Roughly 9 million American workers in the food service industry lost their jobs in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data — and for many of them, the financial damage didn’t stop when the job came back. When I met Carlos Mendez at a diner in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood in February 2026, he was two years into a new management position and still sorting through the wreckage of what came before. He ordered coffee, black, and put his phone face-down on the table before he started talking.
Carlos is 55. He has two biological kids — a daughter, 16, and a son, 13 — and he and his wife, Marisol, share a home with her two children from a previous relationship, ages 11 and 9. That’s four kids under one roof, one income that came back smaller than it left, and a blended-family budget held together with discipline and, as Carlos put it, a lot of prayer.
The Fourteen Months That Erased Everything
Carlos had managed the same Miami restaurant for eleven years before COVID. He wasn’t wealthy — restaurant management in South Florida rarely is — but he had built up roughly $34,000 in savings, enough that he felt, for the first time in his adult life, like he had a cushion. That cushion lasted fourteen months.
“When the restaurant closed, I thought it was going to be three months, maybe four,” Carlos told me, wrapping both hands around his coffee mug. “By month six, I was dipping into everything. By month ten, I was borrowing from my brother-in-law. By the end, there was nothing. Zero. We were starting over.”
He eventually found a new management role at a different restaurant group in late 2021, but the pay cut was significant — roughly $14,000 less per year than his previous position. Combined with Marisol’s part-time income as a dental office receptionist and the erratic child support payments from her ex-husband, the family was living paycheck to paycheck by any honest measure.
The child support situation made budgeting nearly impossible. Marisol’s ex-husband is court-ordered to pay $680 a month for his two children. In the 12 months before I spoke with Carlos, he had paid in full exactly four times. The rest of the months were partial payments, late arrivals, or nothing at all. Carlos and Marisol couldn’t count on it, which meant they planned as if it didn’t exist and treated it as a bonus when it came through.
The Tax Filing That Almost Went Wrong
For the 2024 tax year — filed in early 2025 — Carlos and Marisol used a national tax preparation chain, the same one they’d used for years. Carlos described the appointment as rushed, maybe 40 minutes, with a preparer who ran through their W-2s and called it done. They received a modest federal refund of approximately $1,100. Carlos assumed that was right. It wasn’t.
“My coworker — she’s younger, she’s got two kids — she mentioned she got almost four thousand back just from the child credit,” Carlos told me. “And I’m sitting there thinking, I have four kids. How did I get eleven hundred?”
When he went back and had a second preparer review the return, the discrepancy became clear. The original filing had correctly claimed the Child Tax Credit for his two biological children but had not processed Marisol’s two younger children as qualifying dependents for the Additional Child Tax Credit, a refundable component that allows lower-income families to receive money back even when their tax liability is minimal. The amended return — which Carlos filed in the summer of 2025 — resulted in an additional $3,200 refund.
Understanding the Credits Carlos Was Owed
The credits at the center of Carlos’s situation are among the most widely used — and most frequently miscalculated — in the U.S. tax code, particularly for blended families. Here’s how the relevant credits break down for a household like his.
For the 2025 tax year, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) allows eligible families to claim up to $2,000 per qualifying child under age 17, according to IRS guidance on the Child Tax Credit. The refundable portion — called the Additional Child Tax Credit — allows families to receive up to $1,700 per qualifying child back as a refund, even when the household owes little or no federal tax. For a family with four qualifying children, that’s a potential $8,000 in total credit, with up to $6,800 refundable.
*EITC maximum for three or more qualifying children, 2025 tax year estimate. Actual amounts depend on income, filing status, and IRS adjustments.
The stepchild question is one that catches a lot of families. Under IRS rules, a stepchild can be a qualifying child for purposes of the CTC and EITC if the child lives with the taxpayer for more than half the year and the taxpayer provides more than half of the child’s financial support — conditions that Marisol’s two younger children met, especially in years when their father’s child support payments were inconsistent or absent.
What the Amended Return Actually Changed
Carlos’s amended return for tax year 2024 added the ACTC for Marisol’s two younger children and also triggered a review of his Earned Income Tax Credit eligibility, which had been calculated only on his income and two dependents in the original filing. The corrected filing recognized all four children as qualifying dependents, which pushed the EITC figure upward as well.
The total difference between the original refund of approximately $1,100 and the final corrected amount came to roughly $4,300 — meaning the original filing had left nearly $3,200 on the table. Carlos received the amended refund in August 2025, about twelve weeks after submission.
“We used it to pay off a medical bill and put the rest in a savings account,” Carlos said, with something that was almost but not quite a smile. “It’s not a lot. But it’s a start. First time we’ve had anything saved since before COVID.”
The Bigger Picture — and the Parts That Still Don’t Work
I want to be careful not to frame Carlos’s story as a clean resolution, because it isn’t one. The amended refund was real and meaningful. But at 55, with no retirement savings after COVID erased everything, four kids at various stages of adolescence, and a household income that depends partly on whether a court order gets honored in any given month, Carlos is still operating without a net.
He was candid about the child support situation in a way that surprised me. He didn’t express bitterness toward Marisol’s ex so much as exhaustion at the unpredictability. “I can’t budget around a maybe,” he said. “So I don’t. I treat that money like it doesn’t exist. When it shows up, great. When it doesn’t — and it usually doesn’t — we figure it out.”
Carlos told me he’s now looking into whether his family qualifies for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Florida, not because they’re in crisis but because, as he put it, “why are we leaving things on the table?” The federal poverty guidelines and SNAP income thresholds are complex for blended households, and he’s still working through the paperwork with help from a local community organization.
For the 2025 tax year — the return he’ll file in spring 2026 — Carlos said he’s already keeping better records and has a preparer who specifically works with blended families. He estimates his household may qualify for a combined CTC, ACTC, and EITC benefit approaching $11,000 if all four children are correctly documented and his income stays within the applicable thresholds.
When I left the diner that afternoon, Carlos was already back on his phone — texts from the restaurant, he said, without looking up. He waved without ceremony. The story he told me wasn’t one of rescue or transformation. It was something more ordinary and, in some ways, more important: a man who asked one more question after being told the answer, and found out the first answer was wrong.
Millions of blended families file taxes each year under similar circumstances — lower incomes, complicated household structures, unreliable secondary income from child support. The credits exist. The eligibility rules are on the IRS website in plain language. But knowing to ask the question, as Carlos learned the hard way, is half the battle.
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