The first thing Carlos Mendez told me was that he’d never been inside a SNAP office before last spring. He said it quietly, almost as a disclaimer, before we’d even ordered coffee. “I always thought that was for people in a different situation than mine,” he said, setting his phone face-down on the table. “Turns out I just hadn’t been in my situation yet.”
Carlos is 55, broad-shouldered, and the kind of man who fills up a room without trying. He manages a mid-sized restaurant in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood — not the same one he lost in 2020, but close enough geographically that he drives past the shuttered space twice a week. He doesn’t slow down when he passes it anymore. He used to.
The Restaurant That Disappeared
When I spoke with Carlos about what COVID actually cost him, the number he kept coming back to was $31,000. That was roughly what he and his wife Elena had saved over six years — a modest emergency fund and the early beginnings of something that might have become a down payment. The restaurant where he’d worked as general manager closed in March 2020. By May, the savings account had started to move in one direction.
“We weren’t reckless,” Carlos told me. “We just had four kids, a lease, utilities, car insurance. The money goes where it goes.” He applied for unemployment and received it. But Florida’s maximum weekly unemployment benefit at the time was $275 — a figure that, as he put it, “doesn’t mean much when you have a family of six.” The federal pandemic supplement helped, but it expired. The savings ran fourteen months before he landed a new management position in May 2021.
The new job paid $52,000 a year. His previous position had paid $68,000. That $16,000 gap sounds bridgeable in the abstract. In practice, Carlos told me, it determined whether the electricity stayed on in a difficult month. “I took what I could get,” he said. “I wasn’t in a position to negotiate.”
A Blended Family on a Broken Budget
To understand the full weight of Carlos’s finances, you have to understand the household. He and Elena have two biological children together — Mateo, 14, and Sofia, 11. Elena also has two children from her first marriage: Daniela, 16, and Tomás, 13. All four kids live with Carlos and Elena full-time. Elena works part-time as a medical receptionist, bringing in roughly $1,100 a month. Together, the household gross income runs approximately $5,433 a month.
Elena’s ex-husband, the father of Daniela and Tomás, is court-ordered to pay $480 a month in child support. In the eleven months before Carlos and I spoke, he had paid on time exactly four times. “You can’t budget around money that might not come,” Carlos said. “So you plan like it doesn’t exist and hope it shows up.” When it does arrive, it goes directly toward groceries or the kids’ school expenses. When it doesn’t, that gap has to be filled from somewhere else.
What struck me most during our conversation wasn’t the dollar amounts — it was how Carlos talked about the kids. He never once distinguished between “his” and “hers.” Daniela and Tomás are as much his responsibility, in his mind, as Mateo and Sofia. “They didn’t ask for any of this,” he said. “They just need a stable home.”
Applying for SNAP at 55
The decision to apply for SNAP came after a particularly brutal February — a month in which the water heater failed, Tomás needed dental work, and the child support check did not arrive. Carlos told me he sat at the kitchen table after midnight going through the numbers and realized he was $600 short with nine days left in the month.
According to the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, most households must meet both a gross and net income threshold to qualify for SNAP benefits, according to fns.usda.gov. For a household of six in fiscal year 2025, the gross monthly income limit sits at approximately $4,739 — which is 130 percent of the federal poverty level. Carlos and Elena’s combined income of $5,433 put them above that threshold.
Carlos told me the caseworker walked him through the deductions carefully. The earned income deduction — which excludes 20 percent of all earned income from the calculation — brought his countable gross down significantly. Standard deductions and a dependent care deduction for after-school care further reduced the household’s net income figure. After deductions, their net monthly income came to approximately $3,410, which fell under the net income limit of roughly $3,645 for a family of six.
Their approved monthly SNAP benefit came to $347. Carlos said the number felt both significant and somehow insufficient at the same time. “It’s not nothing,” he told me. “When you’re standing in the grocery store deciding between chicken and ground beef, $347 matters. It just doesn’t solve everything.”
The Child Support Complication
This is where the situation became genuinely complicated, and where I could see the frustration tighten across Carlos’s face. Child support received by a household is counted as unearned income for SNAP purposes. But Elena’s ex pays erratically — sometimes $480, sometimes nothing, sometimes a partial amount. When Carlos’s caseworker asked about child support income, he said he didn’t know how to answer honestly.
The caseworker averaged Elena’s actual child support receipts over the prior six months. In that window, she had received a total of $960 — an average of $160 per month. That $160, rather than the court-ordered $480, was used in the calculation. “I didn’t know they could do that,” Carlos told me. “I thought we’d be penalized for money we were supposed to get but didn’t.”
As Carlos explained it, that single piece of information changed everything about how they thought about their eligibility. If the full $480 had been counted, their net income figure would have risen high enough to reduce their benefit by roughly $96 a month. The actual receipts-based average preserved nearly $100 in monthly assistance for the household.
Where Things Stand Now, and What Carlos Is Still Carrying
When I asked Carlos what his financial situation looks like today, he paused for a long moment before answering. “Survivable,” he said finally. “That’s the word. We’re survivable right now.” The SNAP benefit has helped stabilize the grocery budget. Elena has picked up a few extra shifts. The water heater was replaced on a payment plan.
But there is no savings account. There is no retirement fund being contributed to, though at 55, Carlos is acutely aware that he should have one. He told me he thinks about it often — the math of starting from zero at his age. “I know what I should be doing,” he said quietly. “I just can’t do it yet. Right now I’m just trying to make sure the kids have what they need.”
According to the USDA’s most recent SNAP participation data, approximately 42 million Americans participate in the program in an average month, according to fns.usda.gov. The average benefit per person runs roughly $189. Carlos’s household receives about $58 per person — below the national average, reflecting their income level relative to others in the program.
There is also the matter of health insurance. Carlos is covered through his employer, but the premium takes $312 a month from his paycheck for family coverage. He said it’s non-negotiable — one of the kids had an asthma hospitalization two years ago that would have cost them $40,000 uninsured. So the premium stays, and something else gives.
Before we wrapped up, I asked Carlos what he wishes someone had told him earlier. He thought about it for a moment, then looked up. “I wish someone had told me that asking for help is part of the system working the way it’s supposed to,” he said. “I waited too long because I thought it meant I’d failed. It just meant I needed it. There’s a difference.”
Carlos Mendez is not a man who failed. He is a man who ran out of buffer. The difference between those two things is quieter than it should be, and I think about that sentence every time I look at this story.
Related: I Assumed Medicare Would Cover My Mom’s Care Home — The Reality Cost Our Family Over $74,000
Related: Four Kids, Sporadic Child Support, and No Savings at 55: The Tax Credits a Miami Dad Almost Left on the Table, according to americanrelief.info
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