Most people assume that if you work hard, pay your taxes, and follow the rules, the system will treat you fairly in a crisis. Monique Peralta followed every one of those rules — and the system still left her standing in a leaking kitchen, staring at a denial letter from her employer’s insurance carrier. The paperwork said her workers’ compensation claim lacked sufficient evidence. Her back said otherwise.
I first connected with Monique in February 2025 through Pastor Marcus Webb of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Louisville’s Shively neighborhood. Pastor Webb had reached out after learning that American Relief was reporting on how working-class families navigate the gap between what government relief programs promise and what they actually deliver. He told me there was a woman in his congregation who had been through the wringer and deserved to have her story told right. He was correct.
A November Injury That Changed Everything
When I sat down with Monique Peralta at a folding table in the church fellowship hall, she had a folder thick with documents — medical records, denial letters, contractor estimates, and tax forms — organized with the precision of someone who had learned the hard way that paperwork is survival.
She had been driving a delivery route for FedEx for nearly six years, earning approximately $36,000 a year before overtime. On November 18, 2024, she was carrying a stack of packages up a wet driveway in eastern Louisville when she slipped. The fall compressed two vertebrae in her lower back. She finished the shift anyway, because she felt she had no choice.
On January 9, 2025, the denial letter arrived. The employer’s insurer cited a gap between the date of injury and her first medical visit as grounds for questioning whether the injury was work-related. Monique told me she had no money to hire a workers’ comp attorney, and the free legal aid clinic in Jefferson County had a six-week waitlist.
Meanwhile, her roof — already patchy from a storm in the summer of 2023 — had begun leaking into the hallway outside her daughter Camille’s bedroom. Camille, 14, has a developmental disability requiring round-the-clock supervision. A local contractor estimated the repair at $8,400. Monique had $212 in her checking account.
When the Damage Compounds
What makes financial crises at this income level so devastating is not any single problem — it is the way problems stack on top of one another. Monique’s credit score, which she described as sitting around 574, had been dinged by a medical debt from 2022 that went to collections before she even knew it had been sent. That score made a home equity loan effectively impossible.
Monique told me she had not filed her 2024 taxes yet when we spoke. She had been putting it off, partly from exhaustion and partly because she assumed she owed money. Her husband Terrence, who works part-time doing landscaping, had brought in roughly $14,000 that year. Together, their household income sat at approximately $50,000 — squarely in the range where the IRS Earned Income Tax Credit can deliver a meaningful refund, especially for families with qualifying dependents.
She had been eligible for the EITC for years. She had not claimed it correctly — or at all — in at least two previous filing cycles, she told me, because she used a free tax prep software that she found confusing and had abandoned partway through.
The Turning Point: A Volunteer and a Tax Form
Pastor Webb had connected Monique with a volunteer through the AARP Foundation Tax-Aide program, which provides free in-person tax preparation for low-to-moderate income filers. The volunteer, a retired accountant named Gerald, spent three hours going through Monique’s documents in early February 2025.
What Gerald found was a refund Monique had not anticipated. Filing jointly with Terrence and claiming Camille as a qualifying dependent for both the EITC and the Child Tax Credit, the household was entitled to a combined federal refund of $3,847. The return was filed on February 14, 2025. The refund arrived via direct deposit on March 4.
Gerald also flagged something Monique had not known: Kentucky participates in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which in some counties includes a small home repair component for heating-related structural issues. Because Monique’s roof leak was affecting the insulation of the home, the local community action agency determined she was eligible for an emergency weatherization referral. That did not cover the full $8,400 repair, but it covered approximately $2,100 of the most urgent patching work.
What the Refund Did — and What It Couldn’t Fix
Monique used $1,200 of the refund as a down payment toward the remaining roof repairs. Another $800 went to pay down the medical debt in collections, which her creditor agreed to settle at a reduced amount. She set aside $600 for Camille’s therapy co-pays through the spring. The rest — roughly $1,247 — went into a savings account for the first time in her adult life.
But I want to be careful about how I tell this part of the story, because Monique herself was careful about it when we spoke. The workers’ comp appeal is still pending. Her back still hurts every shift. The roof still needs another $6,300 in structural work that the weatherization program does not cover. Her credit score has not yet recovered.
She told me she wishes she had known about AARP Tax-Aide years earlier. She also told me she is nervous the workers’ comp appeal will fail, and that one bad shift — one more fall, one more rainstorm through a still-damaged roof — could undo everything the refund bought her.
What Monique’s Story Says About the System
Reporting on families like Monique’s, I keep running into the same structural gap: the programs that could help them most require the most navigation to access. The EITC has existed since 1975. The Child Tax Credit has been law since 1997. LIHEAP has weatherization components that most recipients never hear about. None of these required Monique to be exceptional — she just needed someone to sit across a table and walk her through the forms.
Pastor Webb told me after our visit that he has three other families in his congregation in similar situations. He has started hosting a quarterly tax prep day in the church basement. It is not a policy solution. But it is something.
When I left Cornerstone Baptist that afternoon, Monique was helping stack chairs after a Wednesday Bible study. Her back brace was visible beneath her jacket. She waved at me from across the room with the kind of tired, specific optimism that belongs only to people who have been genuinely scared and have found, at least for now, a narrow path through.
Her workers’ comp appeal has not been resolved. Her roof still needs work. But she filed her taxes on time, claimed every dollar she was owed, and her daughter’s hallway is dry. For February 2025, that had to be enough.
Vivienne Marlowe Reyes is a Senior Tax & Stimulus Writer at American Relief. She covers how federal and state relief programs reach — and fail to reach — working Americans.
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