Have you ever checked your bank balance and felt a kind of low-grade shame that follows you through the whole workday? That quiet dread of knowing the number before you even look?
I found Marcus Trujillo the way I find a lot of people — scrolling through a Facebook group, this one nominally for retirees navigating government benefits, where younger members sometimes wander in looking for answers nobody else seems to have. His post was short and specific: he wanted to know whether a part-time income gap from the previous year would affect his federal tax return. Something about the precision of the question caught my attention. I sent him a direct message, and he replied within ten minutes.
When I sat down with Marcus Trujillo at a coffee shop near his apartment in east San Jose in late February 2026, he was wearing his brown UPS uniform, just off a shift. He was 26 years old, freshly divorced, no children, and in the middle of what he called “rebuilding from scratch.” He had his phone on the table with the IRS2Go app open.
The Financial Hole a Divorce Can Leave at 26
Marcus had married at 23. By 25, the marriage was over, and the financial wreckage was real. He told me the divorce cost him roughly $6,200 in legal fees — money he charged across two credit cards he could no longer keep up with. Both went to collections by mid-2024.
“My credit score hit 520,” Marcus told me, almost laughing. “I know that number by heart. It’s like a bad grade you can’t stop thinking about.”
His income as a full-time UPS driver was approximately $41,000 for 2024, but that number was misleading. For roughly four months of that year — January through April — he had been working part-time only, pulling in around $1,100 per month while the divorce proceedings dragged on and his hours were limited. The income swing made budgeting nearly impossible.
“You can’t plan anything when you don’t know what’s coming in,” he said. “I’d have one good week and think I was okay. Then a car repair, and I’m back to zero.”
The Tax Credit He Almost Ignored
Marcus told me he almost didn’t file his 2024 return. He assumed, based on nothing more than anxiety and bad past experiences, that he either owed money or would receive something negligible — maybe $200. He had filed late in 2023 and owed $318, which had stung him enough to make the whole subject feel dangerous.
A coworker mentioned the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) during a break in December 2025. Marcus said he’d heard the name but always assumed it was “for people with kids.” That assumption, he would later learn, was only partially true.
Marcus earned approximately $41,000 in 2024, which placed him above the childless EITC income limit — but the four months of part-time earnings changed the calculation. His adjusted gross income, after accounting for certain deductions, came in lower than he expected when he finally sat down with a free tax preparer through the IRS’s VITA program in January 2026.
Sitting Down With a VITA Volunteer Changed the Numbers
The Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program — VITA — offers free federal tax preparation for people who generally earn $67,000 or less per year. Marcus found a site at a community center about two miles from his apartment. He went on a Saturday morning in mid-January 2026, expecting to spend maybe an hour there and leave with bad news.
He spent nearly two hours with the VITA volunteer, a retired accountant named Patricia who Marcus described as “patient in a way that didn’t feel fake.” She walked him through every line. His part-time income period, his student loan interest payments of roughly $890 for the year, and a small deductible expense related to a work-required uniform purchase all factored into a return that looked very different from what Marcus had feared.
His federal refund came to $1,847. California’s state return added another $314.
What $2,161 Actually Did — and What It Didn’t
The refund deposited on February 4, 2026. Marcus told me he stared at his bank account for about three minutes before closing the app.
He used $1,200 of it to pay down the smaller of his two collection accounts — a credit card balance that had ballooned to $1,380 after fees. He negotiated a settlement for $1,200, and the account was marked satisfied. He paid $400 toward his car insurance, which he had let lapse to a reduced plan. The remaining $561 went into a savings account he had opened specifically for emergencies — his first savings account in two years.
“I know it doesn’t fix everything,” Marcus told me, leaning back in his chair. “I still have the other credit card. I still have a bad score. But I feel like I did something real for the first time in a long time. That matters.”
The second collection account — roughly $2,900 — remains unresolved. His credit score, as of March 2026, sits at 548. The jump of 28 points came entirely from the satisfied account. It is progress, but it is slow, and Marcus knows it.
The Larger Picture Behind One Driver’s Return
Marcus’s story is not unusual in its structure, even if the details are his own. According to the IRS, roughly one in five eligible workers fails to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit each year. The agency estimates that figure represents billions of dollars in unclaimed credits annually — money that workers are legally entitled to but either don’t know about or are too intimidated to pursue.
The VITA program served approximately 3.2 million returns in the most recent reporting period, but demand consistently outpaces capacity in high-cost urban areas like San Jose, where the cost of living amplifies financial stress at every income level.
What struck me most about Marcus’s situation was not the refund amount — $2,161 is meaningful but not life-altering on its own. What struck me was the gap between what he was entitled to and what he almost accepted: nothing. He came within days of filing a basic return himself, missing the deductions entirely, and likely receiving far less or even owing money.
He plans to file earlier next year — January if possible — and has already bookmarked the VITA site locator on his phone. He is cautiously tracking his credit score through a free monitoring app, watching the number move one point at a time.
When I left the coffee shop, Marcus was heading back to his truck. He had an afternoon route to finish. He waved without looking back, and I thought about what he’d said near the end of our conversation: that he was hopeful but not confident, that hope and confidence felt like two very different things at 26. He was right. They are.
Related: My 2026 Tax Refund Showed ‘Processing’ for 31 Days — Here Is What the IRS Actually Told Me
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