Roughly 40 million Americans report being victims of identity theft each year, according to the Federal Trade Commission. But that statistic does almost nothing to capture what it actually feels like to watch a credit score you spent years building collapse in the span of a few months — especially when a second financial blow lands at the same time.
I met Monique Pruitt on a Tuesday afternoon in late February 2026, at a pharmacy counter in Southeast Portland. She was asking the pharmacist quietly — the kind of quiet that signals embarrassment — whether there were any programs to help cover the cost of her monthly prescriptions. I was there picking up an inhaler refill. Something about the precision of her question made me linger. She clearly knew what she was looking for; she just wasn’t sure anyone could help her find it.
I introduced myself after she stepped away from the counter. She laughed a little when I mentioned I write about economic relief programs. “Well,” she said, “you might want to hear my story.”
A Barber Shop, a Budget, and Two Financial Disasters at Once
Monique Pruitt is 37 years old, married, and owns a small barber shop in the Woodstock neighborhood of Portland. Her daughter, Janelle, is 17 and applying to colleges this fall. On paper, the shop is hers — she built it from a rented chair in someone else’s space to a four-chair operation over nearly a decade. In practice, the margins are thin enough that any disruption feels like it could tip everything over.
When I sat down with Monique at a coffee shop two days after our pharmacy encounter, she walked me through the numbers without flinching. The shop clears roughly $3,100 to $3,400 a month after she pays her lease, supplies, and the part-time stylist she hired two years ago. Her husband works in warehouse logistics and brings home about $2,600 monthly. Together, they’re not poor by federal definitions — but in Portland’s cost environment, that income leaves almost no cushion.
The first disaster arrived in March 2024. Monique told me that someone — she still doesn’t know who — opened three credit cards in her name using a combination of her Social Security number and an old address. By the time she noticed the accounts on a credit monitoring alert, the fraudulent charges totaled $4,700. Disputing them took six months, two rounds of FTC identity theft reports, and more phone calls than she could count.
“I kept thinking, I’m a business owner. I pay my taxes. I do everything right,” she told me, holding her coffee with both hands. “And someone just — took something from me that I had no way to protect.”
The Cosigned Loan That Compounded Everything
The second blow came from a direction Monique trusted completely. In early 2023, her younger brother needed a vehicle to get to a new job. His credit wouldn’t qualify him for a loan alone, so Monique cosigned a $8,500 used car loan through a local credit union. He made payments for five months. Then the job fell through, the car was repossessed, and the remaining $7,500 balance landed squarely on Monique’s credit report.
Between the identity theft accounts and the cosigned loan default, Monique’s credit score dropped from 641 — which she’d built carefully over years — to 498 by the summer of 2024. At that level, she was denied a small business line of credit she’d applied for to replace aging equipment in the shop. She ended up borrowing $2,200 from her mother-in-law instead.
What struck me most in talking with Monique was how calmly she reported all of this. There was no drama in her delivery. She’s the kind of person who absorbs the hit and moves forward, which is both admirable and, honestly, a little heartbreaking — because it also means she often doesn’t stop to ask whether there’s help available.
What the Pharmacy Counter Actually Unlocked
The prescriptions that brought Monique to that pharmacy counter were for a thyroid condition diagnosed in 2022. Without assistance, her monthly medication costs ran to approximately $94. She’d been quietly trimming other expenses — fewer groceries, delayed car maintenance — to cover it.
The pharmacist that afternoon pointed her toward Oregon’s Oregon Health Plan supplemental resources and a manufacturer patient assistance program for her specific medication. Monique told me she’d assumed she made too much money to qualify for any of it. She was wrong. Between the two programs, her out-of-pocket prescription cost dropped to roughly $7 per month — a savings of about $87 monthly.
“I almost didn’t ask,” she said. “I almost just paid and left. I’ve been paying that full amount for almost two years.”
The FAFSA Concern and What Came Next
Once Monique started looking at what assistance programs her family might qualify for, she opened a door she’d been avoiding: her daughter’s college financial aid situation. Janelle had been accepted to two four-year programs and a community college. The family had filed a FAFSA for the 2026–2027 academic year, but Monique wasn’t sure how the shop’s income would be calculated — or whether the outstanding debt on her credit report could affect anything.
As Monique explained it to me, she’d been operating under a set of assumptions that weren’t fully accurate. She believed her credit score would hurt Janelle’s aid eligibility. In reality, FAFSA-based federal student aid is determined by income and household size — not parental credit scores. That distinction matters enormously for families in her position.
The EITC piece was the one that hit Monique hardest. For tax year 2024, a married filer with one qualifying child and income in her household’s range could have been eligible for a credit of up to approximately $3,995, according to IRS EITC guidelines. She had filed without it. The return period for that year has passed, but she is working with a tax preparer to amend her 2024 return before the three-year lookback window closes in April 2027.
“I had a whole tax credit sitting there,” she said, and for the first time in our conversation, something flickered across her face that wasn’t quite composure. “Nobody told me. I didn’t know to ask.”
Where Things Stand Now — and What Remains Unresolved
I want to be careful not to wrap Monique Pruitt’s story in a bow it doesn’t quite fit. When we spoke in late March 2026, her situation was meaningfully better in some ways and largely unchanged in others.
The prescription savings — $87 a month — are real and immediate. The potential EITC amendment could return somewhere between $2,500 and $3,900, depending on how her self-employment income is calculated and verified. Janelle’s FAFSA is submitted and the family is waiting on aid packages from two schools.
What hasn’t changed: the $7,500 cosigned loan debt is still on her credit report, where it will likely remain until 2030 under standard reporting timelines. Her credit score, now at 511, is recovering slowly. The business line of credit she needs to replace her shop’s aging hydraulic chairs — the cost to replace all four runs approximately $6,800 — remains out of reach through traditional lenders.
She looked at Oregon’s Small Business Development Center loan programs, which offer technical assistance for businesses in her revenue range. That process is ongoing. There are no guarantees there.
What Monique told me before we said goodbye was the thing that stayed with me longest. She said she’d spent years assuming that assistance programs were for people in worse situations than hers. She thought asking for help would mean admitting she’d failed at something. She hadn’t failed. She’d been hit by things largely outside her control — and then she’d stayed quiet about it for too long.
Reporting on economic relief means spending a lot of time with spreadsheets, eligibility tables, and IRS guidance documents. It’s easy to forget that behind every missed credit or unclaimed benefit is a person who simply didn’t know to ask — often because the systems designed to help them weren’t built to be found easily. Monique Pruitt found the door almost by accident, at a pharmacy counter, while trying not to be noticed.
I’m glad she asked the pharmacist. I’m glad I was standing close enough to overhear.
Related: My 2026 Tax Refund Showed ‘Processing’ for 31 Days — Here Is What the IRS Actually Told Me
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