Roughly one in ten American workers will have their wages garnished at some point in their careers, according to estimates from payroll research firms — a number that rises sharply among middle-income earners carrying medical or credit debt. Most people affected never see it coming until the first short paycheck arrives.
Curtis Dupree saw it coming. He just couldn’t stop it.
I first encountered Curtis in the comment section of a piece I’d written last November about medical debt and wage garnishment. His comment was brief and pointed: “Nobody tells you that a hospital bill from three years ago can become a court judgment that follows you to every job for the next decade. Wish I’d known that at 46.” I sent him a message that same afternoon. It took him two weeks to respond — and when he did, he was cautious. “I don’t really trust people who want to talk about money,” he told me in that first exchange. “Usually someone’s selling something.” I wasn’t, and eventually he agreed to speak with me over coffee in San Antonio on a Tuesday morning in late February 2026.
A Legal Secretary With a Side Hustle and a Debt He Thought Had Expired
Curtis Dupree, 49, has worked as a legal secretary at a mid-size civil litigation firm in San Antonio for eleven years. His base salary sits at roughly $52,000 a year — comfortable enough in a mid-cost Texas city, but not a lot of cushion after rent, utilities, and the financial reset that followed his divorce in 2021. He started a mobile notary business on the side around that same time, largely to rebuild his emergency fund, which had been wiped out during the divorce proceedings.
For a while, the side business worked. At its peak in early 2023, Curtis told me, he was clearing about $2,200 a month from notarizations — real estate closings, loan signings, legal document authentication. “I was doing closings almost every weekend, sometimes two in a day,” he said. “It felt like I’d finally figured out how to get ahead of things.”
Then the real estate market slowed. Remote online notarization platforms began undercutting mobile notaries on price. By the time Curtis and I sat down in February, his side income had fallen to roughly $780 a month — a 65 percent drop from its peak over about 30 months. He’s still doing the work. There’s just far less of it.
The debt garnishment arrived separately, and earlier. In September 2024, Curtis received notice that a collection agency had obtained a civil judgment against him in Bexar County for an unpaid emergency room bill from 2021 — the same year as his divorce, when he was uninsured for about seven months during a transition between employer health plans. The original bill was $8,400. With interest and collection fees, the judgment came to $11,230. The court authorized the creditor to garnish 25 percent of his disposable weekly earnings, which works out to approximately $312 per month taken directly from his paycheck.
The Retirement Math That Keeps Curtis Up at Night
When Curtis and I worked through the numbers at the table that morning, the picture that emerged wasn’t catastrophic — but it was sobering. At 49, he has approximately $41,000 saved in a 401(k) through his firm. He contributes 4 percent of his salary, enough to capture his employer’s full 3 percent match, but not more. He hasn’t increased his contribution rate in four years.
According to the Department of Labor’s retirement planning guidance, a worker who wants to replace roughly 70–80 percent of pre-retirement income in their 60s generally needs to have saved significantly more by their late 40s than Curtis currently has. The often-cited rule of thumb — three times your salary saved by age 50 — would put Curtis’s target at around $156,000. He’s at $41,000.
“I know the number,” he told me, stirring his coffee without drinking it. “I’ve done the math. I just can’t figure out how to close the gap when $312 is already gone before I touch my check, and the notary work keeps dropping.”
What makes Curtis’s situation particularly tight is the compounding effect of the garnishment on his ability to save. The $312 monthly reduction in take-home pay means he has repeatedly dipped into a small taxable savings account — roughly $4,800 — he’s been trying to preserve as an emergency buffer. He’s withdrawn from it three times since October 2024, totaling about $1,100.
The Tax Angle Nobody Warned Him About
One thing Curtis didn’t anticipate: the self-employment tax burden from his notary business. When he filed his 2024 return in March 2025, he owed $1,840 in federal self-employment taxes on top of his regular income tax — money he hadn’t fully set aside because he’d been using notary income to cover monthly shortfalls caused by the garnishment.
He paid the $1,840 bill using an IRS installment agreement, adding another $153 monthly obligation on top of the garnishment. For roughly five months straddling 2025 and early 2026, Curtis was effectively losing nearly $465 a month in obligations he hadn’t budgeted for when he set up the notary business three years prior.
“That’s what really got me,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I thought I was doing the smart thing by having a second income stream. I didn’t realize the tax piece was going to come back and hit me like that. Nobody sat me down and explained how self-employment taxes work. I had to figure it out after the damage was done.”
A Distrust of Systems — and What He’s Actually Doing Now
Curtis’s wariness of financial institutions isn’t abstract. In 2018, he said, he enrolled in a debt management plan through a credit counseling agency after accumulating about $14,000 in credit card debt post-separation from a long-term relationship. He made 14 months of payments — roughly $9,800 total — before the agency closed its San Antonio office without notice. He spent months trying to confirm where his payments had gone and whether his creditors had been notified. Some hadn’t been. One account went to collections anyway.
“After that I just stopped trusting the process,” he told me. “I figured if I’m going to get burned, I’d rather get burned doing it myself than paying someone to do it for me.” That experience has shaped how he approaches everything since — including the current garnishment, which he is not disputing or seeking legal counsel on, partly out of exhaustion and partly because he doesn’t believe it would change the outcome.
The one concrete step Curtis mentioned during our conversation was his plan to increase his 401(k) contribution rate to 7 percent in May, once the IRS installment clears. According to IRS rules on catch-up contributions, workers who turn 50 during a tax year can contribute an additional $7,500 annually to a 401(k) on top of the standard limit — a provision Curtis is now counting down to with something between anticipation and anxiety. He turns 50 in October 2026.
“That catch-up rule is the only thing that feels like it was designed for someone like me,” he said. “Someone who didn’t start early enough, or lost ground, or had things go sideways. It doesn’t solve the problem. But it’s something.”
No Clean Resolution — Just a Man Still Figuring It Out
When I left the coffee shop that Tuesday morning, I didn’t walk away with a tidy story about someone who’d conquered his debt and maxed out his retirement account. Curtis Dupree is still in the middle of it. The garnishment continues. The notary work keeps shrinking. The retirement gap isn’t closing yet.
What stayed with me was something he said near the end of our conversation, almost offhandedly: “I’m not looking for sympathy. I made some of these choices, and I didn’t make others well enough. I just want people to understand that middle-income doesn’t mean safe. It means you earn too much to get help and not enough to absorb the hits.”
He paid for his own coffee. He made a point of it.
Curtis’s story doesn’t have a moral or a five-step fix. It’s a portrait of what happens when several ordinary financial pressures — a medical debt, a slow market, a late start on retirement — arrive at the same time in a life that was never designed to absorb all of them at once. He’s not giving up. He’s adjusting. And he’s paying attention to the rules now, even the ones that used to feel like they didn’t apply to him.
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