Tax season closes fast, and so does the window on certain federal benefits that millions of low-to-moderate income workers quietly qualify for but never claim. When I reached out to Brittany Holloway in late March 2026, she had filed her 2025 federal return just two weeks earlier — and she was still processing what she’d found. We met at a coffee shop in East Nashville, a neighborhood that feels increasingly expensive to the people who actually grew up here.
Brittany is 25, a dental assistant at a family practice near Murfreesboro Road. She is the first person in her immediate family to finish any college coursework — two years at Nashville State Community College, which she completed in 2023. She loves her work. She is also, by her own admission, quietly stressed about money in a way she does not feel she can talk about with her coworkers.
The Numbers Behind the Stress
Brittany earns $17 an hour. At roughly 40 hours a week, that comes to approximately $35,360 before taxes annually. Nashville’s median one-bedroom rent crossed $1,400 a month in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau housing data — and Brittany pays $1,250 for a place she shares with one roommate, splitting a two-bedroom. After rent, utilities, groceries, and her car payment, she told me her monthly breathing room is rarely more than $150 to $200.
She also carries two debts that have followed her since she was a teenager and a student. Her federal student loans — taken out for community college — total $8,000. A credit card she opened at 19, which she used for textbooks and a car repair, sits at $3,000 with an interest rate she described as “definitely higher than it should be.”
“I’ve watched probably 200 TikToks about money,” Brittany told me. “And I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do first. One person says pay off debt before anything. The next one says invest immediately because of compound interest. Then someone else says you need three months of savings before you touch the debt. I’m genuinely confused.”
The TikTok Trap — And Why It Hits Hard at Her Income Level
Brittany’s confusion is not a personal failing. The financial content she’s consuming was mostly designed for people in different income situations than hers. Much of the debt-payoff vs. investing debate assumes a surplus large enough to make either choice meaningful. At $150 to $200 of monthly discretionary income, the math changes considerably.
She also grew up without financial literacy education in any formal sense. Her parents, she told me, did not have retirement accounts. Nobody in her household filed taxes using itemized deductions. The concept of a tax credit — money that reduces your actual tax bill, not just your taxable income — was something she had never heard explained until recently.
She compared herself, often, to people she saw online. Friends posting about maxing out Roth IRAs at 24. Influencers showing net worth spreadsheets. “I know I shouldn’t compare,” she said, “but it makes me feel like I’m already behind and I haven’t even started.”
What Her 2025 Tax Return Actually Showed
When Brittany sat down with a volunteer tax preparer through a local VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) program in February 2026, she expected a routine refund from overwithholding. What she got instead was a more complete picture of what she qualified for — and two federal tax benefits she had not claimed in previous years.
The first was the student loan interest deduction. For 2025, the IRS allows eligible borrowers to deduct up to $2,500 in student loan interest paid during the year. Single filers with a modified adjusted gross income below $80,000 qualify for the full deduction — and it phases out completely at $95,000. At her income level, Brittany qualified in full. On her $8,000 loan balance at a federal rate, she had paid approximately $420 in interest during 2025. That amount came directly off her taxable income.
The second benefit was the Retirement Savings Contributions Credit, also called the Saver’s Credit. According to the IRS, single filers with an adjusted gross income of roughly $36,500 or less in 2025 may claim a credit of 10 to 50 percent of contributions made to a qualifying retirement account, up to $2,000 in contributions. Brittany had contributed $600 to a workplace retirement plan through her dental office. At the 10 percent rate applicable to her income bracket, that translated to a $60 direct credit against her tax bill — not a deduction, but a dollar-for-dollar reduction.
“The VITA woman explained it to me three times,” Brittany said, laughing. “Not because I’m slow — I just kept asking her to confirm it was real. I didn’t know the government gave you anything back for paying your student loan interest. Nobody told me that.”
The Decision She Had to Make With the Refund
Brittany’s total federal refund for 2025 came to $847 — a combination of overwithholding throughout the year and the credits described above. That sum forced the exact question that had been paralyzing her: what do you do with a meaningful but not transformative lump sum when you have competing financial needs?
She laid out the options she was weighing when I spoke with her. She had been told by three separate TikTok creators to prioritize three entirely different things.
Brittany told me she spent about two weeks sitting with the decision. She called her older cousin, who works in accounting. She re-watched several TikToks. She read one article on a government website about income-driven repayment options for federal loans, which she found through Federal Student Aid. Ultimately, she split the refund: $500 toward the credit card, $247 into a high-yield savings account as the beginning of an emergency cushion.
What Brittany Says She Wishes She Had Known Sooner
The student loan interest deduction is not new. It has existed in some form since 1998. Yet Brittany had filed taxes for three years without claiming it — not from negligence, but from not knowing it existed. She had used free online tax software in previous years, and while the software does ask about student loan interest, the prompt is easy to skip if you don’t know what it means.
“My mom has worked since she was sixteen and she’s never heard of the Saver’s Credit,” Brittany said. “That’s not her fault. Nobody explained it to her. I feel like that’s a whole generation of people just leaving money behind because the information was never made accessible.”
She is not wrong that the access gap is real. The Saver’s Credit, according to the IRS, is claimed by a relatively small share of eligible filers each year — in part because awareness drops sharply among first-generation earners and households without prior tax preparation assistance.
Where She Stands Now
When I spoke with Brittany at the end of March 2026, her credit card balance was down to $2,500. Her emergency savings account had $247 in it — a number she acknowledged, with some self-deprecating humor, was not going to cover much. But she had also enrolled in income-driven repayment for her federal student loans, which reduced her monthly loan payment from $89 to $43 based on her current discretionary income. That freed up $46 a month that she has, for now, added to her savings contribution.
The outcome is not a transformation. She is still earning $17 an hour in a city that costs more every year. She still has $11,000 in debt. The social media confusion has not entirely lifted. But something smaller and arguably more durable happened: she made a set of financial decisions using her own real numbers rather than someone else’s template — and she understood, for the first time, why she made them.
“I’m not out of the woods,” she told me before we left. “But I don’t feel like I’m just reacting anymore. I know what I paid in interest last year. I know what credits I got. That feels different than just watching a video and feeling bad about myself.”
Reporting on young workers navigating economic pressure in high-rent cities, I’ve sat across from a lot of people who are doing more right than they give themselves credit for. Brittany Holloway is one of them. The system she’s operating in is genuinely difficult at her income level — but the tools exist, and finding even one of them changed her relationship to a situation she had been dreading for years.
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