The first thing Tommy Bianchi showed me when I sat down with him at a diner off I-10 in Phoenix was a crumpled paper printout — a summary of his monthly expenses he’d scrawled by hand. He’d circled the child support figure twice. Not out of resentment toward his kids, he was quick to say, but because that single line item shaped every financial decision he made.
Tommy is 46, an HVAC technician who has worked the same trade for over two decades in the Sonoran Desert heat. He is, by most measures, someone who should be financially stable. He earns a consistent income, has marketable skills, and carries no history of reckless spending. And yet, three years after his divorce was finalized, he is renting a two-bedroom apartment, carrying credit card balances from legal fees that haven’t fully cleared, and watching his savings account hover stubbornly near zero.
The Settlement That Changed Everything
When I asked Tommy to describe how the divorce unfolded financially, he paused before answering. He wasn’t reluctant — just precise. He wanted to get the numbers right.
The family home in the Ahwatukee Foothills neighborhood was sold as part of the settlement in early 2023. After splitting equity and covering closing costs, Tommy received less than he’d expected. His ex-wife retained primary custody of their two children, ages 12 and 15. The legal process dragged on for nearly 14 months, and by the time the judge signed off, Tommy had run up approximately $22,000 in attorney fees — all of it charged to two credit cards.
He moved into a rental apartment in Mesa shortly after. The monthly rent, the credit card minimums, and the court-ordered child support — set at $1,600 per month — consumed the bulk of his income before he could set aside a single dollar for savings.
Child Support, Credit Cards, and the Math That Doesn’t Add Up
Arizona calculates child support using an income shares model, and Tommy’s $1,600 monthly obligation reflects roughly 25 percent of his gross income. That is a meaningful slice, but it’s also only part of what makes his monthly budget feel suffocating.
The leftover balance on his legal fee credit cards — which he estimated at around $9,400 as of early 2026 — still carries interest charges each month. His rent for the two-bedroom apartment, which he keeps so his kids have their own space during visits, runs $1,450 a month. He described the financial architecture of his life as a series of obligations stacked so tightly that any unexpected expense becomes a crisis.
And then there are the weekends.
Tommy sees his two sons every other weekend and one evening per week. He was candid with me about what those visits cost him emotionally — and financially. He wants the boys to feel normal when they’re with him. That means movies, dinners out, video games, the occasional Suns game. Spending he knows, in the moment, he cannot truly afford.
He estimated this discretionary spending — meals, activities, small purchases — adds between $300 and $500 to his monthly outflows during weekends with his sons. He called it his one area of financial indiscipline, and he didn’t sound entirely sorry about it.
The Tax Season That Opened His Eyes
For the first two years after his divorce, Tommy filed his taxes using a basic online platform. He claimed single filing status, reported his income accurately, and received modest refunds. He assumed that because he was paying $1,600 a month in child support, he was entitled to claim his children as dependents — and with them, the Child Tax Credit.
He was wrong, and discovering that fact stung.
According to the IRS guidelines on child tax credits and divorced parents, the Child Tax Credit generally goes to the custodial parent — the parent with whom the child lives for the greater portion of the year. A noncustodial parent can only claim the credit if the custodial parent formally signs over the right using IRS Form 8332. Tommy’s divorce decree did not include that provision, and his ex-wife had not signed the form.
What Tommy had been missing across two filing seasons amounted to potentially $4,000 in credits — $2,000 per child, per year — that his ex-wife was claiming instead. He was not angry at her for that. He was frustrated that no one had explained the mechanics to him during or after the divorce process.
He also learned, after consulting with a tax preparer for the first time in early 2026, that his filing status might warrant a closer look. As someone who is unmarried, pays more than half the cost of maintaining his apartment, and has his children staying with him regularly, he wanted to know whether Head of Household status applied to him. The answer, based on IRS dependency and filing status rules, was no — at least not without the children qualifying as his dependents, which brings the situation back to the Form 8332 question.
Where Tommy Stands Now — and What He’s Still Carrying
When I spoke with Tommy in late March 2026, he had just filed his taxes for the 2025 year. His refund came in at $714 — better than the prior two years, he said, after his tax preparer caught a work-related equipment deduction he’d been overlooking as a self-employed subcontractor for part of the year. It wasn’t transformative money. But it was real.
His credit card debt from the legal fees has dropped from $22,000 to approximately $9,400. He’s been making more than the minimum payments when he can, and the balances have moved. Slowly, but they’ve moved. His goal — cautious, not optimistic — is to clear the remaining balance within 18 months.
The house remains the open wound. Tommy told me he has roughly $3,100 set aside — a number he offered with a short, dry laugh. In Phoenix’s housing market, a conventional down payment on a median-priced home would require somewhere in the range of $20,000 to $30,000, depending on the loan structure and purchase price. He knows the math. He’s done it many times.
He had looked briefly into whether Arizona offered any state-level relief programs for renters or first-time homebuyers working to rebuild after financial hardship. He found some resources through the Arizona Department of Housing but hadn’t pursued any of them yet. That, he said, was his next step.
A Story Without a Neat Ending
I’ve reported on dozens of people navigating the financial aftermath of major life disruptions — job loss, medical debt, housing crises. Tommy Bianchi’s story is not one of recovery complete. There is no triumphant final number here, no moment where the ledger suddenly balanced.
What struck me most about him was the clarity with which he understood his own situation. He knew where the money went. He knew which decisions had cost him. He even knew, with a kind of weary self-awareness, that the weekend spending on his kids was a choice he kept making despite knowing better.
Three years out from a divorce that restructured every financial assumption he’d built his adult life on, Tommy Bianchi is still piecing things back together. The credit card balance is falling. The tax preparer found him a deduction. He’s got $3,100 in savings. Some weeks, that feels like progress. Other weeks, it feels like standing still on a very slow-moving floor.
He told me, as we wrapped up, that the one thing he wished he’d done differently was hire a CPA the same year the divorce was finalized — not later, not after two tax seasons had already passed. That advice cost him, he estimated, somewhere close to $4,000 in credits he’ll never get back.
Related: His Divorce Left Him $22K in Debt — Now His Tax Refund Is the Only Financial Reset He Gets All Year
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