The folding chairs were still scraping against the linoleum floor when Ingrid Pruitt made her opinion clear. It was a Thursday evening in January 2026, inside a community room at a veterans’ support center in southwest Atlanta, and someone at the front of the room had just mentioned the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. Ingrid, arms crossed, told the woman next to her: “That’s not for people like me. That’s for people who have accountants.”
A mutual contact at that meeting — a caseworker who had heard similar dismissals dozens of times — connected me with Ingrid a few days later. She agreed to talk, mostly, she said, to prove that the whole thing was more complicated than people let on.
A Life Built on Self-Reliance — and One Costly Assumption
When I sat down with Ingrid Pruitt at a diner near her home in East Point, Georgia, the first thing she did was order black coffee and clarify that she wasn’t looking for sympathy. At 48, she has been a licensed union electrician for nineteen years, a single parent since her son Marcus was two, and the kind of person who treats asking for help as a personal failing.
She earns approximately $67,000 a year — solid middle-income ground, she acknowledged, but not as cushioned as it sounds when you factor in what she’s actually carrying. Marcus, now eleven, attends an afterschool program that runs $1,100 a month. Her health insurance, purchased through the ACA marketplace because her union’s plan was discontinued in late 2023, costs her $392 a month. There is no child support. There is no second income.
“I do okay,” she told me, with that particular flatness people use when they mean the opposite. “But it’s always tight. I’m not saving the way I should be. The kid needs things. The truck needs things. And every spring I do my taxes myself, I get a little refund, and I think — okay, good, we’re fine.”
She had been filing with tax software for years. She claimed the standard deduction, listed Marcus as a dependent, and moved on. She had never claimed the Child and Dependent Care Credit. She wasn’t entirely sure what it was.
What She Was Missing — and Why
The Child and Dependent Care Credit, administered through the IRS, allows working parents to claim a percentage of qualifying childcare expenses — up to $3,000 for one child — as a credit against their tax liability. At Ingrid’s income level, that percentage sits at approximately 20 percent, which translates to a credit of up to $600 on eligible expenses.
That is not a fortune. But it is $600 Ingrid had never collected, across multiple filing years, because she assumed the paperwork was beyond her and the reward wasn’t worth it.
Separate from the care credit, there was also the Child Tax Credit itself. Ingrid had been claiming it, but imprecisely. For tax year 2025, the CTC offers up to $2,000 per qualifying child under 17, with a refundable portion — the Additional Child Tax Credit — of up to $1,700. Because Ingrid owed relatively little in federal income tax some years, she wasn’t always capturing the full refundable amount.
And then there was the ACA piece. At $67,000 for a household of two, Ingrid falls at roughly 390 percent of the federal poverty level — just inside the range where Premium Tax Credits through the marketplace can still apply, according to KFF’s subsidy analysis. She had enrolled in marketplace coverage in 2024 without checking her eligibility for advance premium tax credits. That meant she had potentially been paying more than she needed to.
The Conversation That Changed the Calculation
After the veterans’ support group meeting, a volunteer tax preparer affiliated with the group reached out to Ingrid and offered to walk through her 2025 return with her — no charge, no judgment. Ingrid told me she almost declined.
She agreed eventually, mostly out of stubbornness in the other direction — a desire to prove the review would turn up nothing she’d missed. That assumption did not survive the first thirty minutes.
The preparer — a retired CPA volunteering through the VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) program — identified that Ingrid had never filed Form 2441, the form required to claim the Child and Dependent Care Credit. She had also not applied for advance Premium Tax Credits when she re-enrolled in marketplace coverage for 2025, meaning her monthly premium was higher than it may have needed to be.
“She pulled up the form and just showed me,” Ingrid told me. “I kept waiting for a catch. There’s always a catch.”
What the Numbers Looked Like at the End
When Ingrid’s 2025 return was finalized in late February 2026, the difference was significant. Between the Child Tax Credit (including the refundable Additional Child Tax Credit), the Child and Dependent Care Credit, and a reconciled Premium Tax Credit for her marketplace plan, her total refund came to approximately $2,800 — compared to the $640 she had expected based on prior years.
She used most of it to pay down the balance on a medical bill — Marcus had an urgent care visit in October 2025 that cost $840 after her insurance applied. The remaining amount went into a savings account she had been trying to build for two years.
The Frustration That Stayed With Her
What struck me most about Ingrid’s story wasn’t the relief — it was the quiet anger underneath it. She’s not someone who dwells on what’s lost. But sitting across from her at that diner, I could see her doing the math in her head: how many years of CDCC credit she had left on the table, how many months she’d been paying full marketplace premiums without realizing she may have been eligible for relief.
“I didn’t think it was for someone like me,” she said again, near the end of our conversation. “I make decent money. I figured all these programs were for people who were really struggling. Turns out I was struggling in a way I wasn’t counting.”
She has two more years before Marcus ages out of qualifying for the Child and Dependent Care Credit — the cutoff for that program is age thirteen. She said she plans to use VITA again next filing season. She has not, she told me, become someone who asks for help easily. But she has become someone who checks the forms.
Ingrid Pruitt is not a cautionary tale, exactly. She is someone who built a stable life through hard work and stubborn self-discipline — and who, for years, confused self-reliance with leaving money behind. Those two things are not the same, even if they can feel that way when you’ve been doing everything alone for a decade.
She drained her coffee, pulled on her jacket, and said one last thing before heading back to her truck: “Tell people to just look. It doesn’t cost anything to look.”
Related: She Owed $47,000 in Student Loans and Faced a 30% Rent Hike. Then a Tax Clinic Changed Her Math.
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