The first time I heard Crystal Ivanovic’s name, I was standing beside a folding table of potato salad at a neighborhood barbecue in Indianapolis last August. A mutual friend — someone who knew I covered economic relief programs — pulled me aside and said, quietly, “You should talk to Crystal. She’s been struggling and she doesn’t even know what she’s missing.” Crystal was across the yard, laughing at something, looking like someone who had it together. That composure, I’d later learn, was something she’d practiced for years.
When I sat down with Crystal Ivanovic a week later at a diner off East Washington Street, she ordered coffee and set her phone face-down on the table. She had a morning Uber shift in two hours. She was 54 years old, engaged to her partner Marcus — who was finishing a two-year associate’s degree at Ivy Tech Community College — and she was exhausted in the way people get when they’ve been quietly anxious for a very long time.
Running on Fumes: Crystal’s Financial Picture in Early 2025
Crystal told me she had been driving for Uber since 2021, after the retail job she’d held for eleven years was eliminated during a round of pandemic-era layoffs. The gig work filled the income gap — barely. In 2024, she grossed approximately $31,400 driving roughly 55 to 60 hours per week, logging miles across Indianapolis and its suburbs. After Uber’s platform fees, gas, and the self-employment tax she owed as an independent contractor, her net take-home landed somewhere around $22,000 for the year.
Marcus’s coursework kept him largely off the income ledger. He picked up a part-time shift at a warehouse on weekends, pulling in roughly $7,200 annually. Together, their household brought in under $30,000 — enough to stay housed, not enough to feel stable.
Adding pressure to the budget was a situation Crystal described with some reluctance. Her younger sister had gone through a difficult separation in early 2024, and Crystal had stepped in to help cover after-school care costs for her sister’s two children — aged six and nine — during a stretch of about seven months. The arrangement cost Crystal roughly $420 a month, money that came directly out of a savings account she’d been slowly building since 2022. By October 2024, that account had dropped from just over $3,800 to under $600.
What Crystal Didn’t Know About Gig Workers and Federal Tax Credits
Crystal had filed her taxes every year using a free online platform. She entered her 1099-K form from Uber, deducted her mileage, and accepted whatever number the software returned. For 2023, she had received a small federal refund — around $190. She assumed that was the best the system had to offer her.
What she didn’t realize — and what I found myself explaining carefully, without veering into advice — was that gig workers with earned income below certain thresholds may qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable credit administered by the IRS that can result in money returned to the filer even beyond what they paid in taxes. For tax year 2024, a filer with no qualifying children and income in Crystal’s range could claim up to approximately $632 under EITC. But Crystal wasn’t filing alone — she and Marcus, though not yet married, had a filing situation worth examining more closely with a qualified preparer.
There was also the question of the dependent care expenses Crystal had covered for her sister’s children. The Child and Dependent Care Credit, according to IRS guidance, applies to care expenses paid for qualifying persons — which can, under specific circumstances, include relatives’ children if certain conditions are met. Whether Crystal’s specific arrangement qualified required professional review, not a diner conversation with a journalist.
The Turning Point: A Free Tax Clinic and a Number That Surprised Her
After our diner meeting, Crystal told me she did something she’d been putting off for months: she called the local Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site — better known as VITA — which offers free tax preparation for people earning roughly $67,000 or less per year. The VITA program is IRS-certified, and Indianapolis has several active sites run through community organizations.
She went in on a Saturday in late January 2025 with a folder of documents: her Uber 1099-K, receipts for mileage, a bank statement showing the childcare payments she had made for her sister’s kids, and her and Marcus’s basic income records. She sat with a certified volunteer for about ninety minutes.
When I spoke with Crystal again in February, she told me the result had genuinely surprised her. After properly accounting for her Schedule C deductions — mileage at the 2024 IRS standard rate of 67 cents per mile, phone expenses, and a portion of her car insurance — her adjusted net profit from Uber came in lower than she had originally estimated. Combined with an EITC calculation and a partial credit related to the dependent care documentation her preparer helped her organize, her total federal refund came to approximately $2,140. She had been expecting, based on prior years, somewhere around $200.
What the Money Actually Meant — and What Crystal Still Regrets
The $2,140 refund arrived in her bank account on February 19, 2025 — direct deposit, nine days after she filed. Crystal told me the first thing she did was transfer $1,500 back into the savings account she had drained helping her sister. The remainder went toward a car repair she had been putting off for months: a brake job on the 2019 Hyundai Sonata she used for rides, which a mechanic had flagged as urgent back in November.
But Crystal’s tone shifted when I asked her about the years before 2024. She had been driving since 2021. That was three prior tax years — 2021, 2022, and 2023 — during which she had likely under-claimed deductions and possibly missed credits entirely. Her VITA preparer had mentioned, briefly, that amended returns could be filed going back three years, but Crystal told me she hadn’t pursued it.
It’s a regret she carries quietly. By her own rough estimate, she may have left somewhere between $1,500 and $4,000 on the table across those three years — money she’ll likely never recover, because she ran out of energy before running out of eligibility windows.
A Broader Pattern Among Gig Workers
Crystal’s situation isn’t unusual. Among low-income self-employed workers — particularly those in the gig economy — the combination of complex Schedule C filing requirements, self-employment tax obligations, and unfamiliarity with refundable credits creates a gap between what people owe and what they could have claimed. According to the IRS, approximately one in five eligible workers fails to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit each year.
For gig workers specifically, the math is complicated by the fact that platforms like Uber report gross earnings — before fees — on 1099-K forms. A driver who grossed $31,000 on the platform did not net $31,000. Platform fees alone can represent 25 to 30 percent of gross fares, and that’s before fuel, maintenance, insurance, and self-employment tax are factored in. When filers enter only the 1099-K number without proper deductions, they often overstate their income — and in some cases, inadvertently push themselves into a higher tax liability while simultaneously understating their eligibility for income-based credits.
Crystal’s outcome — a $2,140 refund versus the $200 she expected — reflects what happens when someone with legitimate, documented expenses finally gets help navigating a system that rewards precision. It also reflects what years of doing it alone, without guidance, cost her.
Where Crystal Stands Now
When I followed up with Crystal in late March 2025, Marcus was two months from finishing his degree. She had rebuilt her savings account to just over $2,200 — not where she wanted to be at 54, but the highest it had been in two years. She was still driving six days a week, still logging her miles in a notebook she kept in the center console, still quietly anxious.
She has already scheduled her VITA appointment for next January. She told me she put it in her phone the same week she got her refund. That detail — the preparedness, the quiet resolve — felt like the most Crystal thing she’d said across all our conversations. She wasn’t celebrating. She was just making sure it didn’t happen again.
Driving away from that diner on East Washington Street the first morning we met, I kept thinking about how many people are probably out there doing exactly what Crystal did for years: filing honestly, filing alone, and leaving money behind not out of negligence but out of a simple lack of information. Crystal’s story isn’t about a windfall. It’s about the cost of not knowing — measured not in one year, but in three.
Leave a Reply