Have you ever made what everyone around you considers “good money” — and still found yourself quietly terrified that the next month would be the one that broke you?
I met Eddie Trujillo in February 2026, during a delivery ride-along with Meals on Wheels of Metro Oklahoma City. One of the volunteers, a retired school administrator named Donna Phelps, pulled me aside between stops. “There’s a young man I think you should talk to,” she said. “He helped us fix the van engine last fall, free of charge. But I think he’s struggling more than he lets on.”
I reached out to Eddie a week later. He hesitated. Then he agreed to meet at his shop on NW 23rd Street — a modest but well-kept garage with three lifts and a hand-lettered sign out front that read Trujillo Auto, Est. 2019. When I sat down with Eddie Trujillo in a folding chair next to a half-rebuilt transmission, he was already uncomfortable. “I don’t really talk about this stuff,” he told me upfront. “Not with friends. Not even with family.”
A Business Owner Who Felt Like He Had No Right to Complain
Eddie Trujillo is 31 years old, married, and by most external measures, doing well. His shop grossed approximately $187,000 in 2025. After overhead — parts, insurance, a part-time helper on weekends — he netted closer to $94,000. That’s solidly upper-middle income for Oklahoma City, where the median household income hovers around $57,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
His wife, Camila, had been working as a dental office manager earning $52,000 annually. Together, their household brought in roughly $146,000 before taxes in 2024. Then, in September 2025, the dental practice that employed her abruptly closed. Camila was laid off with two weeks of severance and no forewarning.
“She’s been applying everywhere,” Eddie said. “But dental office jobs in OKC don’t grow on trees. She’s had three interviews since October. Nothing yet.”
The household now runs almost entirely on Eddie’s shop income. And that income has to cover a mortgage of $1,650 per month, two car payments totaling $870, utilities, groceries — and childcare costs that shocked me when he said them out loud.
The Childcare Bill That Changed Everything
Eddie and Camila have two children together: a daughter, Sofia, age 4, and a son, Marco, age 7. Marco is in second grade and attends an after-school program five days a week. Sofia is in full-time daycare. Combined, those two programs cost the family $2,840 per month as of early 2026.
Camila also has a child from a previous relationship — a 9-year-old son named Dominic, who lives with them full-time. Dominic’s biological father has not paid court-ordered child support in over 14 months. The amount owed has grown to approximately $8,700 in arrears. Eddie told me the family has been through the Oklahoma Department of Human Services enforcement process twice. So far, the payments haven’t materialized.
The embarrassment Eddie carries is palpable. He spent fifteen minutes during our interview prefacing every answer with some version of “I know other people have it worse.” He mentioned a customer who’d lost a job and couldn’t afford brake repairs. He brought up the Meals on Wheels clients on Donna’s route. Only after I pressed him did he admit he’d been quietly dipping into a retirement savings account he’d started in 2021 — pulling out roughly $6,000 between November 2025 and January 2026 just to cover the monthly shortfall.
Discovering the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit
The turning point came in January 2026, when Eddie’s part-time weekend helper, a community college student named Ren, mentioned offhand that his mom had used a tax credit to offset her daycare costs. Eddie had never heard of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. He’d always filed his taxes through a basic online service and assumed anything complicated didn’t apply to him.
According to the IRS, the Child and Dependent Care Credit allows eligible taxpayers to claim a percentage of qualifying care expenses — up to $3,000 for one qualifying person or $6,000 for two or more. The percentage of expenses you can claim varies based on adjusted gross income.
For 2025 taxes, Eddie and Camila’s combined AGI was significantly reduced by Camila’s job loss in September. Eddie estimated their 2025 household AGI came in around $108,000 — not low, but enough to qualify for a meaningful credit amount. He also learned about the Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account, which he had never enrolled in through any employment benefit because he is self-employed.
“I felt like an idiot,” Eddie told me, shaking his head slightly. “I’ve been running this shop for six years and I didn’t know half of this existed. I just thought you filed your taxes and that was it.”
The Numbers That Surprised Him Most
Eddie worked with a CPA for the first time for his 2025 return, referred by another small business owner in his neighborhood. The preliminary assessment, which Eddie shared with me, showed that between the Child and Dependent Care Credit, the Child Tax Credit for Sofia and Marco, and deductions he hadn’t been fully capturing for his business — including a home office deduction and depreciation on shop equipment — his expected refund for 2025 was projected at approximately $4,200, compared to the $800 refund he’d received for tax year 2024.
The difference wasn’t a windfall. Eddie was careful to say that. “It’s not like we’re out of the woods,” he told me. “Camila still doesn’t have a job. The daycare bill is still coming every month. But knowing that money is coming back — that we’re not just hemorrhaging with nothing — it helped. Mentally, it really helped.”
He also acknowledged that the early IRA withdrawals he made in late 2025 will likely create a tax liability he’ll need to address. His CPA flagged it as something that would reduce the refund and potentially create a balance due situation on the state return. Eddie winced when he talked about it. “That was panic money,” he said quietly. “I’d do it differently now.”
Where Eddie Stands Today — and What He’s Still Worried About
When I followed up with Eddie in late March 2026, Camila had received a second interview at an orthodontics group near Edmond. He was cautiously hopeful. The child support situation remained unresolved — the Oklahoma DHS case was still active, but Eddie said he’d stopped counting on that money as part of any financial plan.
His bigger lingering fear is retirement. He’s 31, and the $6,000 he withdrew from savings in late 2025 was not a small fraction of what he’d accumulated. “I had about $34,000 in that account,” he said. “It took me four years to build that. And I pulled almost a fifth of it out in three months.” He’s since stopped withdrawals and resumed contributions, but the anxiety about long-term security is clearly something he carries daily.
According to the IRS Child Tax Credit guidance, many self-employed filers with multiple dependents consistently under-claim available credits — often because they file without professional help and assume higher income automatically disqualifies them. Eddie’s case illustrates exactly that gap.
What stays with me from our conversations is not the dollar amounts — it’s the isolation. Here is a man who spent months pulling from his retirement fund, lying awake at night over daycare invoices, and never once said a word to the people around him. “My friends think I’m doing great,” he said near the end of our second meeting. “They’d be embarrassed for me if they knew. I’d be embarrassed for me.”
Donna Phelps, the volunteer who first pointed me toward Eddie, told me she never knew the full extent of what he was dealing with. She just knew he’d fixed that van for free and looked tired doing it. Sometimes the people giving the most are the ones being asked for nothing in return — because they’re too proud to ask.
Eddie Trujillo is still figuring it out. His shop is still open. His family is still whole. And for now, at least, he knows what credits he’s entitled to claim. That’s not everything. But in February 2026, on a cold Tuesday in a garage that smelled like motor oil and burnt coffee, it was clearly something.
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