The window for claiming certain federal tax credits doesn’t wait for anyone to get their finances in order. For the 2025 tax year, the deadline for most filers passed on April 15, 2026 — but for people like Crystal Andersen, the scramble to understand what she was even owed began months earlier, in a church fellowship hall in southwest Atlanta where a free tax clinic was underway.
A financial counselor named Deborah Watts — who runs a nonprofit financial literacy program in the Atlanta metro area — reached out to me in late February 2026 and said she had a client whose story deserved to be told. She didn’t frame it as a success story. She described it as a survival story that was still being written. That’s how I found myself sitting across from Crystal Andersen on a Thursday afternoon in early March, in a corner booth at a diner off Campbellton Road.
A Budget Built on Overtime That Disappeared
Crystal Andersen is 63 years old. She has worked as a machine operator at a plastics manufacturing facility in the Atlanta industrial corridor for eleven years. For most of that time, the job came with reliable overtime — weekend shifts, occasional holiday hours — that added roughly $700 a month to her base pay of about $2,850 after taxes.
That overtime disappeared in the spring of 2025 when the facility cut production capacity. No layoffs — just a restructuring that eliminated the extra hours almost entirely. In one month, Crystal went from a take-home income of approximately $3,550 to $2,850. The math was brutal and immediate.
Crystal is single and has been for years. She is also quietly shouldering the cost of her younger brother Marcus’s enrollment at Georgia State University — roughly $4,200 a year in tuition and book costs that she covers out of pocket. She described it to me without complaint, the way people describe things they’ve already decided they will not stop doing regardless of the consequences.
The “rest” she was figuring out included a roof that had been leaking since September 2024. A contractor quoted her $6,500 to replace the damaged section. She has $940 in savings.
What the Tax Clinic Revealed
Crystal had been filing her own taxes using a basic online software program for years. She’d always owed a small amount — usually between $200 and $400 — and paid it without question. She assumed 2025 would be the same, maybe worse given the income fluctuation.
When she went to Deborah Watts’s free tax clinic in January 2026, a volunteer preparer ran her numbers and asked if she had ever claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit. Crystal told me she thought the EITC was for families with children. She had heard the name but tuned it out because it never seemed to apply to her.
That assumption, it turned out, had likely cost her several thousand dollars over multiple filing years.
According to the IRS EITC guidelines, a single filer with no children and an adjusted gross income under approximately $18,600 in 2025 qualifies for the childless EITC. Crystal’s income was above that threshold — so the childless EITC alone was a modest piece of the picture. But the drop in her income, combined with other deductions the volunteer preparer identified, shifted her tax situation substantially.
The Numbers That Actually Came Back
The volunteer preparer at the clinic identified three areas where Crystal had been leaving money on the table. The first was the EITC — small in isolation but real. The second was the Saver’s Credit, a federal credit available to lower-income workers who contribute to a retirement account, which Crystal had been doing through her employer’s 401(k) plan without realizing it generated a credit. The third was a Georgia state income tax adjustment tied to her documented out-of-pocket contributions toward Marcus’s qualified educational expenses.
Crystal told me she stared at the preparer’s screen for a long moment before she said anything. She had brought a check already written out, expecting to owe money. Instead, she was looking at a refund of roughly $1,400 on her federal return and another $340 from the state of Georgia.
The Part the Refund Didn’t Fix
I want to be careful not to make this a tidy story, because Crystal made clear to me that it isn’t one. The $1,740 refund arrived in her account in late February 2026. She put $900 toward the roof — enough for a temporary patch the contractor agreed to do at a reduced rate — and used $400 to catch up on a utility bill that had ballooned over the winter. The remaining $440 went to Marcus for next semester’s textbooks.
She still needs the full roof repair. The contractor’s estimate has since risen to $7,100 because of additional water damage that became visible once work began. Crystal’s savings account, after the refund, sits at just under $1,300.
Deborah Watts, the counselor who connected Crystal and me, told me she sees this pattern constantly. People in Crystal’s income bracket often earn too much to qualify for the most robust safety net programs but too little to absorb any real financial disruption. The credits they do qualify for are real and meaningful — and consistently unclaimed.
According to the IRS, roughly one in five eligible workers fails to claim the EITC each year. For tax year 2023, that translated to approximately $7 billion in unclaimed credits nationally.
What Crystal Says She Wishes She Had Known Earlier
When I asked Crystal what she would tell someone in a similar situation — a working adult, no kids, income that fluctuates year to year — she paused for a long time before answering. She didn’t talk about tax credits or government programs. She talked about asking for help.
She also told me something that I’ve been thinking about since I left the diner. She said that the hardest part of the past year wasn’t the money. It was performing stability for Marcus — making sure her younger brother didn’t slow down his studies because he was worried about her. She said she’s gotten very good at sounding fine.
Crystal plans to return to the free tax clinic again in January 2027. She’s also been connected through Watts’s nonprofit to a county-level weatherization and home repair assistance program that she was not previously aware of. Whether she qualifies — and whether any funds are still available — won’t be known until later this spring.
On the day I met her, she paid for her own coffee and wouldn’t let me pick up the check. I didn’t push it. Some people’s dignity is the last thing they’re holding onto, and you don’t take that from them by insisting on a gesture.
Crystal Andersen is 63 years old, working full shifts at a factory in Atlanta, keeping a leaking roof over her head and a younger brother in college. She found approximately $1,740 in credits she didn’t know she was owed. It wasn’t enough to solve everything. It was enough to matter.
Vivienne Marlowe Reyes is a Senior Tax & Stimulus Writer at American Relief. She covers economic relief programs, federal benefits, and the real-world financial experiences of working Americans.
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