The federal tax filing deadline of April 15, 2026 is days away, and the free tax preparation clinics scattered across Denver are seeing a final surge of people who almost didn’t show up at all. Eddie Trujillo almost didn’t show up at all.
I met Eddie at a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) site in Denver’s Cole neighborhood on a Thursday morning in late March 2026. He was sitting at a folding table with a manila envelope of paperwork, looking like a man bracing for a diagnosis he’d been putting off. He had driven over during his planning period, he told me, leaving a stack of ungraded algebra tests on his classroom desk back at school.
Eddie Trujillo is 35 years old. He teaches high school math in the Denver Public Schools system, earns roughly $42,000 a year before any deductions, and is — by his own description — “the person in the family people call when things go wrong.” In the 18 months before we met, a lot had gone wrong. Almost none of it was his fault.
A Year of Financial Hits That Compounded Quietly
When I sat down with Eddie Trujillo and asked him to walk me through the past year, he organized it the way a teacher would: in order, no drama, just facts. But the steadiness in his voice cost him something to maintain. You could tell.
The first hit came in August 2024, when his school district eliminated its summer tutoring stipend program. Eddie had been counting on approximately $4,800 in supplemental income from that program each year — not extra money, he stressed, but money already assigned a job. “That wasn’t a bonus,” he told me. “It was built into my budget. Rent, my sister’s tuition payment, groceries through September. When it disappeared, I had to cut things I didn’t want to cut.”
The second hit was a cosigned loan. In February 2025, Eddie cosigned an $8,500 personal loan for a close family member who needed to cover an emergency car repair and an outstanding medical bill. The other person made four months of payments. Then they stopped. By December 2025, the account had been sent to collections, and the balance — all of it — had attached itself to Eddie’s credit report. “I knew the risk,” he said flatly. “But what was I supposed to do? Let them lose their car and then their job? That’s not who I am.”
The third hit was the one Eddie had been living with longest. He has a seven-year-old daughter named Marisol from a previous relationship. Her other parent owes $650 a month in court-ordered child support. According to Eddie, the last payment arrived in September 2024. Since then, nothing. He filed a complaint with the Colorado child support enforcement unit, but enforcement actions take time, and the missing $4,550 — roughly seven months of payments by the time we spoke — had simply never arrived.
Why He Nearly Didn’t File at All
By the time Eddie found out about the VITA clinic — through a flyer posted in the school’s main hallway — he had already convinced himself that filing would only bring more trouble. With a collections account on his credit report and his finances stretched thin, he assumed the IRS would have bad news waiting for him. He almost threw the flyer away.
The IRS VITA program provides free tax preparation to taxpayers earning roughly $67,000 or less, along with people with disabilities and limited-English speakers. Volunteers are IRS-certified and file returns at no cost to the taxpayer. For Eddie, the barrier wasn’t the fee — it was the mental weight of confronting paperwork he believed would confirm his worst fears about his financial situation.
The VITA volunteer who worked with Eddie that morning was a retired accountant named Patricia. According to Eddie, she looked at his W-2, his records of Marisol’s care expenses, and a few supporting documents, and within about 20 minutes began explaining something he had not known he qualified for.
What the Numbers Actually Showed
Eddie’s taxable income for 2025 came in at approximately $37,200 — lower than his base salary after standard deductions. The loss of the $4,800 tutoring stipend had actually reduced his adjusted gross income, which affected his eligibility for several refundable credits in ways he hadn’t considered.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the largest anti-poverty tax tools in the federal code, but the IRS estimates that roughly one in five eligible taxpayers never claims it — often because they don’t realize they qualify. For Eddie, Marisol counted as a qualifying child under EITC rules. He had been raising her in his home for the majority of the year, covering her expenses without consistent support from her other parent, and his income fell squarely within the eligible range.
On top of the EITC, Eddie also qualified for the Additional Child Tax Credit — the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit. For tax year 2025, that refundable component is worth up to $1,700 per qualifying child. Eddie had claimed the non-refundable Child Tax Credit in prior years, but had never known the refundable piece existed and applied to his return.
Patricia had to explain the total twice. “I kept thinking I was misunderstanding something,” Eddie told me, laughing for the first time since we’d sat down. “I’m a math teacher. I should have been able to figure this out on my own. But I didn’t. I had no idea.”
The Weight of What He Almost Left Behind
The $4,267 refund does not erase what Eddie Trujillo has been carrying. The collections account from the defaulted cosigned loan remains on his credit report, limiting his options and raising his cost of borrowing. The Colorado child support enforcement process is ongoing — his caseworker told him that enforcement actions, including income withholding orders and license suspension notices, can take several months to produce actual payment, with no guaranteed timeline. His younger sister is entering her junior year of college in the fall, and her tuition gap won’t close itself.
What struck me sitting across from Eddie that morning wasn’t the number itself. It was the fact that he had already done the math in his head before I could ask. He knew precisely where every dollar was going. There was no hesitation, no impulse purchase built into the plan. The money had a job before it had arrived.
As I packed up my notes, Eddie mentioned one more thing. He had spent the previous week telling two colleagues at his school that they might also qualify for the EITC. He’d walked them through the basics during a lunch break. “I’m turning into the tax guy in the teachers’ lounge,” he said, shaking his head. “But if I almost missed this, other people are missing it too.”
He’s right. The IRS has estimated that unclaimed EITC benefits total in the billions of dollars annually — money that eligible workers simply don’t know to claim, or never get around to pursuing because filing feels like a risk rather than a return. For a single tax season, that represents an enormous amount of relief that was authorized by Congress and funded by law, but never reaches the people it was designed for.
When I left the Cole neighborhood clinic that morning, Eddie was still at the table. His own return had been filed. He was now sitting next to a younger teacher who’d walked in after seeing the same hallway flyer. He was walking her through the documents she’d need to bring. The math teacher, back to teaching — this time explaining numbers that actually mattered to her life. The subject was money she might have left behind without ever knowing it existed.
Related: I Almost Claimed Social Security at 62 — The Math That Changed My Mind
Related: A Math Teacher Waited 63 Days for His $4,100 IRS Refund — Here’s What Finally Moved It
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