Marcus Dillard was sitting at his kitchen table in late January, staring at a number on his laptop screen, when his younger daughter wandered in asking for a snack. He closed the lid. He didn’t look at it again for three days. The number was his adjusted gross income for the prior year — and it told him, quietly but unmistakably, that the tax refund he’d been counting on to cover two months of minimum credit card payments wasn’t coming.
When I spoke with Marcus in March 2026, he was calm in the way that people get when they’ve processed something painful enough times that the sharp edges have worn down. He’s 34, teaches high school algebra in Atlanta, and has the patient, methodical energy you’d expect from someone who explains quadratic equations to teenagers for a living. But when the conversation turned to money, something shifted in his expression — a careful blankness, like a door quietly closing.
The Degree That Was Supposed to Change Everything
Marcus grew up in a household where finances were, as he put it, “a closed topic.” His parents worked hard, the bills got paid most months, and that was the full extent of what money meant in his home. Nobody talked about interest rates, tax brackets, or retirement accounts. When Marcus decided to pursue a master’s in education after his undergraduate degree, he borrowed what he needed and didn’t think too hard about what repayment would look like.
By the time he graduated and started teaching in Atlanta, he carried $62,000 in federal student loan debt. His starting salary was roughly $48,000 — a number he knew going in, but that felt different once rent, groceries, and a car payment entered the picture.
“I thought the master’s would bump my pay enough to make it worth it,” Marcus told me. “And it did bump it — maybe $4,000 or $5,000 more per year than I’d have made otherwise. But nobody sat me down and said, okay, here’s what $62,000 at 6.5% interest actually costs you every month.” He paused. “I wish someone had drawn that out for me on a whiteboard.”
His wife, Dani, works part-time as a dental hygienist. After their second child was born in 2023, she cut her hours significantly. The math shifted hard. What had been a dual-income household became, for stretches of several months, effectively a single-income one.
When Childcare Costs Became the Breaking Point
Childcare in Atlanta isn’t cheap. Marcus told me they were paying approximately $1,400 per month for their younger daughter’s full-time daycare placement — a number that arrived like clockwork regardless of whether Dani picked up any shifts that week.
Between the loan payment, daycare, rent, utilities, groceries, and a modest car note, the household was running close to the edge most months. When an unexpected expense hit — a car repair in October 2024, a medical copay in December — they floated the gap on credit cards. Over about 18 months, that floating added up to roughly $7,200 in revolving credit card debt across two cards.
“We weren’t being irresponsible,” Marcus said, and he said it without defensiveness, just precision. “We were covering real expenses. But when you’re covering real expenses on credit and not paying it off, eventually you’re paying for last year’s groceries with interest.”
The Tax Season That Didn’t Deliver
Every winter, Marcus told me, he and Dani had a quiet ritual of estimating their tax refund. It became a kind of financial life raft — a once-a-year injection they could plan around. In early 2025, they were counting on approximately $2,800 back, based on rough math Marcus had done in his head.
The actual refund was $340.
The gap came from several directions at once. Marcus had expected the Lifetime Learning Credit to offset more of his student loan interest situation — but the credit, which is capped at $2,000 and phases out at higher income levels, applied to tuition paid during enrollment, not to loan repayment after the fact. He’d already graduated. According to the IRS guidance on the Lifetime Learning Credit, the credit applies to qualified tuition and related expenses for courses taken during the tax year, not to existing loan interest accrued from prior enrollment.
He had also miscalculated the Child and Dependent Care Credit. The credit can help offset childcare costs, but the amount is based on a percentage of qualifying expenses — up to $3,000 for one child or $6,000 for two — and that percentage decreases as income rises. Because Marcus had received a step raise mid-year, pushing his salary closer to $54,000, the effective credit was lower than he’d estimated.
“I teach math,” Marcus told me, with a short, tired laugh. “And I still got the math wrong. Not because I’m bad at numbers — because the tax code isn’t written like a math problem. It’s written like a maze.”
What He Didn’t Know About Student Loan Interest Deductions
There was one deduction Marcus had missed entirely in prior years: the student loan interest deduction. For tax year 2025, the IRS allows taxpayers to deduct up to $2,500 of student loan interest paid during the year — but the deduction phases out for single filers with modified adjusted gross income between $75,000 and $90,000, and for married filing jointly between $155,000 and $185,000.
Marcus and Dani’s combined income put them well within the eligibility range. But in previous years, he’d simply missed the line on the form. When a colleague pointed it out in early 2026, he went back and realized he’d left money on the table in at least two prior filing years.
The Dependent Care FSA discovery was, by Marcus’s account, the most frustrating. His school district had offered it for years. He’d seen the enrollment form during onboarding and assumed it was for something else. “I think I thought it was only for medical stuff,” he told me. “Nobody explained it to me. It was just a line on a form.”
Where Things Stand Now — and What Hasn’t Changed
When I spoke with Marcus in late March 2026, he had filed his 2025 return with help from a volunteer tax preparer through the IRS’s VITA program — free tax preparation for households earning under $67,000. The refund this time was $1,140, which he described as “realistic” rather than exciting. He also enrolled in the Dependent Care FSA for the 2026 plan year, diverting $5,000 pre-tax toward daycare costs — a change that will reduce his taxable income and lower his overall tax bill next year.
The credit card debt is still there. At approximately $7,200 across two cards, it hasn’t grown, but it hasn’t shrunk meaningfully either. The student loans sit at around $58,000 after several years of payments — lower than the starting balance, but not by as much as Marcus had hoped, because interest continued accruing during a period when he had paused payments under a hardship deferment in 2023.
Dani picked up an additional shift per week starting in February, which has helped. Marcus took on a tutoring side arrangement with three students — roughly $200 extra per month, which he described as “better than nothing, not enough to change anything.” He’s also finally started opening his bank app regularly, something he told me he’d avoided for years out of a low-grade dread he couldn’t quite name.
“I grew up thinking money was something that happened to you,” he said near the end of our conversation. “Like weather. You didn’t understand it, you just dealt with it. I’m trying to unlearn that. It’s slow.”
I left Marcus’s kitchen thinking about the particular cruelty of a system that offers meaningful tax relief to people who already understand how to find it. Marcus is a person who can explain derivatives to a room full of teenagers. The tax code still managed to cost him money he didn’t know he was losing. That gap — between a complicated system and the people it’s meant to help — doesn’t close on its own.
Related: A Teacher With $62K in Student Loans Told Me He Avoids Opening His Bank App — Here’s What Changed
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