Most people assume the federal relief system is designed to be found. That if you qualify for money, the government will make sure you know about it. Bernice Stanton spent almost eight months believing exactly the opposite — and it turned out to be one of the most expensive assumptions of her life.
I first heard about Bernice at a block party last September. A mutual neighbor, knowing the kind of stories I cover, pulled me aside and said, “You should really talk to the woman across the street — she and her husband have been going through it.” A few days later, Bernice agreed to sit down with me at her kitchen table in Denver’s Westwood neighborhood, a cup of coffee going cold between us as she walked me through the last year and a half of her financial life.
A Freelancer’s Income, a Spouse’s Layoff, and a Car That Quit
Bernice had been freelancing as a graphic designer for about four years by the time her husband Marcus lost his warehouse job in March 2024. She was pulling in roughly $2,100 a month — some months better, some months worse — and Marcus had been bringing home around $3,400. When his employer eliminated his entire logistics department with two weeks’ notice, that income disappeared overnight.
The layoff alone would have been manageable, Bernice told me, if everything else hadn’t collapsed at the same time. In May 2024, their 2014 Honda Accord threw a transmission failure that the mechanic quoted at $2,200 to fix. She didn’t have it. Marcus didn’t have it. The car sat in the driveway for eleven weeks while she took rideshares to client meetings, watching that expense eat directly into the income she needed to survive.
Marcus filed for unemployment benefits through Colorado’s Department of Labor almost immediately after his layoff. He was approved at $487 per week — a number Bernice described as “better than zero, but not by as much as you’d think.” Between her irregular freelance checks and his weekly benefits, they were covering rent and groceries. Barely.
The Myth That Cost Them Months of Relief
Here is where the real damage happened. Bernice had heard — from a cousin, she thinks, or maybe a Facebook group — that accepting a federal stimulus payment would count against Marcus’s unemployment eligibility. She believed this completely. She repeated it to Marcus. They agreed not to touch it.
That belief was wrong. According to official guidance on stimulus and unemployment eligibility, individual stimulus payments are explicitly not calculated as part of unemployment benefits eligibility — a policy that was expanded in February 2021 to cover all federal COVID-related stimulus payments, including CARES Act rounds. The same principle carried forward into the American Rescue Plan’s $1,400 payments. Claiming your stimulus credit does not reduce, suspend, or otherwise affect unemployment benefits.
Colorado follows the same federal framework. Marcus’s weekly $487 would not have been touched. But Bernice didn’t know that — and nobody told her.
The Recovery Rebate Credit — the mechanism through which people who never received or only partially received their stimulus payments can claim them via their tax return — was still available to Bernice and Marcus for payments they had not received. According to the IRS coronavirus tax relief page, people who missed stimulus payments should review their eligibility for the Recovery Rebate Credit when filing their federal return.
When She Finally Looked at the Numbers
The turning point came in late January 2025. Bernice was sitting with a tax preparer — something she had avoided for years because she assumed freelancers didn’t get refunds — and the preparer asked a routine question: had they received both stimulus payments they were eligible for?
Bernice told me she almost laughed. “I said, ‘We didn’t take those. We didn’t want to mess up the unemployment.'” She paused when she recounted this moment, looking at the table. “The woman just looked at me and said, ‘That’s not how it works.'”
The tax preparer walked Bernice through the Recovery Rebate Credit. As a married couple filing jointly, Bernice and Marcus were eligible for $1,400 per person — $2,800 total — that had never been deposited into their account. Because they had not claimed it in prior years, it was now claimable as a credit on their 2024 return.
What the Process Actually Looked Like
Bernice and Marcus’s path to claiming those funds was not instant. The tax preparer filed their 2024 return in early February 2025. The IRS processing time stretched to roughly six weeks — Bernice checked the IRS refund status tool almost daily, she admitted.
The refund, totaling $3,140 (the $2,800 Recovery Rebate Credit plus a small additional refund from freelance deductions), was deposited on March 19, 2025. Bernice used $2,200 of it to fix the car. The remaining $940 went into their savings account — the first time they’d had a cushion since Marcus’s layoff.
Marcus found part-time work in April 2025, and by the time I sat down with Bernice in September, he was back to full-time employment at a different company. The financial crisis had passed — but Bernice was still processing the months they had spent struggling unnecessarily.
What Bernice Wants Other People to Know
When I asked Bernice what she would say to someone in a similar situation today, she was quiet for a moment. She still has that self-reliant streak — she bristled slightly when I used the word “benefits,” defaulting to calling everything “the stuff the government supposedly offers.” But her answer was direct.
She also flagged a concern she still carries: her disability benefits — she receives a modest monthly payment for a chronic joint condition diagnosed in 2021 — still don’t cover what she actually needs. She pays roughly $340 a month out-of-pocket for medication and physical therapy that her coverage doesn’t touch. According to SSA.gov disability benefits information, what a recipient actually receives depends heavily on their work history and the specific program they qualify under — SSDI versus SSI carry different rules and different payment structures.
For Bernice, this remains the unresolved thread. The stimulus money helped. Marcus’s new job helped more. But the structural gap between what disability benefits pay and what they actually cost her each month hasn’t closed. She’s not asking for sympathy about it — that’s not her style. She just wanted it on the record.
Sitting across from Bernice that afternoon, what struck me most was not the money she’d missed — though $2,800 over nearly a year of hardship is not a small number. It was the exhaustion of navigating a system that offers help it never fully explains, to people who are often too proud, too busy, or too misinformed to reach for it. Bernice’s story isn’t extraordinary. That’s the point. There are millions of households that made the same assumption she did, and some of them still haven’t corrected it.
She walked me to the door when we were done. The Honda was parked in the driveway, newly repaired. “It still pulls a little to the left,” she said. “But it runs.”
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