Most working Americans assume that if they qualify for a government benefit, someone will tell them about it. That assumption is wrong, and it costs families thousands of dollars every year they never get back.
Corey Mendez learned this the hard way. When I first heard from him in January 2026, he had sent a message through our publication’s contact form after reading a piece I wrote about families navigating tax credits on single incomes. His note was short: “I think I’ve been leaving money on the table for years. Can we talk?” We arranged a phone call the following week, and that conversation stretched past two hours.
Corey is 45, a UPS driver based out of Atlanta, Georgia. He’s been with the company for eleven years. He and his wife, Renata, have one child — a nine-year-old son named Marcus, who has autism and requires full-time care. Renata cannot work outside the home. The financial architecture of their household was built on one income, and for years, a critical structural beam in that architecture was Corey’s overtime.
When the Overtime Disappeared
Corey told me that at his peak, he was pulling in roughly $640 extra per month in overtime — sometimes more during the holiday rush season. It wasn’t glamorous money. It was Marcus’s therapy copays, the family’s car insurance, and a small monthly contribution to a retirement account he’d opened through work. Over the course of a year, that overtime added up to approximately $7,500 to $8,000 in additional income.
Then, in the spring of 2025, his facility restructured shift assignments. Overtime dried up almost overnight.
“I sat down with our budget one Sunday night in April and I just stared at it,” Corey told me. “The numbers didn’t work anymore. I’d already cut everything I could cut. There was nothing left to cut.”
His base pay at the time was approximately $42,000 annually — well within the range that qualifies for several federal tax relief programs. But Corey, like millions of other working-class Americans, had never itemized his credits carefully. He filed his taxes with a basic software program, clicked through the prompts, and accepted whatever refund came back. He had no idea how much he might be missing.
The Credits He Had Been Overlooking
After the overtime loss, Corey started researching. He found our publication, read the earlier story, and reached out. When we spoke, I walked him through what he described — not to advise him, but to understand his situation well enough to report it accurately. What emerged was a picture of a family that had been significantly underclaiming federal tax credits for years.
The Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, is one of the largest anti-poverty tools in the federal tax code. According to the IRS, the credit can reach up to $7,430 for a family with one qualifying child in the 2025 tax year. Corey’s household income — now reduced by the overtime loss — placed him squarely in the qualifying range. But he told me he had never once had a preparer or software prompt walk him through whether he was maximizing it.
There was also the Child and Dependent Care Credit, which allows families to claim a percentage of qualifying care expenses for a dependent child under 13. Marcus’s after-school support program, which cost the Mendez family approximately $4,800 per year, may have been partially claimable — something Corey said he had never considered.
The Side Hustle Calculation — and Why It Complicated Things
Corey described himself to me as someone who is always looking for a way to stay ahead. After the overtime cut, he picked up weekend gig work — driving for a delivery app on Saturdays and occasionally selling refurbished electronics through an online marketplace. Between April and December 2025, he estimated he earned roughly $4,200 from those sources.
That hustle mentality, he admitted, created complications he hadn’t fully thought through.
Self-employment income — even from gig work — is subject to self-employment tax, which covers Social Security and Medicare contributions that an employer would normally split. According to the IRS, the self-employment tax rate is 15.3% on net earnings, though half of that amount is deductible. For Corey, that meant his $4,200 in gig income carried a tax obligation he hadn’t budgeted for — roughly $490 in additional self-employment tax.
When he sat down with a volunteer tax preparer through a local VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) site in February 2026 — a program the IRS offers free to households earning under $67,000 — the picture came into clearer focus. He had credits available he hadn’t used. He also had a small tax surprise from the gig work. The net effect was more complicated than either a windfall or a disaster.
The Outcome — and the Regret That Came With It
Corey’s 2025 return, once fully prepared, yielded a refund of approximately $2,100. That was larger than anything he’d received in the previous three years. It wasn’t the $7,500 the overtime had represented, but it was something — and it covered two months of Marcus’s therapy costs.
The harder part of our conversation came when Corey started doing the backward math. If he had been using a VITA preparer — or any preparer who walked carefully through available credits — for the past four or five years, what might he have claimed that he didn’t?
His retirement concern hasn’t gone away. He contributes roughly $80 per month to a 401(k) through his employer — far below what most retirement planning guidelines suggest for someone his age. The overtime had allowed him to occasionally bump that up; without it, he’s reverted to the minimum. He told me he’s 45 and feels like the clock is running faster than he expected.
“I used to think I had time,” he said. “Now I think about Marcus and what happens when Renata and I can’t take care of him. That’s a different kind of math. That’s not retirement — that’s survival planning.”
What Corey’s Story Reveals About the System’s Gaps
The IRS estimates that roughly one in five eligible taxpayers does not claim the Earned Income Tax Credit each year. According to IRS data, that amounts to billions of dollars left unclaimed annually — money that Congress specifically authorized to flow to working-class families but that never reaches them because of complexity, lack of awareness, or reliance on incomplete filing tools.
Corey’s situation illustrates exactly how that gap forms. He wasn’t careless. He filed his taxes every year. He just didn’t know what questions to ask or where to look, and the system didn’t prompt him to find out.
When I wrapped up my reporting on Corey’s situation, what stayed with me wasn’t the refund number or the credit calculations. It was the image of a 45-year-old man sitting with a Sunday-night budget spreadsheet, watching the arithmetic of his family’s security unravel in real time — and realizing he had spent years filing taxes without anyone in the system ever saying: did you know there’s more available to you?
He’s already planning differently for the 2026 tax year — tracking mileage from the gig work, saving documentation for Marcus’s care expenses, and planning to return to the VITA site in January rather than waiting until April. Whether that translates into a better outcome remains to be seen. But for the first time in a long time, he said he feels like he’s actually playing the game instead of just showing up.
That shift — from passive to active — may be the most important thing the overtime loss ultimately forced him to do.
Related: His $4,200 Tax Refund Was Seized Over a Loan He Cosigned — And He Never Saw It Coming
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