The federal deadline for income-driven repayment recertification was less than six weeks away when Wanda Dillard first appeared in my comments section — a single paragraph buried beneath a story I’d written about student loan borrowers navigating the post-pandemic repayment maze. She hadn’t intended it as a cry for help. That’s not who Wanda is.
Her comment read: “I have loans from my MBA and a side business that’s been losing money for three years. I just keep paying and hoping it gets better. Is that what everyone else is doing?” I followed up the next morning. Two weeks later, I was sitting across from her at a coffee shop in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, listening to a story I’ve heard variations of a hundred times — and yet one that felt entirely its own.
A Life Built on Two Engines, Both Sputtering
Wanda Dillard has been a flight attendant for twelve years. She loves the job — the structure, the motion, the people. But around 2018, she started wondering what would happen if the airline industry contracted again, the way it did after September 11 and again during the pandemic. So she enrolled in a part-time MBA program at a private university in South Florida, financing it almost entirely with federal graduate PLUS loans.
By the time she graduated in 2021, she owed $47,200 — more than she’d expected, partly because the program extended by a semester during COVID disruptions. Around the same time, she launched a small e-commerce shop selling travel accessories: packing cubes, noise-canceling headphone adapters, compression socks designed for long-haul flights. It made sense on paper. She knew the customer. She was the customer.
The shop peaked in 2022 at roughly $31,000 in gross revenue. By 2023, it had dropped to $18,500. Last year, it brought in $9,400 — not enough to cover inventory, shipping costs, and the platform fees she was paying to keep the storefront alive. She was subsidizing the business with her flight attendant salary, and she knew it.
Then her husband Marcus, 58, retired earlier than planned due to a back condition that made his warehouse job physically untenable. Their household went from two incomes to one full-time salary plus whatever the business scraped together. They’re empty nesters — their youngest left for college in 2023 — but that didn’t make the math easier. If anything, it made the silence louder.
The Loan Payment She’d Accepted Without Question
When federal student loan repayment resumed in October 2023, Wanda enrolled in what was then the SAVE plan — the Saving on a Valuable Education repayment plan introduced by the Biden administration. Her calculated monthly payment came out to $387, based on her income from the prior tax year. She accepted that number and set up autopay.
What she didn’t know — and what became one of the more consequential gaps in her financial picture — was that her income calculation hadn’t accounted for her business losses. According to Federal Student Aid’s income-driven repayment guidance, adjusted gross income is the figure used to calculate monthly payments. Her AGI for 2024, once business losses were properly netted, was significantly lower than her gross flight attendant salary suggested.
When I walked through the numbers with her during our conversation, she went quiet for a moment. “So I’ve been paying based on the wrong number?” she asked. Not exactly — but close enough that the distinction mattered.
After consulting a nonprofit credit counselor through the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, Wanda submitted a recertification request using her 2024 tax return — the first year she’d properly documented her business losses. Her new monthly payment calculation dropped from $387 to $142. That’s $245 less per month, or $2,940 per year, back in her household budget.
The Tax Deductions That Had Been Sitting There Unused
The business losses were where things got more complicated — and more consequential. For three years, Wanda had been filing her Schedule C with help from a tax software program she’d used since her twenties. She was reporting her business income, but she hadn’t been capturing the full picture of her deductible expenses.
When she finally worked with a tax professional to review her 2024 return — prompted, she told me, partly by our correspondence — the deductions they identified were substantial:
- Home office deduction: Wanda manages all inventory ordering, customer service, and bookkeeping from a dedicated room in her home. Under IRS Publication 587 guidelines, she qualified for a home office deduction she’d never claimed — approximately $1,140 based on square footage.
- Inventory write-offs: A batch of product she’d ordered in late 2023 had become unsellable due to a supplier quality issue. That $2,200 loss had never been properly documented and deducted.
- Business use of vehicle: She makes quarterly supply runs and ships packages from her car. Mileage logs she’d kept but never formalized amounted to approximately $890 in deductible expenses at the 2024 IRS standard mileage rate of 67 cents per mile.
- Platform and software fees: The $1,840 she paid in annual platform fees, payment processing charges, and design software subscriptions had been partially miscategorized in prior returns.
Combined, the newly captured deductions reduced her 2024 taxable income by approximately $6,800. Given her effective federal tax rate, that translated to roughly $1,530 in reduced tax liability — money she would have otherwise owed.
The Credit Nobody Had Mentioned to Her
The most surprising discovery came late in the tax review. Wanda’s household income, with Marcus no longer working and her business operating at a loss, had dropped below a threshold that made her eligible for the Retirement Savings Contributions Credit — commonly called the Saver’s Credit. She had contributed $1,800 to a Roth IRA in 2024, a habit she’d maintained for years without realizing the contribution now made her eligible for a credit worth $2,200 at her income level.
According to the IRS Saver’s Credit guidelines, the credit percentage and income thresholds are adjusted annually. For tax year 2024, married couples filing jointly with an AGI under $76,500 could claim between 10% and 50% of qualifying retirement contributions. Wanda’s adjusted income placed her in the 50% tier — and her $1,800 Roth contribution qualified in full.
She filed an amended return for 2023 as well. That refund — $890 — arrived in February. She used it to pay down her highest-interest inventory credit card.
What Wanda Is Still Figuring Out
When I followed up with Wanda in late March, her situation had improved materially — but she was careful not to overstate it. The business is still declining. Marcus’s retirement income won’t begin until he turns 62. The loan balance hasn’t shrunk; it’s just costing her less per month while she sorts out whether the income-driven repayment track makes sense long term.
She’s also wrestling with a question that doesn’t have a clean federal program attached to it: whether to close the shop entirely. A formal business closure would allow her to deduct remaining inventory and equipment losses — potentially another $3,100 based on current assets — but it would also mean letting go of something she built herself, something that carried real meaning even when the revenue didn’t.
She said something near the end of our conversation that stayed with me. She’d spent years downplaying her own financial stress — framing it as manageable, as something other people had it worse about, as not worth making a fuss over. It wasn’t until she put her situation in writing, in a comment on an article she almost didn’t read, that the weight of it became visible to her.
“I think I needed someone to look at my situation like it mattered,” she told me. “Not to fix it. Just to look at it.”
That, more than any tax credit or loan recalculation, is what reporting on people like Wanda keeps teaching me. The relief is often there. The programs exist. The gap is usually somewhere between the paperwork and the person — and it costs more than money to close it.
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