The first time I heard Lucille Matsuda’s name, I was standing in the parking lot of a Sacramento church after Sunday service, talking to Pastor David Okafor about families in his congregation who had been quietly struggling through California’s relentless cost of living. He mentioned Lucille almost as an aside — a woman who drove for Uber six days a week, raised two kids alongside her part-time-employed husband, and hadn’t said a word of complaint to anyone in the pews. “She doesn’t ask for help,” he told me. “That’s exactly why I wanted you to meet her.”
I reached out the following week, and Lucille agreed to speak with me over coffee at a diner on Florin Road. She arrived in her own car — a 2019 Toyota Camry with 112,000 miles on it, the same one she uses for rides — and ordered just a small coffee. She was matter-of-fact from the start, the kind of person who has organized her exhaustion into something functional and doesn’t expect sympathy for it.
A Gig Worker’s Income That Looks Better on Paper
On paper, Lucille and her husband Marco are doing fine. Between her Uber earnings and his part-time warehouse shifts, the household brings in roughly $76,000 a year. In most of the country, that would feel manageable. In Sacramento — where the median rent for a three-bedroom apartment climbed past $2,100 in 2024 — it barely stretches across the month.
The more precise picture is harder to look at. Lucille’s gross income from Uber in 2024 was approximately $61,000. After self-employment taxes (15.3% on net earnings), gas, car maintenance, and ongoing depreciation on the Camry, her actual take-home was closer to $39,000. Marco brought in about $18,000. Together, they were paying $2,150 a month in rent for a three-bedroom in South Sacramento — a number that has gone up twice since 2022.
There was also the matter of Marco’s ex-partner, who was ordered by a Sacramento County family court in 2022 to pay $650 a month in child support for their 11-year-old daughter, Maya. Not one payment had arrived in over two years. “I stopped counting on it,” Lucille told me, stirring her coffee. “You can’t budget around money that was never real to begin with.”
She said it without bitterness — just the flat resignation of someone who has done the math too many times to be angry about the answer anymore.
The Tax Return She Almost Filed Wrong
In early February 2025, Lucille sat down to file her 2024 taxes using the same free online tool she had used for three years. She expected a small refund or possibly a balance due — she’d underpaid her estimated taxes one quarter after a slow stretch in October. What she did not expect was a text from a volunteer at her church’s free tax prep clinic suggesting she stop and talk to someone before hitting submit.
That volunteer was part of the IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, commonly known as VITA — a free filing service available to households earning under $67,000. The VITA volunteer who reviewed Lucille’s draft return found two significant problems: she had not claimed the full Child Tax Credit for both children, and she had missed several legitimate self-employment deductions that would substantially lower her taxable income.
Lucille had two qualifying children: Maya, 11, and Theo, who turned 2 in October 2024. Combined, that was up to $4,000 in Child Tax Credit — money she had only partially claimed because of errors in how she reported her self-employment income on the original draft return.
What the VITA Volunteer Found — and What It Changed
The VITA volunteer was a retired accountant named Gerald who had been running the church’s tax clinic for four years. He walked Lucille through a list of deductions she was entitled to as a self-employed worker. These included standard mileage — she had logged approximately 41,000 business miles in 2024, which at the IRS’s 2024 rate of $0.67 per mile translated to a $27,470 deduction — along with a portion of her monthly phone bill used for the Uber app, and car insurance costs attributable to her work use.
After applying those deductions, Lucille’s net self-employment income dropped from roughly $52,000 to approximately $36,800. That shift directly reduced her Adjusted Gross Income — and in turn unlocked the full Child Tax Credit for both children that her original return had only partially reflected.
When Gerald showed her the revised numbers, Lucille went quiet. She asked him to run them again. Then she stepped outside and called Marco from the church parking lot.
The Relief — and the Limits of It
Lucille’s refund of approximately $2,800 arrived via direct deposit on March 14, 2025 — about three weeks after she filed the corrected return. She used $1,200 of it to pay down a credit card balance she had been carrying since replacing Theo’s rear-facing car seat after a fender-bender the previous spring. Another $900 went to a dental bill for Maya that had been with a collections agency since August 2024.
The remaining $700 went into a savings account — the first time, Lucille told me, she’d had more than $200 in savings since early 2022.
But the refund did not fix the larger picture. Rent is still $2,150 a month. Lucille’s Camry had started making a noise she described as “the kind you try not to think about.” Marco’s hours at the warehouse were cut in February 2025, trimming their household income by roughly $400 a month. She estimated she’d need to drive an extra eight to ten hours a week through spring to compensate.
When I asked if she planned to return to the VITA clinic for her 2025 filing, she nodded immediately. Gerald had already told her to start tracking her miles properly from January 1. She’d downloaded a mileage-logging app the same week. She almost smiled when she mentioned it — the small, worn smile of someone who has decided that learning the system is the only option left.
What Lucille’s Case Reveals About Gig Work and the Tax Code
Lucille’s experience is not rare. According to the IRS self-employed tax center, gig workers who fail to document deductible business expenses routinely overpay their effective tax rate — because the gross income on a 1099-K from a platform like Uber reflects earnings before any business costs are subtracted. For ride-share drivers, vehicle expenses alone can represent tens of thousands of dollars in legitimate deductions per year.
The Child Tax Credit, which the IRS makes available to taxpayers with qualifying children under 17, begins phasing out at $200,000 for single filers and $400,000 for married couples filing jointly. For most gig workers, the issue is not earning too much — it is miscalculating their AGI and inadvertently creating the appearance that they do.
What the VITA program does — and what Gerald did for Lucille — is thread those pieces together for filers who have no tax background and no money to pay a preparer. The program is free, operates at thousands of locations nationwide, and according to the IRS VITA program page, served over 3.2 million returns in the most recent filing season. Lucille’s return was one of them.
As I watched her walk back to her Camry after we finished talking — one eye already on her phone to check for incoming ride requests — I thought about the $7,800 in child support that had never come, the dental bill, the noise in the engine she was pretending not to hear. The refund was real. The relief was real. So was the knowledge that in eleven months, she would have to navigate the whole system again from scratch, and hope Gerald was still there.
“I’m tired,” she told me as she unlocked the car. “But I’m still here.” She said it the way people say things they’ve had to remind themselves of more than once — not as triumph, just as fact.
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