The notification sat unread on Marcus Dillard’s phone for eleven days. It was from his bank — a low-balance alert on the checking account he shared with his wife, Janelle. He knew roughly what it said. That was exactly why he hadn’t opened it.
When I sat down with Marcus at a coffee shop near his school in Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood on a Tuesday afternoon in early March 2026, he laughed when he told me this. It was the kind of laugh that isn’t really a laugh.
A Teacher Who Learned Math but Never Learned Money
Marcus Dillard is 34, teaches math to tenth graders at a public high school in DeKalb County, and is — by his own description — deeply comfortable with numbers in the abstract. Personal finance is a different subject entirely. “I can teach a kid to calculate compound interest,” he told me, “but I spent years not actually understanding what compound interest was doing to my own life.”
He grew up in a household where money was treated as a private, almost shameful subject. His parents paid bills, things mostly worked out, and the details were never discussed at the dinner table. That silence followed him into adulthood.
After earning his undergraduate degree in mathematics education, Marcus enrolled in a master’s program, believing the advanced credential would translate directly to a higher salary lane on Georgia’s teacher pay scale. That part was technically true. What he hadn’t fully modeled was the cost of the loan he’d need to get there.
By the time Marcus finished his degree, he was earning approximately $54,000 annually in base salary. His wife Janelle worked full-time as an administrative coordinator, bringing their combined household income to roughly $91,000. On paper, they were fine. In practice, Atlanta’s cost of living had other ideas.
The Debt Nobody Talks About in the Faculty Lounge
When their second child was born in 2023, Janelle reduced her hours significantly. She told Marcus she needed to — the cost of full-time childcare for two children under four would have consumed nearly everything she brought home. She was right. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, childcare costs have outpaced inflation for over a decade, and in metro Atlanta, full-time infant care alone averages over $14,000 per year.
With Janelle working roughly twenty hours a week, their combined income dropped to around $72,000. The student loan payment didn’t move. The credit card balances, which had always been manageable, began to creep. Then the minimums started feeling like a stretch.
“I think I just got really good at not knowing,” Marcus told me. “I knew we were behind. I knew the credit cards weren’t good. But I told myself it wasn’t that bad because I hadn’t actually looked at the number.” He paused. “That’s a bad strategy for a math teacher.”
He said he knew colleagues at school who had similar loan balances. Nobody talked about it directly — but there was a shared, unspoken tension every time a new paycheck hit and the immediate question was which bill to prioritize.
When the Tax Return Became a Mirror
The shift — if you can call it that — came in February 2026, when Marcus sat down to file his federal taxes and, for the first time, actually used a preparer instead of doing them himself with free software. A friend had recommended a tax preparer in their neighborhood who worked primarily with educators and young families.
What the preparer found wasn’t dramatic. There were no hidden windfalls. But there were credits and deductions Marcus had been underutilizing, or in some cases missing entirely, for years.
The first was the Child Tax Credit. For tax year 2025, according to the IRS, the credit is worth up to $2,000 per qualifying child under age 17. With two children, the Dillards were entitled to up to $4,000 in credits — but their income and filing approach had previously left money on the table through an error in how they’d calculated their adjusted gross income.
The second was the student loan interest deduction. The IRS allows taxpayers to deduct up to $2,500 in student loan interest paid during the year, subject to income phase-outs. Marcus had paid approximately $1,840 in interest on his federal loans in 2025 — a deduction he had claimed incorrectly in prior years, reducing its value.
The preparer also flagged that Marcus may have been eligible in prior years for the Earned Income Tax Credit, depending on his income level — though for tax year 2025, with their combined income closer to $72,000, the Dillards were near or above the threshold for a family of four. That conversation, Marcus told me, was harder to sit with than the good news.
What the Numbers Actually Showed
Their 2025 federal refund came to $3,210 — larger than the roughly $800 to $1,100 they’d received in previous years. It wasn’t a fix. Marcus was clear about that when he described it to me.
“Three thousand dollars sounds like a lot until you remember I have forty-some thousand left on a sixty-two-thousand-dollar loan, two credit cards with balances, and a childcare bill that doesn’t stop,” he said. “It helped. But it also made me realize how much I’d left on the table before by just filing badly.”
The Dillards used $1,500 of the refund to pay down the higher-interest credit card. The remaining $1,710 went into their checking account, where it has mostly been absorbed by the ordinary costs of life with two young children. Marcus said that’s not a complaint — just a fact.
What the preparer also did, which Marcus described as unexpectedly useful, was walk him through income-driven repayment options on his federal loans. His current repayment plan was a standard ten-year term. Depending on his income and family size, he might qualify for an income-driven plan that could lower his monthly payment — though Marcus acknowledged he hadn’t yet called his loan servicer to explore that.
Still Climbing, But With a Map
Sitting with Marcus for the better part of two hours, I came away with a portrait that resists easy resolution. He is not out of the woods. The credit card balances are smaller but not gone. The loans have years left on them. Janelle wants to return to full-time work when their youngest starts preschool, which helps, but preschool has its own costs.
What changed, Marcus told me, was less about the refund check and more about the act of looking. Of sitting in a chair across from someone who knew the tax code and actually going through the numbers line by line.
- He now has a folder — physical, on his desk at home — for financial documents.
- He has opened his bank app three times in the past six weeks, which he described as a personal record.
- He has a note in his phone to call his loan servicer before May 1, 2026.
None of that is dramatic. But for someone who spent years using deliberate ignorance as a coping mechanism, it represents something real.
“I keep thinking about what I would tell my students if one of them said they didn’t look at a test because they were scared of the grade,” Marcus told me as we wrapped up. “I’d tell them not knowing the score doesn’t change the score. It just means you can’t do anything about it.”
He laughed again. This time, it almost sounded like one.
Marcus Dillard still has $44,000 left on his student loans as of this reporting. He still has two credit card balances. He still sometimes hesitates before opening the bank app. But he filed his taxes correctly this year. For now, that’s the story he’s telling himself — and there is something genuinely earned about it.
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