Her Overtime Vanished and Her Car Loan Went Underwater — One IRS Credit Changed the Math

Roughly 40 percent of workers who depend on overtime pay say that income makes up more than 20 percent of their total household budget, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Labor. When that income disappears, the budget doesn’t just get tight — it breaks in quiet, compounding ways. That was the situation Linda Ochoa found herself in by the fall of 2024, and it took nearly a year before anything started to shift.

I first heard about Linda through a mutual friend at a neighborhood barbecue in South St. Louis last October. Our friend mentioned, almost in passing, that Linda had been dealing with a financial situation she couldn’t quite get out from under — lost hours, a car loan that no longer made sense, and a tax return that hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. I asked if she’d be willing to talk. She agreed, though she was clear she didn’t expect the conversation to lead anywhere useful. “I’ve kind of made peace with where I’m at,” she told me over the phone a week later. “I’m not angry about it. I’m just tired.”

How $8,400 in Overtime Pay Quietly Disappeared

When I sat down with Linda Ochoa at a coffee shop near her apartment in the Tower Grove South neighborhood, she brought a folder. Inside were pay stubs, a loan statement, and a printout of her 2023 tax return. She wasn’t disorganized — she was a woman who had been trying to manage something she couldn’t fully see.

Linda, 36, works as a home health aide, a job she’s held for seven years. Her base pay in 2023 came out to roughly $34,000 annually. But for three years before that, she had been regularly pulling overtime shifts — sometimes twelve to fifteen extra hours a week — which added approximately $8,400 to her annual income. She and her partner, who is currently finishing a degree and working part-time, had built their budget around that number without explicitly acknowledging they were doing it.

In late 2023, her employer cut overtime agency-wide, citing staffing restructuring. Linda’s hours dropped back to standard. “I didn’t even notice for the first two months,” she told me. “Then I looked at my account in January and thought, okay, something is wrong here. But I couldn’t figure out what had changed because nothing had changed. That was the problem.”

The auto loan was a separate wound. Linda had financed a 2020 Honda CR-V in early 2022, when used car prices were still inflated in the post-pandemic market. By 2024, the vehicle’s market value had dropped below what she owed — she estimated the gap at roughly $4,200, based on a dealer appraisal she’d gotten out of curiosity. She had no plans to sell the car; she needed it for work. But knowing she owed more than it was worth added a particular kind of dread to every monthly payment.

Filing Taxes on a Suddenly Different Income

When tax season arrived in early 2024, Linda filed using the same online software she’d used for years. She entered her W-2, took the standard deduction, and waited. Her refund came back at $312 — noticeably smaller than the $1,100 she’d received the prior year. She accepted it without questioning the math.

What Linda didn’t know — and what I explained to her only after doing my own research — was that her drop in income may have made her eligible, or more eligible, for the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC is a refundable federal tax credit specifically designed for low-to-moderate income workers. For tax year 2024, a single filer or a household without qualifying children with income below approximately $18,591 qualifies for some credit amount, and the credit phases out gradually for earners above that threshold, according to the IRS EITC guidelines.

Linda’s household situation was more complex. She is engaged but not yet married; her partner earns part-time income while in school. For 2024, they filed separately. That means Linda’s reported income of roughly $34,000 would not have qualified her for the EITC without qualifying children — the income ceiling for childless filers is significantly lower than for those with dependents. But the structure of the credit, and the question of how future filings might be affected by her income changes, was something she had never explored.

The Conversation That Shifted Something

Over the course of our two-hour conversation, Linda told me she had never used a tax professional. She had always filed herself, trusting the software to surface anything important. She didn’t know about the IRS Free File program, which allows taxpayers with incomes below $84,000 to file federal returns at no cost using guided software, according to IRS Free File information. She also hadn’t heard of Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites, which offer free in-person tax preparation for households earning under $67,000.

There is a VITA location less than two miles from her apartment. When I mentioned this, she went quiet for a moment. “So you’re telling me there’s a free tax place nearby and I’ve been paying $40 a year to do it myself and possibly getting it wrong,” she said. She wasn’t upset. She laughed, a short and tired laugh. “That is extremely on-brand for my life right now.”

Linda told me she planned to go to the VITA site before the 2025 filing deadline. She had already missed the 2024 filing window to potentially amend her 2023 return — that three-year window was still technically open, but she wasn’t sure it was worth the effort given what she now understood about her income ceiling. She said she would ask someone in person before deciding.

Where Things Stand Now, and What Linda Is Still Carrying

When I spoke with Linda again in late March 2026 to follow up, she told me she had visited the VITA site in January. A volunteer preparer reviewed her 2025 return — her income had remained close to the same $34,000 base — and confirmed she did not qualify for the EITC as a childless filer at her income level. But the preparer did identify a Saver’s Credit she had been eligible for in prior years and hadn’t claimed, related to contributions she had made to a small workplace retirement account. The recoverable amount for 2024 was modest — approximately $180 — but she filed an amended return anyway.

The car loan is still underwater. Linda has no plans to refinance — she looked into it, but the terms she was quoted didn’t improve her situation meaningfully. She is making payments and waiting for the gap to close on its own as she continues to pay down principal. “It’s just a number I know now,” she told me. “I used to not know it and that felt worse, somehow.”

Her partner is expected to finish school in December 2026. Linda said she tries not to build too many plans around that date, having learned what happens when a future income source doesn’t arrive on schedule. But she mentioned it with something that wasn’t quite optimism — more like a data point she was keeping in her peripheral vision.

What stayed with me after my conversations with Linda was not the dollar amounts, though they mattered. It was the particular exhaustion that comes not from catastrophe but from years of small miscalculations — a budget built on hours that disappeared, a credit unclaimed because no one explained it was there, a loan that made sense at the time and then didn’t. None of it was dramatic. All of it was heavy.

Linda Ochoa is not a cautionary tale. She is a person doing her job, filing her taxes, and trying to understand a system that wasn’t designed to be intuitive. The $180 amended refund was not a rescue. But she told me it felt like something. “It felt like I found a dollar in a coat pocket,” she said. “You didn’t need it to survive. But it means the coat was paying attention.”

Related: She Lost $11,000 in Overtime and Her Rent Rose 30% — Then She Found Out Her Health Plan Was the Real Problem

Related: Robert Yarbrough Filed His Taxes Expecting $3,400 Back. Then the IRS Sent Him a Letter That Changed Everything