Have you ever done the math on your own life and come up with a number that made you want to close the laptop and go to bed? That’s the question I found myself sitting with after two hours with Tommy Bianchi, a 46-year-old HVAC technician from Phoenix, Arizona, who has spent the last three years rebuilding a financial life that a divorce nearly demolished entirely.
When I sat down with Tommy at a diner on Camelback Road in late February 2026, he arrived in his work truck, still in his uniform. He ordered coffee, apologized for being five minutes late, and said — before I even asked a question — “I just want people to know this stuff isn’t as simple as everyone makes it sound.”
The Cost of a Marriage Ending
Tommy’s divorce was finalized in early 2023 after a marriage of eleven years. The legal fight over the house, custody arrangements, and asset division stretched across fourteen months and cost him approximately $22,000 in attorney fees — all of it charged to three separate credit cards. He lost the house in the settlement. His ex-wife stayed with their two children, ages 9 and 12, and Tommy moved into a two-bedroom rental in the East Valley that costs him $1,450 a month.
He earns roughly $72,000 a year as a senior HVAC technician, which sounds stable until you start subtracting. Arizona courts ordered him to pay $1,600 per month in child support — roughly 25% of his gross monthly income. After child support, rent, the minimum payments on his divorce debt, and utilities, Tommy told me he clears about $800 a month for everything else.
“I make decent money. I know I make decent money,” Tommy told me, wrapping both hands around his coffee mug. “But at the end of every month, I don’t know where it went. And I can’t save anything. Not a dollar.”
The situation is one that millions of divorced parents navigate without a roadmap. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 13.4 million custodial and noncustodial parents in the country are subject to child support arrangements — and the financial strain on noncustodial parents, particularly those who also carry divorce-related debt, is rarely discussed in policy conversations about economic relief.
The Weekend Spending Problem He Admits He Caused
Tommy sees his kids every other weekend. That’s four days a month. He described those visits to me with a mix of joy and visible guilt — the kind of guilt that tends to express itself through a credit card.
“I want them to have fun. I want them to not feel like their dad is some broke guy who can’t do anything,” he said. “So yeah, I take them to Top Golf. I take them to a Suns game when I can get tickets. Last month I spent $340 in one weekend. I know I shouldn’t. But what am I supposed to do, make them watch TV in my apartment?”
That $340 weekend — which included go-karts, dinner, and an Uber because his truck needed a repair — was charged to one of his existing credit cards. Tommy acknowledged, somewhat sheepishly, that this pattern is one of the clearest reasons his debt isn’t shrinking. He knows it. He just hasn’t been able to stop it.
This is the emotional core of Tommy’s situation — and it’s one that doesn’t show up in any government relief formula. The financial stress and the parenting guilt are tangled together in ways that make purely rational budgeting nearly impossible.
What He Discovered About Tax Credits — And What He Missed
The turning point in our conversation came when I asked Tommy about his tax filings over the past two years. He paused, then admitted he’d been doing his own taxes using a free software tool and had likely left money on the table.
Under IRS rules, the noncustodial parent can claim the Child Tax Credit — worth up to $2,000 per child for tax year 2025 — but only if the custodial parent signs IRS Form 8332, releasing the exemption. Tommy had not done this. His ex-wife has been claiming both children every year. For tax year 2023, that meant Tommy missed out on a potential $4,000 in credits he may have been entitled to share, depending on his divorce agreement’s language.
“Nobody told me that,” Tommy said, leaning back in the booth. “My lawyer never mentioned it. The software I used never flagged it. I just assumed she got the kids, she gets the taxes.” He wasn’t angry when he said this — more resigned, like someone cataloguing a long list of things that had gone sideways.
He also hadn’t explored the Earned Income Tax Credit, which, at his income level and with two qualifying children he may be able to claim in alternate years, could have yielded additional relief. The EITC for 2025 can provide up to $7,152 for filers with two children, though eligibility depends on adjusted gross income thresholds and filing status according to the IRS EITC guidelines.
The Path Forward — Partial, Slow, and Not Guaranteed
When I spoke with Tommy about where things stand now, in early 2026, the picture is mixed. He finally hired a tax professional to refile an amended return for 2023 and is working with his ex-wife — through their co-parenting agreement — to negotiate alternating years for the child dependency exemption going forward. Whether that conversation succeeds is not yet determined.
His credit card debt, which peaked at roughly $22,000, is now down to approximately $17,400 — a reduction he attributes mostly to an unexpected $2,800 tax refund from his 2024 return, which a tax preparer helped him maximize for the first time. He put all of it toward his highest-interest card.
Buying a house remains a distant goal. Tommy told me he’d need at minimum $15,000 for a down payment on anything reasonable in the Phoenix market — and he currently has about $1,200 in savings. “I think about it,” he said. “I’d like to have a real bedroom for the kids when they stay over. Right now they share my couch pullout. My 12-year-old is starting to notice that stuff.”
He’s looked into Arizona Housing Finance Authority programs for moderate-income buyers, and there are down payment assistance options available in Maricopa County — but they require stable savings history that Tommy doesn’t yet have. It’s not a door that’s permanently closed. It’s a door he can’t reach yet.
What Tommy’s Story Reveals About Post-Divorce Economic Recovery
Tommy Bianchi is not a cautionary tale about bad decisions. He made one or two that he owns — the weekend spending, the years of doing his own taxes without professional help. But much of what happened to him is simply the predictable mathematics of divorce in America, where legal fees average between $15,000 and $30,000 per spouse and child support obligations can consume a significant fraction of take-home pay for years or decades.
What’s notable is how little information reached him about the relief mechanisms that exist — partial as they are. The Child Tax Credit negotiation, the potential EITC eligibility in certain years, the amended return he should have filed years earlier. None of it was complicated once someone explained it. It simply required someone to explain it.
As I left the diner and watched Tommy pull out of the parking lot in his work truck — a Bianchi HVAC magnet on the door, a Suns air freshener visible through the windshield — I thought about how many people are sitting on recoverable money they don’t know about, not because they’re careless, but because the system that owes them information never delivered it.
Tommy’s situation isn’t resolved. He’s still renting, still paying down debt, still spending more than he should on weekend visits he refuses to make smaller. But for the first time in three years, he told me, the number on his credit card statement went down instead of up. For now, that’s enough to keep going.
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