Roughly 4 in 10 Americans over age 50 have no retirement savings at all, according to estimates from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. That statistic landed differently after I spent an afternoon with Marian Kirby in Indianapolis — a woman who has spent her entire career knowing exactly how money works and still found herself on the wrong side of it.
Marian came to me through a referral. A financial counselor she’d briefly consulted in late 2024 reached out to say she had a client whose story needed to be told — someone who had helped hundreds of people through tax crises but had never once applied that knowledge to her own. I called Marian on a Tuesday in February 2025. She agreed to meet, but she was careful about it. “I want people to understand this isn’t a sob story,” she told me before we even sat down. “I just want it to be honest.”
A Life Built on Numbers That Stopped Adding Up
Marian Kirby is 52, married, and lives in a brick Colonial on the east side of Indianapolis with her husband, Derek, who works part-time as a physical therapy assistant, and their two children — a six-year-old and a three-year-old. Most people meeting her for the first time would assume stability: the steady posture, the careful sentences, the way she references IRS publications by section number from memory.
What they wouldn’t see is that by January 2025, Marian’s small accounting firm — which she had run as a sole proprietor since 2011 — had been losing ground for three consecutive years. Revenue peaked at approximately $187,000 in 2021. By the end of 2024, it had fallen to just under $103,000. Two anchor clients left for larger regional firms. A third put services on pause during a merger that never resolved.
As her income fell, she had deferred the things that felt deferrable. Retirement contributions — she had never opened an IRA or SEP-IRA, something she still struggles to explain. Property taxes on her home fell behind starting in 2023, and by the fall of 2024, the bill from Marion County had reached $14,200 across two delinquent cycles. She hadn’t told Derek the full number.
The Programs She Had Always Told Other People About
When Marian finally sat with her financial counselor in October 2024 — prompted, she admits, by a certified letter from the Marion County Treasurer’s office — she was handed a list of programs she had personally explained to clients dozens of times. The experience was disorienting.
Indiana’s Indiana Department of Local Government Finance offers several property tax relief mechanisms for qualifying homeowners, including the Homestead Deduction and, in cases of delinquency, county-level payment plan agreements. Marion County specifically allows installment arrangements for owners who are in good-faith financial hardship — a provision Marian had cited in client consultations but never pursued herself.
She also learned she had likely left federal money unclaimed. As a self-employed individual with net income below certain thresholds in 2020 and 2021, she may have been eligible for Pandemic-related relief through the Earned Income Tax Credit adjustments and self-employment tax deferrals under the CARES Act — but her own filings, she said, hadn’t been optimized to capture them.
What the Process Actually Looked Like
When I asked Marian to walk me through the steps she took between October 2024 and February 2025, she pulled out a spiral notebook. She had logged every call, every confirmation number, every name. It was the most organized distress I had ever witnessed.
The amended returns for 2021 and 2022 yielded a combined federal refund of approximately $6,300 — money she had overpaid because she hadn’t claimed her home office deduction consistently, and because her self-employed health insurance premiums had been partially miscategorized. “I have done this for other people a hundred times,” she told me, shaking her head. “A hundred times.”
The Numbers That Remain, and the Ones That Changed
By the time we spoke in February 2025, Marian had made her first two installment payments on the property tax balance — $788 per month under the Marion County arrangement. The $14,200 had not disappeared; it had become manageable. That distinction matters to her.
Her firm’s revenue remained a concern. She had brought in two new small-business clients in January 2025 and was cautiously projecting $118,000 for the full year — still below her 2021 peak, but stabilizing. Derek had picked up additional shifts to cover the household gap during the amendment process.
What she calls the “retirement gap” remains the part of the story without a clean ending. At 52, with $4,000 now in a SEP-IRA and no other retirement vehicles, the math is difficult. She knows it. She cited the figures to me without being asked — the way someone recites something they’ve turned over many times in the dark.
What Marian’s Story Reveals About Who Uses — and Avoids — Relief Programs
Marian’s experience points to something broader than one person’s finances. Financial counselors and social workers have long noted that middle- and upper-income earners are among the least likely to seek or access relief programs — not because they don’t qualify, but because identity and professional reputation become barriers. A woman who has built a career on financial expertise may be the last person to open a brochure about payment plans.
According to the IRS, millions of self-employed filers leave significant deductions unclaimed each year — home office expenses, health insurance premiums, retirement contributions — often due to inconsistent record-keeping or, as in Marian’s case, the quiet neglect that comes with managing a business largely alone.
The programs that helped Marian are not obscure. A county installment plan for delinquent property taxes. An amended return that corrected two years of missed deductions. A retirement account that exists in the tax code for exactly her situation. None of it required a crisis unit or a government advocate. It required her to stop waiting for the right quarter.
When I asked Marian what she would tell a client who came to her with her exact situation, she didn’t hesitate. “I’d tell them they waited too long, but not too long to do something. There’s usually a door open that they haven’t tried.” She paused. “I just had to learn to take my own advice.”
That’s where her story sits in early 2025: not resolved, not rescued, but moving. The certified letters have stopped. The installment payments are current. The retirement account exists, even if the number inside it is a source of private grief. Marian Kirby, who has spent decades guiding people through the American tax system, is finally, quietly, navigating it herself.
Related: My 2026 Tax Refund Showed ‘Processing’ for 31 Days — Here Is What the IRS Actually Told Me
Leave a Reply