The federal tax filing deadline falls on April 15, 2026, which means millions of Americans are right now doing something Marcus Dillard avoided for most of the past two years: opening documents that tell the truth about where their money went. When I sat down with Marcus in late March at a coffee shop near his school in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, he had just — finally — filed his 2025 return. His hands were wrapped around a coffee cup he wasn’t drinking.
Marcus Dillard is 34 years old, teaches Algebra II and AP Statistics at a Title I public high school, and carries $62,000 in federal student loans from the master’s degree in education he finished in 2019. He is also, by his own admission, someone who has spent the better part of two years not looking at his bank account.
A Degree That Was Supposed to Help
Marcus grew up in a household in Decatur, Georgia, where finances were treated as adult business — never discussed at the dinner table, never explained to the kids. His parents paid the bills, the lights stayed on, and that was considered enough. When Marcus enrolled in a master’s program at a state university in 2017, he did what a lot of first-generation graduate students do: he signed the loan paperwork without fully processing what $62,000 in debt would feel like on a teacher’s salary.
His starting salary out of the master’s program was $52,400. By 2025, with step increases and a small district-wide raise, he was earning $58,700 annually. The degree, he told me, had not produced the salary bump he’d imagined.
His wife, Janelle, had been working part-time as a dental hygienist, bringing in roughly $28,000 to $32,000 a year depending on her hours. After their second child was born in the fall of 2023, she scaled back dramatically. Childcare for two children in Atlanta was running the family approximately $2,100 a month — more than their car payment and utilities combined. Janelle’s reduced schedule cut her income to under $14,000 in 2025. The family’s effective household income dropped by roughly $18,000 in less than 18 months.
The Slow Slide Into Avoidance
What Marcus described to me is something that behavioral finance researchers sometimes call financial avoidance — not ignorance, but a deliberate choice to not look, because looking feels like it makes the problem more real. He knows what his salary is. He knows the loans are there. But checking the actual balances, reading the credit card statements, cross-referencing what came in against what went out — that he stopped doing sometime in the spring of 2024.
“I’d open the app on my phone and then just close it,” he told me. “I’d tell myself I’d do it later, when I felt better, when the semester calmed down. And then later never came.” By the time we spoke, he estimated he had three credit cards carrying balances totaling somewhere around $9,400 — he wasn’t certain of the exact number, which said something on its own.
The slide had been gradual enough that neither Marcus nor Janelle had raised an alarm with each other. They weren’t fighting about money. They were, as Marcus put it, “just quietly not talking about it.” Bills got paid — mostly. The student loan had been on an income-driven repayment plan since 2021, which kept the monthly payment lower than the standard $680 figure, though it also meant the balance was barely moving. He wasn’t sure what his current adjusted payment was.
When the Return Told a Different Story
The turning point came in February 2026, when a colleague at Marcus’s school mentioned offhand that she’d received a refund of over $4,000 after switching to a professional tax preparer. Marcus had always filed his own taxes using a free online service. He’d never paid much attention to whether he was capturing everything he qualified for.
At his colleague’s urging, he booked an appointment with a local enrolled agent — a tax professional licensed by the IRS to represent taxpayers. What the preparer found in Marcus and Janelle’s 2025 return stopped him short.
The enrolled agent estimated that in tax year 2024 alone, Marcus had likely left approximately $3,200 in credits and deductions unclaimed. For 2025, the return they filed together produced a refund of $2,847 — more than double what Marcus had received the previous year when he filed on his own.
The Numbers Are Better — and Also Still Hard
Marcus put the $2,847 refund entirely toward the credit card with the highest interest rate. He told me he chose that one specifically because of a lesson he’d taught his own students about compound interest — “I made the example about credit cards and it hit me that I was describing myself.” The gesture was practical and also, in his telling, a little painful.
The larger picture hasn’t transformed. His student loan balance sits at approximately $59,400, after years of income-driven payments that covered interest but little principal. Childcare costs will remain high until his older child starts kindergarten in the fall of 2027. Janelle has started picking up extra shifts when they can arrange coverage, but the family’s monthly budget still runs close to the edge most months.
Marcus is also now researching the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which can discharge remaining federal loan balances after 120 qualifying payments for employees of public schools or nonprofits. He believes he may have already made enough qualifying payments to be more than halfway to forgiveness — but he’s been enrolled in the wrong repayment plan for some of those years, which may complicate his timeline. He didn’t know any of this until his tax preparer mentioned it in passing.
What Comes Next, and What Doesn’t Change
When I asked Marcus what he wishes he’d done differently, he didn’t hesitate. “Looked sooner,” he said. “Just looked.” He paused and then added: “Although I also wish the systems were easier to understand. I’m educated. I have a graduate degree. And I still didn’t understand what I was entitled to.”
That frustration is legitimate and well-documented. The IRS Free File program exists for households earning under $84,000, but awareness of it remains low, and the interface has historically been difficult to navigate for people without tax experience. Marcus qualified for it but had never used it — he’d been using a different free-tier product that he said didn’t prompt him about childcare credits or student loan deductions.
The Dillard family’s finances are still stretched. The credit card debt is lower by one refund check, not gone. The student loans will take years to resolve, PSLF or not. Janelle is interviewing for a part-time position closer to home that would let her work more hours without increasing their childcare burden. Marcus described all of this to me with the careful optimism of someone who has recently been reminded that optimism without information is just avoidance with better posture.
Before I left, Marcus mentioned that he’d started looking at his bank account again — not every day, but a few times a week. He’d set up automatic alerts for when his balance dipped below a certain threshold. Small things. He said he hadn’t told his students any of this, though he thought about it sometimes when he was writing compound interest problems on the board.
“The math is neutral,” he told me, finishing his coffee. “It doesn’t care if you look at it or not. It just keeps going.” There was no resolution in that, exactly. Just the particular kind of clarity that comes from finally deciding to see what’s there.
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