Have you ever looked at someone’s life from the outside and assumed they had it figured out — only to learn they were one missed paycheck away from a crisis? That question sat with me for weeks after a chance conversation in the cereal aisle of a Safeway in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood last January.
I was reaching for a box of oatmeal when the woman next to me muttered something under her breath about a bill she’d just seen on her phone. We made eye contact, laughed awkwardly, and somehow — the way strangers do in grocery stores — ended up talking for twenty minutes. That woman was Gina Ivanovic, a 50-year-old senior bank teller who had spent decades helping other people manage their money while quietly losing her grip on her own.
A few days later, Gina agreed to sit down with me properly. What followed was one of the more honest conversations I’ve had while reporting on economic relief — not because Gina’s situation was uniquely catastrophic, but because it was so recognizably ordinary.
The Numbers Behind a Stable-Looking Life
When I sat down with Gina Ivanovic at a coffee shop near her home in northeast Baltimore, the first thing she did was laugh. “People hear I work at a bank and they assume I know everything about money,” she said. “I know everything about other people’s money. Mine is a different story.”
Gina earns approximately $68,000 a year — a salary that, on paper, disqualifies her from many forms of means-tested assistance. She owns a rowhouse she bought in 2016 for $229,000, currently carrying a mortgage balance of roughly $287,000 after a 2021 refinance that rolled in repair costs. The home’s assessed value as of early 2026 sits around $261,000. That gap — about $26,000 underwater — had been quietly haunting her.
Then there’s her car. Gina financed a 2021 Honda CR-V in late 2020, at a time when dealers were charging above sticker. The loan balance as of February 2026 was approximately $24,500. The car’s current market value: around $16,000. She is underwater on that loan by roughly $8,500.
On top of all of this, Gina has been contributing approximately $850 a month to help her younger brother Marcus, 21, who is enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park. Their parents passed away within two years of each other — their mother in 2019, their father in 2021 — and Gina stepped into a guardian role without hesitation. “Marcus wasn’t going to drop out. That was never an option I considered,” she told me.
The Anxiety of Avoidance
One detail Gina shared early in our conversation stuck with me: she rarely opens her bank statements. For someone who processes transactions for a living, the irony wasn’t lost on either of us. “I know roughly what’s in there,” she said. “I just don’t want to see it all at once. It makes the anxiety worse.”
That pattern — knowing something is bad but avoiding the specific numbers — is more common than most people admit. And it had real consequences for Gina. For at least three tax years, she had been filing a standard deduction return without anyone telling her she might be leaving money on the table.
That assumption, as Gina eventually learned, was costing her hundreds — possibly thousands — of dollars each filing season. She had paid roughly $14,200 in mortgage interest in 2024 alone. She had also been providing more than half of Marcus’s financial support, which, under IRS Publication 501, could make him a qualifying relative for dependency purposes — potentially unlocking education tax credits she had never claimed.
What Changed — and When
The turning point came in February 2026, during tax season. A coworker at the bank mentioned she had claimed the Lifetime Learning Credit for her adult daughter’s tuition. Gina had never heard of it. That same evening — she told me she almost didn’t look it up — she spent two hours on the IRS website reading about education credits.
The Lifetime Learning Credit allows eligible taxpayers to claim up to 20 percent of the first $10,000 in qualified education expenses — a maximum credit of $2,000 per tax return. Unlike the American Opportunity Tax Credit, it has no limit on the number of years it can be claimed, and it covers students who are not pursuing a degree as well as those who are.
Gina worked with a tax preparer for the first time in years — she had previously used a basic online filing service. Together, they reviewed her situation and identified several areas she had overlooked. The result was not a windfall, but it was meaningful.
The Outcome — Real Numbers, Mixed Feelings
Gina’s 2025 tax return, filed in March 2026, resulted in a federal refund of approximately $2,340 — compared to a refund of $614 the prior year. The difference, she told me, came primarily from switching to itemized deductions and claiming the Lifetime Learning Credit after establishing Marcus as a qualifying dependent. Maryland’s state return added another $390.
“It felt good for about a day,” Gina said with a wry smile. “Then I looked at the car payment and the mortgage statement and remembered what the money was actually for.”
The underwater auto loan remains a problem. Gina is current on her payments, but she has roughly 28 months left on the note and acknowledges that the car has depreciated far faster than the principal has decreased. As she explained it: “I’m paying for a car that’s worth less than I owe on it every single month. But what am I supposed to do — walk to work?”
The mortgage situation is similarly unresolved. Gina explored the Homeowner Assistance Fund administered through the Treasury Department, but Maryland’s allocation was largely exhausted by mid-2025 for most applicants not already in the pipeline. She was not in financial hardship severe enough to qualify for remaining funds even if they had been available.
What Gina did gain was something harder to quantify: a clearer picture of her own finances. She has since started working with the same tax preparer on a quarterly basis — not for tax filing, but to review her budget and debt payoff timeline. “I’m not avoiding the statements anymore,” she told me. “Well — most of the time.”
What Gina’s Story Reveals About Middle-Income Relief Gaps
Gina Ivanovic is not an outlier. She represents a demographic that policy conversations often skip over: households with incomes above poverty-level thresholds, often disqualified from the most visible relief programs, yet carrying debt loads that leave them structurally fragile. A single job disruption, a medical bill, or a major car repair can cascade quickly.
Tax credits like the Lifetime Learning Credit exist precisely for situations like hers — but they require knowledge, correct filing, and often a paid professional to navigate properly. According to the IRS, billions in refundable and nonrefundable credits go unclaimed each year, often by filers who assume they don’t qualify or who use simplified filing tools that don’t prompt for every eligible deduction.
- The Lifetime Learning Credit phases out for single filers with modified AGI above $80,000 in 2025 (and is completely phased out above $90,000)
- The mortgage interest deduction requires itemizing — which only makes sense if total itemized deductions exceed the standard deduction ($14,600 for single filers in 2024)
- Establishing a sibling as a qualifying relative requires meeting both the support test and the relationship test under IRS rules
- Dependency claims can affect whether the student themselves can claim their own education credits — coordination matters
These are not obscure loopholes. They are documented, mainstream provisions of the tax code. But they require someone to ask the right questions — and for people like Gina, who assumed the system wasn’t designed with her in mind, those questions often don’t get asked.
When I left our second meeting, Gina was heading back to her afternoon shift. She had a notepad on the table with a column of numbers — her debt payoff projections written out by hand, the way she said she retains information best. The auto loan is scheduled to be paid off by August 2028. She’s hoping home values in her neighborhood recover enough to close the equity gap before then.
She’s optimistic. A little anxious. And paying attention, finally, to her own account balance — which, for Gina Ivanovic, might be the most significant shift of all.
Related: She Owed $47,000 in Student Loans and Faced a 30% Rent Hike. Then a Tax Clinic Changed Her Math.
Related: A Bank Teller Counted on His $2,847 Tax Refund to Cover Medical Bills — The IRS Held It for 52 Days
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