Have you ever assumed you didn’t qualify for something without actually checking? That quiet assumption — the one that says people like you don’t get that kind of help — can cost real money over real years.
When I sat down with Samantha Reeves at a coffee shop near her apartment in Denver’s Sunnyside neighborhood on a Tuesday morning in February 2026, she had just come off a 12-hour overnight shift. Her scrubs still had a coffee stain near the pocket. She apologized for it before she sat down. Then she started talking, and she didn’t stop for nearly two hours.
The Life She Built, and What It Actually Costs
Samantha Reeves is 31 years old. She’s been a registered nurse at a community hospital in Denver for six years, a job she took partly because it felt stable and partly because she wanted her daughter, Nora, now four, to grow up without the financial chaos Samantha herself had experienced growing up. The job paid off — at least on paper.
Her base salary sits around $65,000 a year. With overtime shifts she picks up when her body allows it, she sometimes clears $72,000 to $74,000 in a good year. By most metrics, she’s doing fine. But Denver’s cost of living has a way of making fine feel fragile.
Nora’s father, Samantha told me flatly, “just stopped being a person in our lives” about two years ago. No support. No calls. No forwarding address as far as she can tell. Samantha has a child support order on paper, but enforcing it has cost her more in attorney fees than she’s ever collected. She’s essentially stopped trying.
So the $1,400 a month for daycare — which, she noted, is actually below the Denver average for full-time infant and toddler care — comes entirely from her paycheck. Combined with her rent of $1,575 and her student loan payment of $420 a month, Samantha said she’s spending roughly $3,400 before she buys groceries or puts gas in her car.
The SNAP Application She Almost Didn’t File
About eighteen months ago, a colleague at the hospital — a traveling nurse who had worked in several states — mentioned offhandedly that working families can sometimes qualify for SNAP benefits, even with decent incomes, because of how deductions for dependent care expenses are calculated. Samantha said she laughed it off at first.
“I kept thinking, I’m a nurse. Nurses don’t get SNAP. That’s for people who really need it.” She paused when she said that, then added: “Which is embarrassing to even say out loud, because I was drowning.”
She eventually looked into it. According to USDA’s SNAP eligibility guidelines, households with earned income can apply certain deductions — including a dependent care deduction for childcare expenses — before the net income test is applied. For a household of two in 2025, the net income limit sat at 100% of the federal poverty level, or roughly $1,778 per month.
Samantha walked me through what she found when she tried to calculate her own eligibility:
- Her gross monthly income: approximately $5,100 (base, pre-overtime)
- Standard deduction: $193
- Earned income deduction (20% of gross): roughly $1,020
- Dependent care deduction: $1,400
- Estimated net income after deductions: approximately $2,487/month
That number — $2,487 — still cleared the net income limit by nearly $700 a month. She submitted the application anyway, thinking she might have miscalculated. The denial came in the mail three weeks later.
“I wasn’t surprised. But I was angry for a day,” she told me. “Because the math was right there. I’m spending $1,400 a month in childcare so I can go work and earn money that’s ‘too much’ to get food help. It felt circular.”
The Turning Point: A Tax Credit She’d Never Heard Of
The SNAP denial stung, but it pushed Samantha to look harder at every other line of her financial picture. She started asking questions — to coworkers, to a free tax prep volunteer at a community center in her neighborhood — and that’s when the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit came up.
The credit, explained clearly at IRS.gov, allows eligible taxpayers to claim a percentage of qualifying childcare expenses — up to $3,000 for one child — against their federal tax liability. The percentage varies based on adjusted gross income. For someone at Samantha’s income level, the credit comes to 20% of qualified expenses.
Samantha had been paying $16,800 a year in daycare. She had never once thought of it as a tax event. She’d been filing her taxes using a basic free software program, plugging in her W-2, and accepting whatever number appeared. For three years running, she said she left that childcare section mostly blank because she didn’t understand what it was asking.
What the Numbers Actually Looked Like
The volunteer tax preparer at the community center helped Samantha file an amended return for the prior tax year and file correctly for 2025. The results weren’t transformative, but they were real.
Between the amended 2023 return and the corrected 2024 filing, Samantha recovered approximately $4,210 she had left on the table. Colorado offers its own Child Care Expenses Tax Credit on top of the federal credit, which added meaningful dollars. The volunteer preparer also flagged a small Earned Income Tax Credit she had partially missed in a prior year due to how her overtime income had been reported.
“It’s not enough to fix everything,” she told me, and she wanted me to be clear about that. “I still have $38,000 in loans. Daycare isn’t getting cheaper. But it was real money that was mine, and I just hadn’t claimed it.”
The Part That Still Keeps Her Up at Night
The $4,200 helped. She put $2,000 toward her student loans and kept the rest in savings, which she said she’d never had before — not in any meaningful amount. But Samantha was careful not to let the story become a feel-good ending it isn’t quite yet.
She still picks up overtime shifts she doesn’t have energy for. She’s had two conversations with her hospital’s HR department about burnout resources, and both times left feeling like she’d handed them a form to file. Nora starts kindergarten in 2027, which will reduce the daycare bill, but Samantha isn’t counting on anything she can’t see in front of her.
According to IRS EITC eligibility guidelines, the Earned Income Tax Credit phases out at higher income levels — for a single parent with one child in 2025, the credit begins to phase out around $21,560 and is eliminated entirely above roughly $47,519 in adjusted gross income. In high-overtime years, Samantha may not qualify at all. That uncertainty is part of what she said she finds hardest: the rules shift based on how many extra shifts she worked, how much she pushed herself, how tired she let herself get.
The systemic irony isn’t lost on her. Working more can cost her benefits. Working less isn’t an option when she’s Nora’s only financial anchor.
What Samantha Wants Other Nurses — and Parents — to Know
I asked Samantha what she wished she’d known three years ago, when she was filing taxes alone at midnight and leaving money unclaimed. She thought about it for a moment.
“I wish someone had told me that these programs exist for people who are trying,” she said. “Not just for people who’ve stopped trying. I assumed because I had a job and a degree that I was past the point where any of this applied to me. And that cost me money every single year.”
She mentioned the free VITA tax preparation sites specifically — a program run through the IRS that provides no-cost tax filing assistance for households generally earning $67,000 or less, staffed by trained volunteers. She found her site through a flyer at Nora’s daycare center, of all places.
When I left the coffee shop that morning, Samantha was already checking her phone for messages from Nora’s daycare — a minor pickup logistics issue, the kind of small logistical fire that single parents navigate constantly. She handled it in under two minutes. Then she put her phone away, finished her coffee, and went home to sleep before her next shift.
What she found in those tax forms wasn’t a windfall. It was her own money, reflecting back at her after years of not knowing to look for it. Whether that’s a comfort or a frustration probably depends on how tired you are when you read this.
Related: A Denver Nurse Paying $1,400 a Month for Daycare Didn’t Know She Qualified for a $2,000 Tax Credit
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