Roughly 44% of first marriages in the United States end in divorce — but the financial aftermath rarely makes headlines the way the emotional toll does. The average contested divorce costs between $15,000 and $30,000 in legal fees alone, according to estimates from the IRS and family law researchers. For Tommy Bianchi, those numbers aren’t statistics. They are the $22,000 still sitting on two credit cards, accruing interest every month.
When I sat down with Tommy at a diner off Interstate 10 in Phoenix on a Tuesday morning in late March 2026, he was still in his work uniform — a navy blue polo with his company’s logo on the chest, hands roughened from twenty years of HVAC work. He ordered black coffee and didn’t touch it for the first ten minutes. He wanted to talk, he said, because he figured his story might help someone else avoid his mistakes.
How a Good Income Became a Financial Trap
Tommy Bianchi is 46 years old and earns approximately $76,800 a year as a senior HVAC technician — a wage that, in most contexts, would represent stability. But as Tommy explained to me, gross income tells only part of the story when you factor in what comes off the top.
His child support obligation is $1,600 per month, ordered by an Arizona family court following his divorce three years ago. That’s $19,200 annually — roughly 25% of his gross income, and a far larger share of what he actually takes home after taxes. He has two kids, a daughter who just turned 11 and a son who is 8, and he sees them every other weekend.
“I do okay for a guy with a wrench,” Tommy told me, managing a dry laugh. “But when you subtract child support, minimum payments on two credit cards, and rent — I’m basically working to stay in place. There’s no forward motion.”
His rent on a two-bedroom apartment in the East Valley — he keeps the second bedroom for the kids — runs $1,450 a month. The credit card minimums on the $22,000 in divorce legal fees add another $480. By the time he pays utilities, a car payment, and basic groceries, Tommy says he ends most months with less than $200 left over.
The Weekend Problem He Can’t Seem to Solve
What makes Tommy’s situation more complicated — and more human — is what happens every other Friday afternoon. He picks up his kids, and the pressure he feels to give them a good experience takes over in ways he acknowledges are financially self-destructive.
Tommy estimates he spends between $300 and $500 per custody weekend, which can add up to over $1,000 in some months. He’s aware this behavior is part of why his savings account has never crossed $800. He called it “guilt spending” without me prompting the phrase — he’d clearly thought about it before.
As Tommy explained it, the divorce settlement felt deeply unfair to him. He lost the house — a 3-bedroom property in Chandler they’d owned for seven years — because he couldn’t afford to buy out his ex-wife’s equity while simultaneously covering the legal bills. The bitterness in his voice when he described that decision was unmistakable, even as he was careful to say his kids’ mother is “a good mom.”
Discovering Tax Relief — and Its Limits
About eighteen months after the divorce was finalized, Tommy said a coworker mentioned he might be leaving money on the table at tax time. He’d been filing his taxes the same way for years — using a basic online service, claiming himself, and not digging deeper. What he didn’t realize was that his custody arrangement and income level made him potentially eligible for credits he’d never claimed.
Tommy went to a paid tax preparer for the first time in early 2025 and learned that, because his divorce decree allowed him to claim one of his two children as a dependent in alternating years — and his ex had signed IRS Form 8332 — he was eligible to claim the Child Tax Credit in those years. The credit, worth up to $2,000 per qualifying child in tax year 2024, had been sitting unclaimed for two filing seasons.
“The guy sat me down and showed me what I’d missed,” Tommy told me. “I left almost $4,000 on the table over two years. That hurt to hear. That’s not nothing — that’s two months of credit card payments.”
He filed amended returns for both years. The process took roughly four months to resolve with the IRS, and he ultimately received a combined refund of approximately $3,800 — less than the full amount because of adjustments and his filing status in one of the years.
Where the Relief Fell Short
The $3,800 amended refund was meaningful — Tommy used most of it to pay down one of the two credit cards — but it didn’t change his structural situation. He’s still renting. He’s still paying off $14,000 in remaining legal fee debt. And the down payment on a home, which he set at a target of $25,000 for something modest in the Phoenix suburbs, remains entirely out of reach.
I asked Tommy whether he’d looked into any of the down payment assistance programs offered through Arizona’s Department of Housing or local nonprofits. He had, he said — and that’s where things got discouraging again.
The debt-to-income ratio problem is what stops him cold on housing. With child support counted as a fixed monthly obligation by lenders, his DTI sits above 50% — well over the 43% threshold most conventional mortgage programs require. Tommy knew these numbers. He’d run them himself on a free mortgage calculator at 2 a.m. one night, he told me, and confirmed what he suspected.
He said it matter-of-factly, almost like he was describing a broken HVAC unit rather than his own life. The circular logic of his financial trap was something he’d mapped out clearly — and the clarity didn’t seem to comfort him.
A Slow, Mixed Progress
By the time we finished our second cup of coffee, Tommy’s situation had neither a clean resolution nor a total collapse. He’d knocked one credit card — which originally held $9,000 — down to zero using the amended tax refund and fourteen months of disciplined minimum-plus payments. The second card still carries approximately $14,000.
He’s projecting, based on current payments, that the second card will be cleared sometime in late 2028 — assuming he doesn’t add to it. That’s the variable he can’t fully control. “The weekends with my kids are the wildcards,” he admitted. “I’m better than I was. But I’m not fixed.”
When I asked whether he regrets how the legal fees were handled — specifically, whether he would have structured the debt differently — Tommy was quiet for a moment. “You don’t think clearly when you’re in the middle of a divorce,” he said finally. “You just want it to be over. And then it is over, and you’re left with the bill.”
Leaving the diner, I thought about what Tommy’s story reflects beyond his individual circumstances. He’s not destitute. He earns a real wage, works steadily, and is slowly chipping away at his debt. But the combination of a high fixed obligation like court-ordered child support, compounded debt from legal fees, and the emotional spending patterns that follow a painful custody arrangement creates a financial bind that no single relief program was designed to address. The tax credit he reclaimed was real. The progress is real. The ceiling is also real.
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Related: He Expected a $3,800 Tax Refund After His Divorce. The IRS Deposited $1,240 Instead
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