Most people assume that a blended household — two sets of kids, two sets of histories, an ex-spouse who pays child support on his own schedule — automatically disqualifies a family from the full picture of tax relief available to them. After spending an afternoon with Carlos Mendez in Miami, I can tell you that assumption is costing real families thousands of dollars a year.
Carlos is 55 years old. He manages a mid-size restaurant in Brickell, earns less than he did before the pandemic, and is raising four children alongside his wife in a house where the budget is recalculated every single month. He is not a man who complains easily. But when I asked him how the last five years had felt, he paused for a long moment before answering.
The Year the Restaurant Closed
When I spoke with Carlos Mendez about the timeline, he was precise in a way that told me he’d replayed these months many times. The restaurant where he had worked as a general manager for eleven years closed in April 2020. By June, his unemployment benefits had come through — approximately $275 per week under Florida’s standard unemployment insurance, later supplemented by the federal $600-per-week FPUC boost that ran through July 2020 under the CARES Act.
But the enhanced federal unemployment benefits expired and restarted in fits and starts. By the time the Lost Wages Assistance program offered an additional $300 per week in late 2020, Carlos had already started drawing down the savings account he’d spent a decade building. The math never caught up.
He found a new position as a restaurant manager in early 2022 — but at a salary roughly $14,000 lower than what he’d earned before. His wife works in healthcare administration. Together, Carlos told me, they make enough to cover rent, groceries, utilities, and the basics for a household of six. What they don’t have is any cushion.
“We don’t go out. We don’t take vacations. The kids’ school clothes, the car insurance, the dentist — it all comes out of the same pool, and the pool is never full,” Carlos told me, matter-of-factly, without self-pity.
A Blended Family and an Unreliable Variable
Carlos’s two biological children live with him full-time. His wife’s two children — his stepchildren — also live in the household. Their father, his wife’s ex-husband, is court-ordered to pay child support, but the payments arrive inconsistently. Some months the money comes. Other months it doesn’t, and Carlos covers the gap without discussion.
“I’m not going to let those kids feel the difference,” he said. “They live in my house. They eat at my table. I don’t think of them as ‘hers’ — they’re ours.”
According to the Florida Department of Revenue’s Child Support Program, parents who are not receiving consistent payments can request enforcement services through the state, which has tools including income withholding orders, license suspensions, and tax refund interception. Carlos’s wife had initiated enforcement proceedings, but the process moved slowly, and in the meantime, the missing payments — sometimes $400, sometimes $600 a month — landed on their household budget like a recurring small emergency.
The Tax Filing That Changed the Numbers
For the first two years after returning to work, Carlos filed his taxes using a national chain tax prep service. He got refunds — modest ones, around $800 to $1,100 — and assumed that was roughly what he was owed. It wasn’t until a coworker mentioned a nonprofit free tax assistance program in Miami that he sat down with a volunteer preparer trained through the IRS’s VITA program (floridarevenue.com) and got a very different picture.
The preparer walked through his full household situation: four dependent children, combined household income in a range that qualified for both the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. What Carlos had been filing did not reflect either correctly.
As Carlos explained it to me, the preparer spent nearly two hours on his return. When they were done, the refund estimate on screen was not $900. It was closer to $6,400.
What Carlos’s Situation Actually Qualified For
The credits Carlos had been underutilizing are not obscure. They are among the most significant tax relief tools available to working families, and according to the IRS’s EITC Central, roughly one in five eligible taxpayers fails to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit every year, according to irs.gov.
For the 2025 tax year, the key figures break down as follows:
For Carlos’s household — married filing jointly with four qualifying dependents and an income in the range that falls within EITC phase-in and phase-out thresholds — the combined potential value of these credits is substantial. Stepchildren qualify under the same rules as biological children provided they meet the IRS’s residency, relationship, and age tests, all of which Carlos’s stepchildren satisfied.
The VITA preparer also flagged that Carlos may have been eligible to amend previous years’ returns. The IRS allows taxpayers to file an amended return using Form 1040-X within three years of the original filing deadline. For Carlos, that potentially meant recovering underclaimed credits from earlier years — a process he said he was still working through at the time we spoke.
Where Things Stand Now — and What’s Still Uncertain
When I followed up with Carlos several weeks after our initial conversation, the picture was mixed. The larger refund from his most recent return had arrived and went directly toward clearing a credit card balance that had accumulated during the months when child support didn’t come through. It was not a windfall. It was a reset to zero — which, he told me, felt like a lot.
The child support enforcement case remained open. The amended return for the prior year was in progress. His wife’s ex had paid two months in a row, which Carlos described with the careful optimism of someone who has been disappointed before.
“I don’t want to oversell it,” Carlos told me. “We’re still paycheck to paycheck. But now at least I know what we’re entitled to. That’s different from before. Before, I didn’t even know what questions to ask.”
What struck me sitting across from Carlos was not the amount of money involved — though for a family of six living on a budget with no margin, several thousand dollars is not an abstraction. What struck me was how ordinary his situation is, and how many families in the same position never connect with the programs designed to help them. He didn’t fall through the cracks because the cracks are unusual. He fell through them because they’re everywhere, and nobody handed him a map.
He turned 55 last November. He celebrated with his four kids at home. He made the dinner himself.
Related: She Rebuilt Her Finances After Divorce, according to firstpersonfinance.com. Then Medicare Left Her Mom’s $6,800 Monthly Care Bill Entirely on Her.
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