What does it mean to be financially squeezed when your income looks fine on paper? When I first posed that question to myself, I didn’t have a clean answer. Then I met Sonia Castillo.
I was riding along with a Meals on Wheels volunteer crew in Cleveland’s West Side last November — a story I was working on about food insecurity and senior isolation. Between stops, the driver, a retired postal worker named Gerald, started talking about his neighbors. He mentioned a young woman on his street: a construction foreman, married, one kid with serious medical needs, making decent money but barely holding it together. “She’s not the type to ask for help,” Gerald said. “That’s exactly why her situation is so bad.”
I asked Gerald if he’d pass along my contact information. Two weeks later, Sonia Castillo called me. We met at a coffee shop near her home in Cleveland’s Old Brooklyn neighborhood on a Thursday morning in December 2025, and she spent nearly two hours walking me through a financial reality that was equal parts frustrating and illuminating.
A Good Income That Wasn’t Keeping Pace
Sonia, 29, has worked in construction since she was 22. She moved up to foreman at a mid-size commercial contractor three years ago, and by 2025, she was pulling in roughly $108,000 a year — a salary that puts her well above the median household income in Cuyahoga County. Her husband, Marcus, works part-time as a home health aide, bringing in approximately $21,000 annually. Together, they clear around $129,000 before taxes.
That number sounds comfortable. But Sonia was quick to reframe it. “People see what I make and they think I’ve got it figured out,” she told me, wrapping both hands around her coffee cup. “They don’t see what leaves before I ever touch it.”
Their daughter, Marisol, is seven years old and was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition at age two. She requires daily physical and occupational therapy, specialized adaptive equipment, and — because Marcus scaled back his hours to care for her — the household essentially operates as if one adult is working full-time without pay. Her care is the family’s organizing principle, and it shapes every financial decision they make.
The insurance situation is what finally broke the dam. Sonia’s employer-sponsored family health plan, which covered Marisol’s extensive care needs, renewed in January 2025 at $2,214 per month — up from $1,102 the prior year. That’s an increase of $1,112 a month, or more than $13,000 annually in additional out-of-pocket costs, almost overnight.
When the Roof Became the Last Straw
Sonia and Marcus bought their house in Old Brooklyn in 2021 for $187,000. It was a fixer-upper, and they knew it. What they didn’t know was that the previous owner had patched over significant structural damage to the roof — damage that revealed itself fully during a heavy ice storm in February 2025.
“We had a contractor come out in March,” Sonia told me. “He said the whole thing needs to come off. Full replacement. He quoted us $18,400.” She paused. “I almost laughed. Not because it was funny.”
They applied for a home repair loan through their credit union in April 2025. They were denied — not because of their credit score, which Sonia described as “solid,” but because of their debt-to-income ratio after accounting for the new insurance premiums. They looked at a home equity line of credit. The rates in mid-2025 made that option painful. They sat on it.
Meanwhile, Sonia kept working side hustles: weekend project management consulting for small residential contractors, occasional overtime, a brief stint selling handmade furniture online with Marcus. “I’m always looking for the next lane,” she said. “I can’t sit still when something’s not working.” None of it was adding up fast enough.
The Discovery That Shifted Everything
The turning point came in September 2025, when Sonia attended a free financial literacy workshop hosted by a nonprofit in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood. She went, she admitted, mostly because someone handed her a flyer and there was free parking. What she heard changed her approach to tax season entirely.
A tax professional presenting at the workshop walked through several federal provisions that frequently go unclaimed by families in Sonia’s income bracket. The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit — which, according to the IRS, allows eligible taxpayers to claim a credit on qualifying care expenses up to $3,000 for one dependent or $6,000 for two or more — caught her attention immediately.
More specifically, Sonia learned about the interaction between her employer’s Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account (FSA), which she had never maximized, and the broader credit. She also learned that out-of-pocket medical expenses exceeding 7.5% of adjusted gross income could be itemized as deductions under the IRS medical expense rules. Given Marisol’s therapy costs and equipment — Sonia estimated those at roughly $14,800 in 2025 — that threshold was within reach.
She also learned about the ABLE Act — the Achieving a Better Life Experience program — which allows individuals with qualifying disabilities and their families to open tax-advantaged savings accounts without affecting eligibility for certain federal benefits. Ohio has its own ABLE program, STABLE Account, which Sonia had never heard of before that evening.
What the Numbers Actually Looked Like
Sonia hired a CPA in October 2025 to do a full review of her tax situation before year-end — something she’d never done before, always relying on tax prep software. The CPA’s initial projection was striking.
When Sonia filed her 2025 federal return in February 2026, the outcome was a refund of approximately $3,800 — compared to the $411 she’d received the prior year. It wasn’t a windfall. But it was real money, and it was the clearest sign yet that she had been leaving significant value on the table for years.
“My CPA told me I probably missed around $4,500 in deductions in 2024 alone just by not itemizing,” Sonia said. “I just assumed the standard deduction was always better. Nobody ever told me to run both scenarios.”
Where Things Stand Now
When I followed up with Sonia in late March 2026, the roof still hadn’t been replaced. The refund went into a dedicated savings account — Sonia calls it her “infrastructure fund” — alongside money from her side consulting work. She estimates she’ll have enough to begin the project by late summer 2026 if nothing else breaks.
The insurance situation has not improved. Her family plan renewed again in January 2026 at $2,310 per month. Sonia said she spent three weeks in late 2025 shopping alternatives on the federal marketplace and through associations tied to her contractor’s union, but found nothing that adequately covered Marisol’s specialists at a lower premium. She’s staying put for now.
What lingers with me from my conversations with Sonia is how thoroughly the assumption of sufficiency can work against people. She earns a salary that disqualifies her from most need-based assistance. She is organized, driven, resourceful. And she still spent years filing taxes incorrectly for her situation — not out of negligence, but because the complexity of the tax code rewards those who know where to look.
According to the IRS, millions of taxpayers fail to claim the full value of dependent care provisions each year. The dollar amounts are modest by comparison to the challenges families like Sonia’s carry. But as she put it the last time we spoke: “Every dollar I keep is a dollar I don’t have to hustle for twice.”
She had to get back to a job site. She pulled on her jacket, dropped a tip on the table, and walked out into a cold Cleveland morning. The roof was still waiting. But she knew, at least, what she was working with.
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