The people most likely to miss out on economic relief are not the ones who clearly cannot make ends meet. They are the people quietly earning just enough to assume the system has nothing for them — and staying silent while the stress accumulates in the background of an otherwise ordinary life.
I first came across Rochelle Lombardi in March 2026, when she left a comment beneath an article I had written about overlooked federal tax credits for working adults. Her comment was short — maybe two sentences — but it stopped me cold. She wrote that she had been managing a restaurant for six years, that her car had been broken down since November, and that she had never once filed for a credit or benefit because she assumed, in her words, “people like me don’t qualify for that stuff.”
I sent her a message the same afternoon. She replied three days later. When I finally sat down with Rochelle Lombardi over a video call on a Tuesday evening — she had just finished a closing shift — she looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
A Life Built Around Getting By
Rochelle is 33 years old, widowed, and lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Columbus’s Hilltop neighborhood. Her two adult children live out of state — one in Atlanta, one in Phoenix — and she sends money to both of them regularly, usually somewhere between $350 and $450 a month combined, depending on what comes up.
She earns roughly $38,400 a year managing a mid-size casual dining restaurant on the west side of Columbus. After rent, utilities, food, and those monthly transfers to her kids, she typically has between $200 and $350 left over at the end of the month. There is no savings cushion to speak of.
In early November 2025, her 2011 Honda Civic developed a transmission problem. The estimate from a mechanic on Sullivant Avenue came back at $1,847. She did not have it. She put the repair on a mental list of things she would deal with “eventually” and started taking the COTA bus to work, which added forty minutes to each direction of her commute.
“I just stopped thinking about it after a while,” she told me. “The car is there. I walk past it. I don’t have the money. What am I supposed to do, sit around being upset about it every day?”
That emotional flatness — that practiced numbness — came up again and again during our conversation. Rochelle did not present herself as a victim or even as someone in crisis. She presented herself as someone who had learned to absorb difficulty without reacting to it.
The Assumption That Cost Her Years of Credits
The core issue, as I came to understand it, was a belief Rochelle had held for most of her adult working life: that she earned too much to qualify for any government relief, and not nearly enough to actually get ahead.
That belief had a specific consequence. For at least four years — possibly longer — Rochelle had been filing her taxes using a basic free online tool, claiming the standard deduction, and walking away without ever checking whether she qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit. She had no qualifying children in her household, and she assumed that meant the EITC was off the table entirely.
It is true that the EITC’s maximum benefit for childless adults is far lower than for families with children — and income thresholds are tighter. But Ohio also offers its own state Earned Income Credit, which in 2025 was set at 30% of the federal EITC amount for eligible Ohio filers, according to the Ohio Department of Taxation. Rochelle had never claimed either one.
“I genuinely did not know any of this,” she said. “I thought the EITC was for people with kids. I didn’t know there was a version for people like me.”
What the Numbers Actually Looked Like
When Rochelle finally sat down with a volunteer tax preparer at a local VITA site — the IRS’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, which offers free tax help to people earning under $67,000 — the picture that emerged was more complicated than a simple windfall.
Her 2025 federal return, prepared with professional help for the first time in years, came back with a refund of $1,502. A portion of that was the federal EITC. Some came from adjustments to withholding her previous self-filed returns had gotten wrong. The Ohio state credit added another $114.
The $1,502 refund did not fully cover the car repair. But it closed most of the gap. Rochelle put $1,400 toward the transmission work and used the remaining $216 to cover a month’s worth of bus passes she had already purchased in anticipation of more delays.
The VITA site also connected her with Ohio’s Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP), a federally funded initiative administered by the Ohio Development Services Agency. Rochelle qualified for a $490 credit applied directly to her utility account — a benefit she had never applied for because, again, she assumed she would not be eligible.
The Part That Doesn’t Resolve Neatly
I want to be careful not to wrap Rochelle’s story into something tidier than it is. Her car is back on the road, yes. Her utility bill has some breathing room. But the structural pressure in her life has not changed.
She is still sending money to her kids every month. Her rent went up $75 in February. The restaurant where she works has been cutting floor staff hours, which means her salaried position requires her to fill in more gaps without additional pay. She told me she has not had a vacation in four years.
When I asked Rochelle how she felt about the relief she had found — whether it changed anything in a meaningful way — she paused for a long time before answering.
That question — where did the money go — is one that echoes through the stories I hear most often from middle-income workers who slip through the cracks of a relief system calibrated for two populations: the visibly poor, and the professionally advised. People like Rochelle fall between those two categories and often stay there, year after year, without anyone pulling them aside to explain what they might be missing.
What Rochelle’s Experience Reveals About the Relief Gap
The programs Rochelle accessed are not new or obscure. The EITC has existed since 1975. Ohio’s HEAP program draws from the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which has been operating for decades. The VITA network prepares millions of free returns annually. These are not hidden resources — they are underpublicized ones.
The gap is not in the programs themselves. It is in the assumption, shared by millions of working adults, that earning a paycheck somewhere in the middle of the income spectrum disqualifies you from everything. That assumption is often wrong, and the cost of holding it — as Rochelle’s story illustrates — is real and cumulative.
Before we ended our call, I asked Rochelle what she would say to someone in a situation similar to hers — someone making a middle income, not in obvious crisis, quietly absorbing the weight of it all. She thought for a moment.
The car is fixed now. Rochelle drove herself to work for the first time in four months on a Thursday in late March. She texted me a photo of the parking lot at the restaurant — just asphalt and a gray Ohio sky — with a single caption: “made it.”
It is not a triumphant ending. It is a functional one. For Rochelle, right now, that is enough.
Vivienne Marlowe Reyes is a Senior Tax & Stimulus Writer at American Relief. She covers economic relief programs, federal tax credits, and the financial lives of working Americans.
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