Roughly 7 million American workers have their wages garnished each year, according to estimates from payroll industry analysts — and a disproportionate number of them never saw it coming. That number doesn’t capture what it actually feels like when money disappears from your account before you can even count it. Nadine LaRoche knows exactly what that feels like.
I met Nadine entirely by accident last November, standing behind her at a QuikTrip gas station on Loop 1604 in San Antonio. She was pumping gas with her phone pressed between her ear and shoulder, her voice carrying just enough for me to catch fragments: “they took the whole commission check… I don’t know how we cover rent now… Marcus needs his therapist every week.” When she hung up, something in her expression — equal parts exhaustion and stubborn resolve — made me introduce myself. She agreed to sit down with me the following Saturday.
A High Income That Doesn’t Feel That Way
On paper, Nadine LaRoche, 40, looks financially comfortable. She’s a licensed real estate agent in San Antonio, married to her husband Derek, and in a good year she clears well over $100,000 in gross commissions. But “a good year” is the operative phrase. As she explained when we sat down at a coffee shop near her home in the Stone Oak neighborhood, real estate income doesn’t follow a calendar.
“January and February, I might make nothing,” Nadine told me. “Then May and June I might close four deals back to back. The IRS doesn’t care. The landlord doesn’t care. The debt collector definitely doesn’t care.”
Because Nadine is an independent contractor — not a salaried employee — she’s responsible for her own quarterly estimated taxes to the IRS, as well as the full 15.3% self-employment tax that covers both the employee and employer portions of Social Security and Medicare. In lean months, those payments get deferred. Over time, that habit compounded into a tax debt that eventually led to a levy notice she admits she avoided opening for almost three months.
Her child, Marcus, is nine years old and has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and a sensory processing condition that requires weekly occupational therapy and speech therapy. The family’s out-of-pocket costs after insurance run approximately $1,400 a month. That figure doesn’t move — it’s fixed, every month, regardless of what Nadine closes.
When the Garnishment Letter Arrived
The garnishment that upended the LaRoche household wasn’t new debt. It traced back to a credit card Nadine had opened in her late twenties, before her real estate career took off, when she was cobbling together income between jobs. The balance had been charged off, sold to a collection agency, and eventually resulted in a civil judgment that Nadine says she didn’t fully understand at the time.
“I thought a judgment just meant they could come after me if I had assets,” she told me. “I didn’t realize they could garnish commissions. I thought that was only for people with regular paychecks.”
In Texas, wage garnishment for consumer debt is actually quite limited for traditional employees — state law provides strong protections. But Nadine’s commissions flowed through her brokerage’s accounts and were subject to a bank levy under the civil judgment. In September 2025, a $9,200 commission from a closing in Alamo Heights was reduced to $3,600 by the time it hit her account. The collector had taken $5,600 in a single sweep.
Two weeks after the garnishment, the LaRoches received their lease renewal notice. Their landlord, citing rising property taxes and market rents in their area of San Antonio, raised their monthly rent from $2,800 to $3,640 — a $840-per-month jump, or exactly 30%. The two events, landing within a fortnight of each other, left the family short by roughly $6,400 heading into October.
The Social Security Blind Spot She Hadn’t Considered
As I talked with Nadine over the course of two conversations, a subtler concern emerged alongside the immediate financial crisis. Because her income had been inconsistent for years — and because she sometimes delayed or underpaid her estimated taxes — her actual reported earnings to the Social Security Administration had been lower than her real income in several years. For independent contractors, the SSA only counts earnings on which self-employment taxes are properly reported and paid.
According to SSA.gov’s retirement benefits information, your future Social Security benefit is calculated based on your 35 highest-earning years. Gaps, underreported years, or years with low earnings all drag that average down — meaning the financial chaos of Nadine’s early forties could follow her into retirement.
“Someone told me to check my Social Security statement and I literally hadn’t done it in years,” she said. “When I finally looked, there were two years where my recorded earnings were basically nothing. I was working. I just wasn’t paying myself properly on paper.”
The Social Security Administration serves nearly 75 million Americans, and the agency encourages workers to review their earnings record regularly through a my Social Security account at SSA.gov. Errors in reported earnings can be corrected, but only if you catch them — and only with documentation. For self-employed workers, that means keeping meticulous records of 1099s and tax filings going back years.
According to NBC News reporting on the 2026 COLA adjustment, Social Security recipients will see a 2.8% increase in benefit payments in 2026 — but that boost only compounds on whatever base benefit a worker has already earned. A lower base means a lower raise, in raw dollar terms, forever.
How the LaRoche Family Is Navigating the Mess
Nadine told me that the period between September and December 2025 was the most financially frightening stretch of her adult life — including the years before she built her real estate business. The combination of the garnishment, the rent increase, and Marcus’s ongoing therapy costs left her and Derek with almost no buffer.
What helped, she said, was finally forcing herself to open every piece of mail and look at every account balance — the habit she had spent years avoiding. “I used to joke that ignorance was bliss,” she said with a short laugh. “It’s not. Ignorance is just debt with a delay.”
The SSI application for Marcus is still pending as of our most recent conversation in late March 2026. Nadine is cautiously optimistic but said the process has been slow and paperwork-heavy. The SSA’s disability benefits program covers both adults and children, and SSI for children is need-based — meaning the family’s income is a factor in eligibility. Given their income level, approval isn’t guaranteed.
“We’re not poor enough to qualify easily, but we’re not rich enough for any of this to feel okay,” she said. “That middle space is a really lonely place to be.”
What She Wishes She Had Known Earlier
The regret in Nadine’s voice when she talks about the years she avoided her finances isn’t self-pity — it’s something more precise. It’s the frustration of someone who understands the compounding logic of delayed decisions and can now run the math backward.
She estimates that if she had addressed the civil judgment two years earlier, before interest accumulated, she might have settled it for $3,000 less. The two years of underreported Social Security earnings are harder to quantify, but her CPA has told her the long-term impact on her eventual benefit could be meaningful if the corrections aren’t processed properly.
Nadine’s story isn’t a turnaround story — not yet. The rent is still $3,640. Marcus still needs his weekly therapy. The SSI decision hasn’t come. But something has shifted in how she moves through the financial machinery of her life. She opens the mail now. She checks the balances. She knows, as she put it, “what I’m actually dealing with.”
“The anxiety doesn’t go away,” she told me before we said goodbye. “But it’s different when you’re anxious about real things instead of imaginary ones. At least I know what I’m fighting.”
I drove home thinking about that distinction. There’s a particular kind of financial courage that doesn’t show up in spreadsheets — the willingness to look. Nadine LaRoche is still in the middle of her story. But she’s looking now.
Sloane Avery Wren is a Senior Benefits Writer at First Person Finance. This article reports on one individual’s financial experience and does not constitute financial, legal, or tax advice.
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