Roughly 28 percent of Americans over 65 who are still in the workforce carry high household debt loads they describe as unmanageable — a figure that has climbed steadily since 2020, according to data tracked by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When I first read that statistic, it felt abstract. Then I got an email from Janine Dillard.
Janine had left a comment on a piece I’d published in late 2025 about IRS energy efficiency tax credits. Her comment was three sentences long and matter-of-fact: she was a licensed HVAC technician in Chicago, she’d lost a significant chunk of her annual income when overtime dried up at her company, and she wanted to know if any of the programs I’d described actually worked for someone in her situation. I followed up. We talked for nearly two hours.
What she told me stayed with me for weeks — not because her story was dramatic in the way financial collapse stories often are, but because it was so ordinary. No catastrophic illness. No sudden job loss. Just the slow, grinding math of a life where the numbers that used to add up suddenly didn’t.
Thirty Years of Working, and Then the Overtime Stopped
Janine Dillard is 65 years old, married, and the primary earner in a household that includes her husband — a stay-at-home parent who raised their three children — and the ongoing costs of a three-bedroom home in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood that she’s owned since 1998. She’s been a licensed HVAC technician for 32 years. She is, by any reasonable measure, a skilled professional who built something solid.
“I never thought of myself as someone who needed help,” she told me when we first spoke. “That’s not pride, exactly. It’s just — that category never applied to me. I worked. I earned. That was the deal.”
The deal started changing in January 2025. The commercial contracting firm where Janine worked restructured its billing model, shifting more projects to subcontractors and eliminating the mandatory overtime that had padded technicians’ paychecks for years. For Janine, who had routinely logged 15 to 20 overtime hours per week during peak seasons, this translated to roughly $1,500 less per month — before taxes.
That hit alone would have been manageable, she said. What turned it into a crisis was the timing. In the same month the overtime disappeared, Janine received her employer’s open enrollment materials for 2025 coverage. Her monthly health insurance premium — for herself, her husband, and a plan that covered an adult child still transitioning off their own coverage — jumped from $910 to $1,820 per month. The explanation in the paperwork cited “carrier adjustments and regional cost escalation.”
And then, in March 2025, a home inspector she’d hired to assess some water damage in the basement handed her a report she described as “reading like a horror novel.” The flat roof over the rear addition needed full replacement. The original HVAC system — not the commercial units she serviced for a living, but her own aging home system — had reached end of life. The basement drainage issue was structural. Total estimated repair cost: $23,400.
What She Looked for — and What She Actually Found
When I asked Janine what her first instinct was after she added up the numbers, she paused for a long moment. “I made a spreadsheet,” she said. “I’m a practical person. I figured there had to be some combination of things — programs, credits, something — that could close the gap. So I started looking.”
What she found was a patchwork of programs that each addressed a corner of her problem without solving the whole picture. The first thing she researched was the IRS Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit — the same credit I’d written about that drew her comment in the first place. Under Section 25C of the tax code, homeowners can claim up to $1,200 per year for qualifying energy efficiency improvements, including HVAC systems. Replacing her aging central air and heating unit with a qualifying high-efficiency model would make her eligible for a credit of up to $600 on the system itself, plus additional amounts for other components.
She also looked into the Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D, though her home’s configuration made solar installation impractical. More useful, she told me, was discovering that the State of Illinois runs a Department of Human Services program called the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program — but when she looked at the income thresholds, she didn’t qualify. Her household income, even reduced, put her above the ceiling for most direct assistance programs.
The insurance piece was, by her account, the most frustrating. She spent several evenings in February 2025 on the HealthCare.gov marketplace, trying to determine whether she could find comparable coverage at a lower premium. What she found was that marketplace plans in her coverage area carried premiums that, for her family configuration, ranged from $1,650 to $2,100 per month — in some cases more expensive than her employer plan, without the same network breadth she needed for ongoing specialist visits her husband required.
The Turning Point — and It Wasn’t the One She Expected
The moment things started to shift, Janine told me, wasn’t a program or a credit. It was a conversation with a tax preparer she’d used for over a decade, a CPA in her neighborhood who sat her down in March 2025 and walked her through something she hadn’t fully absorbed: she was 65. Medicare eligibility had begun. And she was still on her employer’s plan — paying $1,820 a month — when she could be transitioning to Medicare Part A and Part B for a fraction of that cost.
“I just hadn’t thought about it,” she said, and I could hear genuine frustration in her voice — not at the system, but at herself. “I’ve been so focused on work that I never stopped to figure out what being 65 actually meant for my options.”
The Medicare transition alone saved her approximately $850 per month. It didn’t solve the problem — the home repairs still loomed, the lost overtime was still lost — but it reframed what was actually possible. “I went from feeling like I was drowning to feeling like I was treading water,” she told me. “Treading water is a lot better than drowning.”
The Numbers That Remain — and What Janine Still Carries
When I spoke with Janine again in early 2026 to follow up before writing this piece, she was measured about where things stood. The roof had been replaced in October 2025 at a final cost of $14,200, paid through a combination of $8,000 from savings and a home equity line of credit at 7.4 percent interest. The basement drainage work — another $6,100 — was done in November. The HVAC replacement was scheduled for April 2026, timed deliberately to fall in a tax year where she could claim the full Section 25C credit.
The home equity debt bothered her. She said it plainly, without editorializing. “I have debt on a house I’ve owned for 27 years. That’s not where I planned to be at 65.”
She was not bitter about this — or if she was, she kept it contained behind the same practical composure that defined every hour of our conversations. What she wanted, she said, was for people in similar positions to know that the programs existed and to chase them down anyway, even if the returns were partial.
What Janine’s Story Actually Tells Us
I’ve covered economic relief programs for several years now, and the pattern Janine described — too much income for direct aid, too little cushion to absorb compounding costs — comes up more than almost any other theme in the reader stories I report on. The programs that exist are real and worth pursuing. The Section 25C credit is legitimate. Medicare eligibility is transformative for people who’ve been paying commercial premiums and haven’t made the switch. City and county home repair programs, even with waitlists, occasionally come through.
But Janine’s story also illustrates the limits of a patchwork system. She is a high earner by most definitions. She is also, right now, carrying home equity debt she didn’t expect, paying a premium for her husband’s standalone marketplace coverage, and watching her retirement savings grow more slowly than she’d planned because of a gap year that nobody built a program to address.
She is still working. She told me she plans to retire at 67, the full Social Security retirement age for her birth year. She’s not sure the math will hold. But she’s running the spreadsheet again, more carefully this time, and she is — in her words — “not drowning.”
For a woman who spent three decades believing she’d never need to look for a safety net, that is both less than she deserved and more than she feared she’d find.
Vivienne Marlowe Reyes is a Senior Tax & Stimulus Writer for American Relief. She covers economic relief programs, IRS policy, and the financial experiences of working Americans.
Related: My 2026 Tax Refund Showed ‘Processing’ for 31 Days — Here Is What the IRS Actually Told Me
Leave a Reply