The window for claiming certain federal tax credits closes faster than most families realize. For households earning under $57,000 a year with three or more qualifying children, the IRS Earned Income Tax Credit can reach as high as $7,830 for the 2025 tax year — but only if those families know it exists and file in time. Many don’t. And for some families, the obstacle isn’t paperwork. It’s shame.
I found that out firsthand on a Thursday afternoon in late March, somewhere between the cereal aisle and the pasta display at a Kroger on Bardstown Road in Louisville, Kentucky. I was grabbing a few things before a long drive back to Nashville, and I noticed a young man standing very still in front of a wall of pasta boxes, holding his phone, not moving. He wasn’t scrolling. He was staring. I asked if he was okay. He laughed — a short, embarrassed sound — and said, “Honestly? Not really.”
That was Dale Dawkins, 25, a bank teller at a regional branch in Louisville’s East End. He’s married, the father of three children under the age of six, and his wife, Tamara, stays home to care for them. What Dale had just read on his phone, he told me, was a collections notice — the third one in six weeks — for a credit card he didn’t know existed.
The Debt That Came From Nowhere
Dale agreed to sit down with me the following Saturday at a coffee shop near his neighborhood. When I arrived, he was already there, coffee in hand, looking like someone who had rehearsed what he wanted to say and then decided to throw out the script.
He told me that in early February 2026, Tamara finally admitted she had opened a credit card in her own name about 22 months earlier — shortly after their third child was born — and had been carrying a balance that had grown, through interest and late fees, to just over $14,200. She had been making minimum payments out of cash she’d set aside from their household budget, quietly, for nearly two years.
The debt itself wasn’t the only problem. As Dale explained, the two of them had no emergency fund, no retirement accounts of any kind, and a combined household income of roughly $38,500 per year — his bank teller wages, with no additional income from Tamara while she cares for their kids. The $14,200 figure represented more than a third of their annual gross earnings.
What made the conversation especially striking was the irony Dale himself kept returning to. He processes loan applications, reviews account balances, and walks customers through overdraft fees every single day at work. He knows what financial distress looks like from the other side of the window.
What Dale Didn’t Know He Was Already Owed
When I asked Dale whether he had filed his 2025 taxes yet, he said he had filed in February — but only because he wanted to get it done. He hadn’t paid close attention to the outcome. So I asked him a few basic questions about what credits his household might have claimed.
The answers were, frankly, deflating. Dale and Tamara had used a free online filing tool and taken the standard deduction. They had claimed the Child Tax Credit for all three children, which at the current rate of up to $2,000 per qualifying child under 17 would have generated up to $6,000 in credits. But Dale wasn’t certain they had fully claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit — and for a family of five with their income profile, that gap could be significant.
Dale told me his refund had come in at just under $1,900. He wasn’t sure how it was calculated. He used the money to cover three months of minimum payments on two other bills and put the rest toward groceries. There was nothing left.
The EITC is one of the most under-claimed federal benefits in the country, particularly among younger filers and those who use basic filing software without professional guidance. According to the IRS, roughly one in five eligible families fails to claim it in a given year. For Dale’s income bracket and family size, the difference between a partial claim and a full claim could run to several thousand dollars.
The Deeper Problem: Shame and Silence
I spent about two hours with Dale that Saturday. At one point I asked whether he had talked to anyone — family, a coworker, anyone — about what was happening at home. He looked down at his coffee cup for a moment before answering.
That silence, I’ve come to believe after years of covering these stories, is one of the most expensive things a struggling family can carry. Not because shame costs money directly — but because it keeps people from asking questions that might unlock resources they’ve already earned. Dale had never looked up whether his family qualified for SNAP benefits. He hadn’t checked whether his children might qualify for CHIP — the Children’s Health Insurance Program — given their household income. He had been paying out-of-pocket for his youngest’s well-child visits because he assumed they didn’t qualify for anything.
Where Things Stand Now
When I followed up with Dale by phone in early April 2026, he told me that he and Tamara had sat down together and made a list — their first real accounting of every debt, every bill, every account. The total picture, he said, was worse than he expected but less terrifying than the uncertainty had been.
The $14,200 credit card balance remains. They haven’t touched it beyond minimum payments. Dale said he had reached out to a VITA site in Louisville — a volunteer tax assistance location — after our first conversation, and was waiting for a callback to find out if his 2025 return could be amended. He still has no retirement savings and doesn’t expect that to change soon. But he said the conversation in that grocery store shifted something for him.
I don’t know yet how Dale and Tamara’s story ends. The debt is real, the income is limited, and the retirement savings gap is one that gets harder to close the longer it sits untouched. At 25, he has time — but not as much of it as he thinks, and he knows that now in a way he didn’t before.
What struck me most, walking out of that coffee shop on a gray Louisville Saturday, wasn’t the numbers. It was the fact that Dale works inside a financial institution every single day, helps customers navigate overdrafts and loan products and account alerts — and still felt completely alone with his own situation. If that’s possible for him, it’s possible for a lot of people sitting in a lot of grocery aisles, staring at their phones, not moving.
Related: My 2026 Tax Refund Showed ‘Processing’ for 31 Days — Here Is What the IRS Actually Told Me
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