The morning I met Rochelle Dillard, she was still in her work blazer at 6:47 p.m., sitting in a plastic chair at the Sunnyside Community Center in Houston, waiting for her five-year-old son, Marcus, to finish a free after-school program. She had her laptop open and a cold cup of coffee beside her. She looked like someone who hadn’t fully exhaled in years.
The center’s outreach coordinator had referred Rochelle’s story to our publication a few weeks earlier, flagging her as someone whose situation didn’t fit the usual mold — not a low-income story, not a wealth story, but something more complicated in between. When I introduced myself, Rochelle didn’t hesitate. “I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about this,” she said, closing her laptop. “Because I don’t think people realize this can happen when you’re doing everything right.”
A Good Income That Didn’t Feel Good
Rochelle, 32, has worked as an IT project manager for a mid-sized logistics firm since 2021. Her base salary sits at $112,000 — a number she worked hard for, finishing a master’s degree in information systems at the University of Houston in 2019 while working full-time. But that degree came with a price tag: $68,000 in federal student loan debt, which she’s been repaying on an income-driven plan at roughly $490 a month.
Then Marcus arrived, and the finances she thought she’d managed carefully started to shift in ways she hadn’t modeled. His father left when Marcus was seven months old and has provided no financial support. “It’s just us,” Rochelle told me plainly, without drama. “There’s no backup.”
Childcare in Houston is expensive. Rochelle enrolled Marcus in a licensed daycare center near her office in 2021, paying $1,900 a month at first. By early 2024, after two rate increases, that number had climbed to $2,300 — or $27,600 a year. After taxes, her take-home pay is roughly $6,700 a month. Between the daycare, student loan payment, rent ($1,650), and basic living expenses, she was saving almost nothing.
“On paper I make good money,” she said. “But every time I looked at my bank account, it felt like a lie. I kept thinking I was doing something wrong.”
The Tax Filing That Broke Her Routine
For three years running, Rochelle had filed her taxes using a popular online software platform, checking the same boxes, claiming what the software prompted her to claim. She knew about the Child Tax Credit — she received $2,000 for Marcus each year. What she didn’t fully understand was the Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account her employer offered, or how dramatically it could change her tax burden.
In February 2025, a colleague mentioned offhand that she’d “maxed out her DCFSA” and gotten a significant refund. Rochelle didn’t know what that meant. When she looked it up that night after Marcus went to bed, she felt what she described to me as “a very specific kind of tired anger.”
A Dependent Care FSA, offered through many employers, allows workers to set aside up to $5,000 per year in pre-tax dollars to cover qualifying dependent care expenses, including daycare. According to the IRS, this benefit reduces both federal income tax and FICA taxes on the contributed amount. For someone in Rochelle’s tax bracket — roughly 22% federal — that $5,000 contribution alone could yield savings of approximately $1,100 in federal taxes, plus another $382 in FICA, for a total of around $1,482 annually.
She had never enrolled. Three years of open enrollment periods had passed without her touching the benefit. “I saw it on the benefits page and thought it was for people with, like, more complicated situations,” she told me. “I didn’t think it applied to me.”
Understanding What She’d Left on the Table
Beyond the DCFSA, Rochelle had also underused the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit — a separate federal credit available to parents who pay for care so they can work or look for work. According to the IRS, the credit allows taxpayers to claim a percentage of up to $3,000 in care expenses for one child ($6,000 for two or more). The percentage phases down as income rises, but even at higher income levels, a taxpayer may still claim up to 20% of eligible expenses.
She also discovered she had been filing as Single rather than Head of Household — a more favorable status available to unmarried taxpayers who pay more than half the cost of maintaining a home for a qualifying child. Head of Household status provides a larger standard deduction ($21,900 for tax year 2025, versus $15,000 for Single filers, according to IRS inflation adjustments) and lower tax rates at several income brackets.
“I sat there reading IRS publications at eleven at night,” Rochelle said, laughing quietly. “I kept thinking — how did I do a whole master’s degree and not know any of this?”
The Year She Actually Used What Was Available
When Rochelle’s employer opened its annual benefits enrollment window in November 2024, she enrolled in the Dependent Care FSA for the first time, contributing the maximum $5,000. She also worked with a CPA — spending $320 for a one-time consultation — to amend her 2023 return and file 2024 correctly as Head of Household with the proper credits applied.
The amended 2023 return came back with a $1,740 refund. It wasn’t transformative money — but it was real. “I cried,” she told me. “Not because it was a huge amount. But because I finally felt like I understood something.”
What Hasn’t Changed — and What Still Weighs on Her
Rochelle is careful not to frame this as a victory story. The student loan debt is still there. The childcare bill is still $2,300 a month, though Marcus starts kindergarten in August — which will drop that cost significantly. The exhaustion she carries is real and not fixed by a tax credit.
“I’m still behind,” she said. “My retirement contributions are lower than they should be. My emergency fund is not where I want it. I’m 32 and I feel like I’ve been running in place for four years.” She paused. “But at least now I feel like I understand the track I’m on.”
She’s also thinking about Marcus’s kindergarten transition differently than she expected. Rather than treating the reduction in daycare costs as extra breathing room, she’s planning to redirect roughly $1,000 of those freed-up dollars per month into a Roth IRA — something she hasn’t been able to meaningfully contribute to since 2021. “I’ve earned enough to invest for years,” she told me. “I just never had anything left over.”
When I left the community center that evening, Marcus had fallen asleep in Rochelle’s arms waiting for an Uber, his small sneakers dangling off her knee. She was back on her phone, reading something. I didn’t ask what it was. It looked like work.
What struck me most about Rochelle’s story wasn’t the dollar amounts — though the numbers matter. It was how thoroughly the structure of her situation had hidden the tools designed to help her. She earned too much to qualify for many low-income programs. She earned just enough that the complexity of the tax code felt like someone else’s concern. That gap, she said, is where she lived for four years.
“Someone should have told me sooner,” she said as we said goodbye. “But also — I should have asked.”
Leave a Reply