”
Three Tax Seasons, Zero Child Tax Credits
For his 2023, 2024, and 2025 tax filings, Tommy had assumed his ex-wife claimed both children as dependents — and she did. As the custodial parent, she was entitled to do so under default IRS rules. What Tommy didn’t know was that those rules have a workaround.
According to the IRS’s guidance on Form 8332, a custodial parent can formally release the right to claim a child as a dependent for tax purposes, transferring that claim to the non-custodial parent. The form can be signed for a single year or multiple future years. It doesn’t require a court order — just the other parent’s willingness to sign.
A coworker mentioned Form 8332 to Tommy in November 2025 while they were driving to a commercial job site. Tommy had never heard of it. He went home that night and spent two hours reading IRS publications on his phone.
“I kept thinking — why didn’t my lawyer tell me this? Why didn’t my tax preparer ask?” he told me, shaking his head. “Three years I left that on the table.”
The Conversation He Dreaded Having
Approaching his ex-wife about signing Form 8332 wasn’t something Tommy was eager to do. Their communication had been civil but tightly managed — mostly through a co-parenting app, mostly about the kids’ schedules. Asking her to voluntarily give up a tax benefit felt like opening a door he’d prefer to keep closed.
He sent her a message in December 2025 explaining the form, attaching the IRS link, and asking whether she’d be willing to release the claim for their older child — the 14-year-old — for the 2025 tax year. He framed it around the credit card debt and his ability to eventually save for a house, which would mean more stability for the kids during visits.
His ex signed Form 8332 for the 2025 tax year in January 2026. Tommy filed his return in mid-February, claiming the Child Tax Credit for his son Marcus. Because he earns above the phase-out threshold for the Earned Income Tax Credit — which for single filers with two qualifying children cuts off at approximately $53,502 for tax year 2024 according to the IRS EITC tables — that credit wasn’t available to him. The Child Tax Credit, however, landed.
What $2,000 Actually Buys — and What It Doesn’t
Tommy’s 2025 federal refund came to approximately $2,200, a meaningful jump from the $400 he’d received the prior year. The Child Tax Credit accounted for most of that difference. He was direct about where it went.
He doesn’t regret the camping trip. He does acknowledge the math problem it represents. At his current debt load — which he estimates is still around $14,000 after three years of minimum payments and interest accumulation — a single $1,400 payment barely registers. His target of saving for a home down payment remains distant. A 5% down payment on a median Phoenix-area home, which hovered near $430,000 in early 2026, would require roughly $21,500 — before closing costs.
The Regret That Runs Underneath Everything
What Tommy kept circling back to during our conversation wasn’t the credit card debt or even the child support — it was the three years of unclaimed credits. He estimates, conservatively, that had he known about Form 8332 from the start and his ex had agreed in 2023, he could have claimed the Child Tax Credit for one child across all three years. That’s approximately $6,000 in credits he left uncollected.
According to IRS instructions for Form 8332, the release must be attached to the non-custodial parent’s return for the year in question. A custodial parent cannot retroactively sign to cover years already filed — so for Tommy, the 2023 and 2024 credits are simply gone.
“That’s what gets me,” he said, finishing the last of his lunch. “Not the divorce. Not even the money, really. It’s that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And nobody told me.” He paused. “My lawyer charged me $400 an hour and never mentioned a free IRS form.”
I didn’t have a good answer for that. There isn’t one.
When I left Tommy in the parking lot of that commercial building in north Phoenix, he was pulling his tool bag out of the van, already thinking about the next job. He told me his daughter’s birthday was the following weekend and he was trying to figure out what to get her without going further into debt. He’d probably figure out something that cost more than he could afford. He knew it. He was going to do it anyway.
That’s where Tommy Bianchi is right now — not broke enough to qualify for most relief programs, not flush enough to make real progress. Somewhere in the middle, doing the math on every small decision, and still trying to be a good father on a budget that never quite cooperates.
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Related: This Phoenix HVAC Tech Expected a $4,200 Tax Refund After His Divorce. He Got $847 Instead.
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