He Almost Left $6,000 in Tax Credits on the Table Because He Thought He Made Too Much

Most people assume that if you have a steady job and a graduate degree, you’ve probably squeezed out of the safety net entirely. The truth is messier than that — and Donovan Chen-Ramirez’s story is proof.

I first encountered Donovan in the comments section of a piece I wrote last November about families who fall into the gap between “too much income” and “enough income.” His comment was three paragraphs long and ended with: “Nobody writes about people like us. We’re not poor enough for sympathy and not rich enough to actually be fine.” I saved it. A few weeks later, I reached out.

We spoke over two separate video calls in late January 2026, a few weeks before he filed his 2025 taxes. Donovan is 32, works the front desk at a midscale hotel chain in El Paso, Texas, and brings home roughly $52,000 a year. His wife, Priya, stays home with their three children — ages 4, 7, and 9 — partly by necessity, partly because childcare in their area would consume nearly a full paycheck. On paper, their household looks functional. In practice, they were running on fumes.

The Child Support Gap Nobody Talks About

Priya has a child from a previous relationship — the 9-year-old, whose father is legally obligated to pay $700 per month in child support. He hasn’t paid consistently in over a year. By the time Donovan and I spoke in January 2026, the family was owed approximately $8,400 in arrears, with no enforcement action producing actual money.

“The court order exists. The obligation exists. The money does not,” Donovan told me, with the flat tone of someone who had long since stopped expecting outrage to change anything. “We’ve filed complaints. We’ve worked with the attorney general’s office. And every month, we just absorb it.”

On top of the child support gap, Donovan carries $38,000 in student loan debt from a master’s degree in hospitality management he completed in 2019. Monthly payments resumed in full after the federal payment pause ended, adding roughly $390 to their monthly obligations. Their budget, as Donovan walked me through it, left approximately $180 at the end of a normal month — and nothing at the end of a bad one.

The Assumption That Almost Cost Him $6,000

Here’s where Donovan’s story takes a turn that surprised even him. For two consecutive tax years — 2023 and 2024 — he had filed his taxes using a basic online software platform and had not claimed the full Child Tax Credit he was entitled to. He assumed, based on what he described as “a vague memory from reading something online,” that the credit phased out at income levels his household had crossed.

He was partially right, and mostly wrong. The Child Tax Credit of $2,000 per qualifying child begins to phase out for married couples filing jointly at $400,000 in modified adjusted gross income — a threshold his family was nowhere near. For tax year 2025, with three qualifying children, Donovan’s family was potentially eligible for up to $6,000 in Child Tax Credits, a portion of which can be refundable through the Additional Child Tax Credit provision.

When I asked Donovan how the confusion had persisted for two years, he laughed — a tired laugh. “I work 45 hours a week,” he said. “I’m trying to find side gigs on weekends. I’m not sitting down with the IRS manual. I trusted what the software auto-populated and I moved on.” His 2023 and 2024 returns, as he later confirmed with a tax professional, had correctly claimed the credit — but he hadn’t understood what he was receiving or why, so his assumption of ineligibility had never been tested against the actual numbers.

What Happened When He Finally Sat Down With a Professional

In late January 2026, Donovan — at his wife’s insistence — booked an appointment with a certified tax preparer through the IRS VITA program, which offers free tax preparation for households earning under $67,000. He had never used a human preparer before. He described the appointment as “the most useful two hours I’ve spent on money stuff in years.”

The preparer identified several items Donovan had either underclaimed or misunderstood. Beyond the Child Tax Credit, she walked him through the Earned Income Tax Credit — which, for a married couple with three children and an adjusted gross income in his range, provided an additional benefit. She also reviewed whether any of his student loan interest was deductible, which it was, up to $2,500 under the student loan interest deduction, subject to income phase-outs.

The Outcome — and What Donovan Wishes He Had Known Sooner

Donovan’s 2025 federal tax return resulted in a refund of approximately $5,340 — a combination of withholding, the Child Tax Credit, and the Additional Child Tax Credit refundable portion. The Earned Income Tax Credit added another layer of benefit. He described the moment he saw the projected number on the preparer’s screen as “surreal.”

“I sat there thinking about the last two years,” he told me. “I wasn’t leaving money on the table in those years, but I didn’t understand what I was actually getting. And I realized — if I had filed differently, if I had made a different mistake, I could have. That was scary.”

The refund won’t fix everything. The $8,400 in unpaid child support is still owed. The student loan balance didn’t shrink. But Donovan told me that the refund let them pay off one high-interest credit card they had been carrying since 2023, establish a small emergency fund for the first time, and buy new school shoes for all three kids — something Priya had been putting off since September.

“It sounds small,” Donovan said. “But my wife cried when we bought those shoes. Because it wasn’t a sacrifice. We just bought them.”

The Regret That Lingers

There is a version of this story that ends cleanly — family discovers credits, gets refund, problem solved. That’s not quite Donovan’s version. When I asked him what he wished he had done differently, he was quiet for a moment before answering.

“I should have done this three years ago. When I had the student loans and we had just had our third kid and everything felt impossible — I white-knuckled it. I didn’t ask for help because I thought we weren’t the kind of family that needed help,” he said. “That pride cost us real money. I can’t get those years back.”

He’s already signed up for the VITA appointment for next year’s filing. He’s also been sharing the program’s information in the employee break room at his hotel — he told me two coworkers have since used it.

As I wrapped up our second call, Donovan mentioned he had just picked up a weekend side gig doing event setup at a local convention center. Restless, still. But a little less desperate than before.

The gap between what families are owed by the tax code and what they actually claim is enormous — and it doesn’t always fall along the lines of sophistication or education. Sometimes it falls along the lines of exhaustion, assumption, and the quiet shame of believing you’re supposed to have figured this out already. Donovan Chen-Ramirez had a graduate degree and still almost missed $6,000. That should tell us something.

Vivienne Marlowe Reyes is Senior Tax & Stimulus Writer at American Relief. This article reflects one individual’s experience and does not constitute financial or tax advice.

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