He Got a Raise and Still Couldn’t Fix His Roof — What a Boise Manager Learned About Energy Tax Credits

A 2024 Bankrate survey found that nearly 57% of American homeowners say they could not comfortably cover a major home repair without going into debt — a number that, on its surface, sounds like a problem for people who are struggling. It is not exclusively. As I learned on a Tuesday afternoon in a Boise, Idaho grocery store, some of the most financially squeezed homeowners are the ones who recently got a raise.

I was in the produce section of a Fred Meyer near downtown Boise when I struck up a conversation with Eddie Espinoza, 32, over a display of avocados neither of us could decide were ripe. We talked for nearly twenty minutes. By the time we reached the checkout line, he had told me about his roof, his new SUV, his wife Diane’s recent retirement, and a general sense of being vaguely, quietly underwater. “I’m not panicking,” he told me that day, half-laughing. “I just feel like I’m on a treadmill and someone keeps bumping up the speed.”

I followed up with Eddie the following week at a coffee shop near his home in Boise’s West Bench neighborhood. What he shared was a story I’ve encountered in different forms across the country: a person who earns a solid income, receives a meaningful raise, and somehow ends up with less financial breathing room than before.

When the Raise Changed Everything

Eddie has worked in retail management for nearly a decade. In March 2024, he was promoted to senior store manager at a large home goods chain, and his annual salary jumped from $68,000 to $89,500. “I thought — okay, now we can finally get ahead,” he told me. “I had this list in my head of everything we were going to fix and pay off.”

The list never got touched. Instead, a slow accumulation of small upgrades quietly reshaped their monthly budget. He and Diane traded in their aging sedan for a newer SUV — $627 a month in payments. They started eating out three or four times a week rather than once. They booked a trip to Cancún they had been postponing for years. Individually, none of these decisions felt reckless. Together, they absorbed somewhere between $1,800 and $2,200 of the raise before it ever reached a savings account.

Economists call this lifestyle inflation — the tendency for spending to rise in proportion to income, often without deliberate decision-making. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, this pattern is especially common among households that experience sudden income increases after a period of financial constraint, which describes the Espinoza household almost exactly.

A higher tax bracket absorbed part of the raise as well. Eddie’s net take-home increase turned out to be considerably less than the $21,500 gross difference suggested. By the time withholding adjusted and spending crept up, the raise had largely disappeared into the monthly current.

The House Was Already Sending Signals

Eddie and Diane purchased their three-bedroom ranch home in 2019 for $287,000. It was older construction but well-maintained, and the inspection report came back mostly clean. Within two years, small problems began surfacing — a door that wouldn’t seal, a utility bill that kept creeping upward, a basement that smelled faintly damp after heavy rain.

By late 2023, their HVAC unit — original to the house and at least 18 years old — was failing. Their roof, a 22-year-old asphalt shingle installation, had started showing granule loss and a pair of soft spots a contractor flagged during a free inspection visit. A hairline crack along the east wall of the basement, small but measurably widening, completed the inventory. Three separate contractors gave Eddie written estimates. The totals hit him hard.

• Roof replacement: $14,500
• Full HVAC system replacement: $8,200
• Foundation crack repair and waterproof sealing: $4,800

Roughly $27,500 in repairs that could not wait indefinitely. “I looked at those numbers and I just went quiet,” Eddie told me. “My wife asked me what was wrong and I didn’t know how to explain it. Like, we make good money. How do we not have $27,000?”

The answer lived in the gap between gross income and actual available cash. Their savings account held approximately $4,200 as of January 2025 — not enough to cover even the smallest of the three repairs without draining the account entirely. Diane’s retirement income, a modest pension of around $1,100 a month, helped with monthly expenses but offered no path toward a $14,000 lump-sum roof job.

Learning About Energy Tax Credits — Almost Too Late

In February 2025, the HVAC situation became urgent. A failing heating system in an Idaho winter is not a discretionary problem. Eddie took out a personal loan at 9.4% interest to cover the $8,200 cost and had a new heat pump installed by mid-February. He didn’t think much about tax implications at the time. He just needed heat.

It was a coworker — not an accountant, not a tax professional, but a fellow store manager named Priya — who mentioned the credit offhandedly during a break-room conversation in March 2025. Eddie had never heard of it. He went home that night and pulled up the IRS website. “I sat there reading it three times,” he said. “We just dropped $8,200 on a heat pump and there’s a federal credit for exactly that. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t known.”

He hadn’t missed the window. The heat pump installation qualified under IRS Form 5695, and when Eddie filed his 2025 tax return in early 2026, he claimed a credit of $2,000 — the maximum allowed for heat pump installations under current rules. It did not arrive as a check. But it reduced his federal tax liability by $2,000, and he directed the freed-up cash directly toward the loan’s principal balance.

Eddie is clear-eyed about what the $2,000 credit fixed and what it didn’t. The roof and foundation remain untouched. Their savings account, after the loan down payment and ongoing monthly payments, sat at roughly $2,800 in early April 2026. The heat pump runs well. The ceiling above it, held together by 22-year-old shingles, is a different story.

Where Things Stand — And What Eddie Would Do Differently

When I spoke with Eddie again in late March 2026, he described his financial life the way someone describes a low-grade headache: ever-present, not debilitating, but relentless. “I’ve stopped talking about it much,” he said. “I just know it’s there. The roof, the foundation — I know they’re waiting. I just put one foot in front of the other.”

That numbness is its own kind of signal. When I asked what he would do differently in the year after his raise, he didn’t hesitate. “I would have automated a savings transfer the day the bigger paycheck hit,” he said. “Before I could think about the car or the trip or any of it. Just move the money before you see it.”

He has since researched whether the roof replacement could trigger any federal credit. Under current IRS rules, standard architectural asphalt shingles do not qualify for the Residential Energy Credits. Only certain metal roofs and asphalt products with qualifying pigmented coatings that meet Energy Star specifications are eligible — a narrow category his contractor confirmed his planned shingles would not satisfy.

The foundation repair carries no applicable federal credit at all. That $4,800 must come from cash savings or another loan. Eddie’s current target is to have $6,000 in a dedicated home repair fund by December 2026. Whether that plan holds, given the household’s documented spending patterns, is something he acknowledges with a tired half-smile.

I drove back from that coffee shop thinking about the gap between what we earn and what we feel. Eddie Espinoza brings home nearly $90,000 a year in a city where the median household income sits around $62,000. By almost any external measure, he is doing well. But the house needs work he cannot afford, the personal loan is still being paid down, and the quiet resignation in his voice — “I’m more aware of it now, I guess” — is not what you’d expect from someone in his income bracket.

There are real tools available. The energy credits are not trivial — according to IRS guidance, they remain in effect through 2032 and carry no income ceiling. Eddie found $2,000 and was genuinely grateful for it. He also still has a $14,500 roof and $2,800 in savings. The credits helped at the margins. They did not fix the underlying arithmetic.

What stays with me about Eddie’s story isn’t any single number. It’s the tone — that flat, practiced calm of someone who has stopped expecting the situation to resolve itself, and is simply managing it one paycheck at a time. A raise was supposed to be the thing that changed everything. Instead it changed the car in the driveway and left the roof exactly where it was.

Related: She Got a Raise, Then Got Hurt at Work — Her Workers’ Comp Was Denied and She’s Still Paying for It

Related: Crystal Fitzgerald Filed Early, Owed Nothing, and Still Waited 61 Days for Her Refund — Here’s What Happened