Have you ever done the math on your household finances at 11 p.m. and felt the numbers staring back at you like an accusation? Connie Valdez knows that feeling well — she lived it for almost two years before anyone told her there might be a different ending.
I first heard about Connie through a neighbor of hers named Darrell, who mentioned her situation at a block party on the east side of Columbus last October. He described her the way people describe someone who carries a lot without asking for help: capable, composed, quietly exhausted. She agreed to sit down with me a few weeks later at her kitchen table, her youngest daughter coloring in the next room.
A Family Running on One Income and Shrinking Savings
Connie is 46 years old and has worked as an insurance claims adjuster for nearly fifteen years. She earns roughly $78,000 annually — a solid salary in Columbus, Ohio, but one that feels significantly thinner when you’re essentially a single-income household with three children. Her husband Marcus, 49, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2019. By early 2023, his symptoms had progressed enough that continuing to work became untenable, and he transitioned to being a full-time stay-at-home parent.
Marcus applied for Social Security Disability Insurance and was approved in late 2023 after an eight-month review process. His monthly SSDI benefit came out to $1,280. It helped — but not enough.
Their oldest child, now 14, is largely self-sufficient after school. But their nine-year-old and five-year-old required structured care during Connie’s working hours, particularly on days when Marcus’s fatigue — a common and debilitating symptom of MS — made supervising two young children unsafe. Between after-school programs and a licensed daycare for their youngest, the family was spending $1,950 a month on childcare by mid-2024. That’s $23,400 over the course of the year.
“Marcus tries to do everything he can,” Connie told me, choosing her words carefully. “But there are days when he can’t get off the couch, and I can’t leave a five-year-old home with someone who can barely lift their arms. Those are not the days to cut corners on childcare.”
The Gap That Kept Growing
The shortfall between what SSDI provided and what the family actually needed was roughly $800 a month — and that was before accounting for Marcus’s medications, adaptive equipment, and the occasional home health aide. Connie’s savings, once a point of quiet pride, had dropped by approximately $14,000 between January 2023 and September 2024.
She had never filed for any childcare-related tax relief. It wasn’t that she was unaware such programs existed in the abstract — she processes insurance claims for a living and is not easily confused by paperwork. The problem was simpler and more human: she assumed that at her income level, she wouldn’t qualify for meaningful help.
That assumption cost her real money. The IRS Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit is available to taxpayers at most income levels — the percentage of qualifying expenses you can claim phases down as income rises, but it does not disappear entirely for households earning above a certain threshold. For tax year 2024, the credit covers between 20% and 35% of up to $6,000 in qualifying expenses for two or more dependents.
At Connie’s income level, that 20% rate applied — meaning up to $1,200 in direct credit against her tax bill, assuming she could document $6,000 in qualifying expenses. She had documented far more than that.
What Changed — and How Connie Found Out
The turning point came in October 2024, not from a financial professional but from Darrell — the same neighbor who eventually connected us. Darrell’s wife had worked with a tax preparer who flagged the Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account as something Connie’s employer almost certainly offered and that Connie had likely never enrolled in.
Connie pulled up her HR portal that same night. The FSA was there. She had skipped past it during open enrollment every single year.
For the 2025 plan year, Connie enrolled in the maximum $5,000 Dependent Care FSA contribution through her employer. She also worked with a CPA to file an amended return approach for 2023 — but because she had missed the original filing window for claiming the Child and Dependent Care Credit properly, the CPA recommended filing correctly going forward rather than attempting an amendment that could trigger additional scrutiny.
The Numbers — Honest and Incomplete
When I asked Connie to walk me through the actual financial outcome, she was careful not to oversell it. Her 2024 tax return, which she filed in February 2025, included a $1,200 Child and Dependent Care Credit — applied directly against her tax liability. The FSA savings for 2025 will amount to approximately $1,150 in reduced federal and Ohio state tax burden across the year, based on her marginal rates.
Combined, she’s looking at roughly $2,350 in annual tax relief. Against $23,400 in childcare spending, that’s about ten cents back on every dollar spent.
Connie understood this. Her CPA mapped out which expenses to route through the FSA and which to reserve for the credit, maximizing both within legal limits. The math still left a significant gap. “It’s not life-changing money,” she told me, setting down her coffee. “But it’s the difference between the savings account going down and it staying flat. That matters when you’re watching every month.”
What Connie Wishes She Had Known Earlier
The conversation shifted when I asked her what she’d tell another family in her position — a household where one income carries the weight that two used to share, where disability benefits exist but don’t stretch far enough.
She also expressed frustration — measured, but real — about the SSDI benefit itself. The $1,280 Marcus receives is calculated from his pre-disability earnings record, and it hasn’t been adjusted in a way that accounts for the full cost of his care needs. According to the Social Security Administration, SSDI benefits receive annual cost-of-living adjustments tied to the CPI-W index — 2.5% for 2025 — but Connie says that increase amounts to about $32 a month and doesn’t come close to the pace of Marcus’s medical expenses.
The family has also looked into Ohio’s STABLE Account program, which operates under the federal ABLE Act and allows individuals with qualifying disabilities to save money without affecting SSDI eligibility. Marcus qualifies. They haven’t yet opened an account, partly because the administrative bandwidth to manage one more financial instrument feels, as Connie put it, “like one more thing.”
“We’re not failing,” she said before I left. “I want to be clear about that. We’re managing. But managing is exhausting, and I don’t think it should require this much research just to find out what you’re already entitled to.”
Sitting at her kitchen table, watching her youngest wander in to show us a drawing of a horse, I found it hard to argue with that. Connie Valdez is not a cautionary tale. She found her way to some of what was available to her — late, imperfectly, but on her own terms. The regret isn’t about the money she found. It’s about the years she didn’t know to look.
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