Roughly 1 in 5 eligible Americans fails to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit each filing season, according to the IRS — leaving an estimated $7 billion in unclaimed refunds sitting on the table every year. That statistic felt abstract to me until a Tuesday evening in January 2026, when I ran into Felicia Tran in the formula aisle of a Harris Teeter in Raleigh’s Oberlin Village neighborhood.
She was holding two cans of toddler formula, doing mental math under her breath. When I mentioned I covered economic relief programs for a living, she laughed — not happily. “I could use some of that,” she said. We ended up talking for forty minutes in the parking lot, and I asked if I could follow up properly. She agreed.
What Felicia described over the next two months — the sleepless calculations, the guilt, the refund she almost never knew she was owed — was a story I’ve heard variations of dozens of times. But rarely with this many moving pieces, and rarely from someone so reluctant to admit how hard things actually were.
A Budget That Left No Room for Error
When I sat down with Felicia Tran at a coffee shop near her apartment in late January 2026, the first thing she did was pull out her phone and open a budgeting spreadsheet. She’d built it herself. Every line was color-coded — red for non-negotiables, yellow for things she was “working on.” There was a lot of red.
Felicia is 26, a marketing manager at a small SaaS startup in Raleigh’s Research Triangle corridor. Her gross salary is $38,500 a year — a number she described as “better than nothing and worse than I need.” She earned a Master’s in Marketing Communications from NC State in May 2022, and left with $67,400 in federal student loan debt. Her monthly loan payment under the SAVE income-driven repayment plan had been $0 since the plan was administratively paused following federal court injunctions in 2025 — but she knew that wouldn’t last, and the uncertainty weighed on her.
Her two-year-old son, Leo, attends a licensed daycare center two miles from her apartment. That costs her $1,100 a month — $13,200 a year. Her younger sister Maya is a sophomore at UNC Wilmington, and Felicia sends her $400 a month toward books, groceries, and the small expenses that financial aid never quite covers.
“I don’t really think about what I want,” Felicia told me. “I think about what Leo needs, what Maya needs, what the loan servicer is going to want when payments restart. My needs are kind of last.” She said it plainly, without self-pity. That fierceness — the kind that makes someone color-code a spreadsheet at midnight instead of asking for help — had also made her reluctant to dig into tax benefits she assumed didn’t apply to her.
Two Years of Filing — and Two Years of Leaving Money Behind
For the 2023 and 2024 tax years, Felicia filed her own federal return using a basic online tool. She filed as Head of Household, claimed Leo as a dependent, and received a modest refund — around $160 the first year, $195 the second. She thought that was normal. She thought that was all she was entitled to.
She had never claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit. She had never claimed the Additional Child Tax Credit. And she had never claimed the Child and Dependent Care Credit — even though she was spending over $13,000 a year on qualifying daycare expenses.
“I think I assumed it was for people who were really struggling,” Felicia said. “Like, I have a job with a salary and benefits. I thought that meant I didn’t qualify.” She paused. “Nobody ever told me otherwise.”
She’s not alone in that assumption. The IRS estimates that roughly 20 percent of eligible workers skip the EITC each year, often because of confusion about eligibility rules, fear of making an error, or simply not knowing the credit exists in the form that it does. For a single mother earning under $46,000 with one qualifying child, the math can be significant.
The Turning Point: A VITA Appointment in February 2026
In early February 2026, a coworker mentioned offhandedly that she’d used a free tax preparation service through a community center and gotten a much larger refund than expected. Felicia looked it up that night and found the IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program — VITA — which offers free, IRS-certified tax prep to people earning roughly $67,000 or less.
She made an appointment at a VITA site hosted by a nonprofit financial counseling organization in Raleigh for February 14th. She brought Leo’s daycare invoices, her W-2, her student loan interest statement, and Maya’s enrollment verification.
Felicia told me the volunteer — a retired accountant named Gerald — went through each line methodically. When he showed her the total, she made him recalculate it twice. “I kept thinking there had to be a mistake,” she said. “I sat there staring at the number like it was going to change if I looked away.” It didn’t change.
What $3,847 Actually Meant — and What It Couldn’t Fix
The refund hit Felicia’s bank account on March 22nd, 2026. She had decided in advance exactly where it was going: $1,200 to a small emergency fund she’d been trying to build for eighteen months, $900 toward two months of ahead-of-schedule student loan payments before the SAVE plan repayment situation resolved itself, and $600 to cover Maya’s spring semester textbooks and a laptop battery replacement. The remaining $1,147 went toward a dental bill she’d been deferring since October.
There was grief underneath the relief, too. When I asked Felicia what she thought about the two prior years of unclaimed credits, she went quiet for a moment. “I think about what I could have done with $7,000 — or whatever it would have been,” she said slowly. “For two years, I was the one leaving money on the table, and I didn’t even know it. That’s hard to sit with.”
She also acknowledged that the SAVE plan uncertainty hasn’t gone away. Her $67,400 balance remains paused, and she doesn’t know what her monthly payment will be when — or if — the program resumes under current litigation. The refund helped. It didn’t resolve the thing underneath it.
“Maya graduates in two years,” Felicia said, almost as a closing thought. “When she’s done, maybe I can breathe a little. Maybe I can start thinking about what I actually want. Right now I just try to get through the week.”
What Felicia’s Story Reveals About a Systemic Gap
Felicia’s experience isn’t unusual — that’s the part that stayed with me after our conversations ended. She is educated, employed, and reasonably financially literate. She built a color-coded budget. She knew what the EITC was, in a general sense. And she still missed it for two full years because no one ever sat down with her and walked through what she specifically qualified for.
The IRS’s VITA program served roughly 3.7 million taxpayers in fiscal year 2024, according to IRS data — a meaningful number, but a fraction of the population that qualifies for free assistance. Many eligible filers simply don’t know the program exists, or assume the process is complicated, or, like Felicia, assume they earn too much to benefit.
When I last spoke with Felicia in late March 2026, she was already thinking about next tax year differently. She’d saved her VITA appointment confirmation, photographed all of Leo’s daycare receipts into a folder on her phone, and set a calendar reminder for January to book early. She was, in her words, “not going to let Gerald find another pile of money I forgot to claim.”
She laughed when she said it. It was the first time she laughed during any of our conversations. It was, I thought, well earned.
Vivienne Marlowe Reyes is a Senior Tax & Stimulus Writer at American Relief. She covers economic relief programs, federal tax credits, and the financial experiences of working Americans.
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