The deadline to apply for Colorado’s Property Tax Deferral Program for the 2025 tax year closes on April 1, 2026 — the same day I’m writing this. That detail hit me harder than I expected when I thought about Tommy Kowalski, the Denver truck driver I’d spent two hours with the previous Thursday afternoon, sitting at his kitchen table with lukewarm coffee and a stack of unopened county notices.
I first heard about Tommy from a neighbor named Darlene at a block party on West Colfax last September. She mentioned almost offhandedly that the guy down the street — the one with the F-250 in the driveway — had been working doubles for months and still couldn’t catch up on his bills. When I asked if he’d ever spoken to anyone about it, she laughed. “Tommy doesn’t ask for help,” she said. “That’s kind of his whole thing.”
He agreed to sit down with me after some back-and-forth. He wasn’t eager to talk about money. But he was angry — and he was tired of being angry alone.
The Year Everything Went Sideways
Tommy Kowalski is 49 years old. He drives long-haul routes out of a logistics hub in Commerce City, Colorado, hauling freight mostly to the Southwest corridor. He’s been doing it for nineteen years, which means he knows exactly how many hours he needs on the road each week to cover his mortgage, his utilities, and not much else.
His wife, Linda, died of ovarian cancer in 2019. His two adult children — a son in Phoenix and a daughter in Minneapolis — are out of state and have their own financial pressures. Tommy lives alone in the same three-bedroom house he and Linda bought in 2004 for $187,000. He won’t sell it.
In October 2023, Tommy was admitted to St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood for an emergency appendectomy. He was uninsured at the time — he’d let his marketplace plan lapse in August of that year after a rate increase pushed his premium to $541 a month, which he said he simply couldn’t justify. The surgery and two-day stay left him with a hospital bill of $14,200 after a financial assistance reduction the hospital applied automatically.
He put $6,400 of it on two credit cards. The rest he negotiated into a payment plan with the hospital’s billing department. By early 2024, the interest on those cards — both carrying rates above 24% — had ballooned his total card balance to just over $8,900.
He missed his second-half 2024 property tax payment of $1,900 in February of this year. He’d already missed the first-half payment of $1,900 the previous June. Total delinquency: $3,800, with county penalties accruing.
“I Don’t Even Know Who to Be Mad At”
When I asked Tommy how he’d been managing the stress of it all, he didn’t answer right away. He picked up his coffee mug, set it back down without drinking, and said something that I’ve been turning over ever since.
That phrase — “I don’t know who to be mad at” — describes something I’ve heard from dozens of people I’ve reported on over the past eight years covering economic relief. It’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from falling through gaps that nobody designed to be gaps. Nobody told Tommy there were programs. Nobody sent him a letter explaining his options when his property taxes came due and he couldn’t pay.
According to the Colorado Department of the Treasury, thousands of homeowners qualify for property tax deferral or relief programs each year but never apply — often because they don’t know the programs exist, or they assume they won’t qualify.
What’s Actually Available — And What Tommy Qualified For
This is where the story gets complicated, because the answer isn’t simple or clean. Tommy didn’t walk away with a single check that solved everything. What he found was a patchwork — partial relief in a few places, dead ends in others.
The Property Tax Deferral Program — administered through the Colorado Department of the Treasury — was the most significant finding. It would allow Tommy to pause his property tax payments without losing his home, with the deferred amount becoming a lien on the property, settled when the home is eventually sold. Tommy told me he sat with that information for a week before he believed it was real.
The Retirement Problem Nobody Addresses
Of everything we talked about, the retirement savings gap was the one Tommy seemed least prepared to confront. He has no 401(k), no IRA, no pension — nothing. His employer, a regional logistics contractor, does not offer a retirement plan. He is 49 years old.
I didn’t offer Tommy advice on this — that’s not my role, and the retirement savings gap requires professional guidance he’d need to seek out independently. What I could tell him was that programs like the Saver’s Credit (officially the Retirement Savings Contributions Credit) exist through the IRS for low-to-moderate income earners who contribute to qualifying retirement accounts. Whether or how Tommy might use that information is his decision to make with someone qualified to help him make it.
He shrugged when I mentioned it. “I don’t have anything to put in a retirement account right now,” he said. “I can’t save what I don’t have.” That’s a real constraint, not an excuse, and it’s worth saying plainly.
What Tommy Said About Asking for Help
Before I left, I asked Tommy if he had any regrets about waiting so long before looking into what was available to him. He thought about it longer than I expected.
By the time I filed this story, Tommy had submitted his Property Tax Deferral application to Denver County. The $3,800 delinquency won’t disappear — it will follow the house — but the immediate threat of a tax lien sale is off the table. He also received confirmation that his LEAP heating benefit had been credited. The credit card debt remains. The retirement savings gap remains.
He’s not fixed. But he’s not in freefall anymore, and he knows what’s in front of him more clearly than he did in September.
I’ve covered relief programs long enough to know that none of them are perfect, and most of them arrive too late or in amounts too small to close the actual gap. Tommy Kowalski isn’t a cautionary tale about laziness or bad decisions. He’s a precise portrait of what it looks like when a working person spends decades doing exactly what he’s supposed to do — and still ends up at 49 with notices from the county and nothing saved for old age.
What he told me last, walking me to the door, I keep coming back to: “I just want to know the rules of the game. Nobody ever explained the rules.”
That’s as honest a summary of the American economic relief system as I’ve ever heard.
Vivienne Marlowe Reyes is Senior Tax & Stimulus Writer at American Relief. This article is reported journalism and does not constitute financial, tax, or legal advice. For guidance on your specific situation, consult a qualified professional.
Related: He Sells Homes for a Living — Then Fell Behind on His Own Property Taxes
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