Most people think divorce is the hard part. The paperwork, the lawyers, the custody hearings — they imagine that once the judge signs the decree, the worst is over. Tommy Bianchi, a 46-year-old HVAC technician from Phoenix, Arizona, would tell you that is exactly backwards. The hard part, he says, is every single month after.
I met Tommy at a diner off I-10 on a Tuesday morning in late March 2026. He was still in his work uniform — a blue collared shirt with a company logo on the chest — and he ordered coffee before he even sat down. He had the kind of tired that doesn’t come from a single bad night’s sleep.
The Divorce Settlement That Didn’t End at the Courthouse
Tommy’s marriage ended in 2022 after twelve years. He and his ex-wife had two kids, a house in the Ahwatukee Foothills neighborhood, and what he described as a comfortable, if stretched, life on his technician’s income. When the divorce was finalized, the house went to his ex-wife, and Tommy walked out carrying roughly $22,000 in attorney fees he had charged across three credit cards.
“I didn’t fight as hard as I maybe should have,” Tommy told me, wrapping both hands around his coffee mug. “My lawyer kept saying, just settle, it’ll cost more to fight. So I settled. And then I got the bill for settling.”
The child support order came to $1,600 per month. Tommy earns approximately $6,400 per month gross as a senior HVAC technician — a solid wage by most measures. But according to Arizona state law, child support calculations are based on gross income, not take-home pay. That means a quarter of every dollar he earns before taxes is spoken for before he touches it.
After federal and state taxes, his credit card minimums, rent on a two-bedroom apartment in Mesa, and the child support, Tommy figures he has roughly $800 to $1,000 left each month for everything else — food, gas, utilities, and the weekends with his kids.
What ‘Every Other Weekend’ Actually Costs
Tommy has his two children — a son, 14, and a daughter, 11 — every other weekend. That’s four days per month. He described those days to me with a mix of joy and something that sounded like quiet shame.
He estimates he spends between $400 and $600 on those two weekends combined — a figure he knows is unsustainable and admits he cannot stop. Psychologists have a name for this pattern: “guilt spending,” the tendency of non-custodial parents to compensate for limited time with money. Tommy hasn’t seen a therapist, but he recognized the behavior when I described it to him.
“Yeah,” he said flatly. “That’s exactly what it is. I know it. Doesn’t stop me.”
Three Years of Renting and Going Nowhere
Tommy has been renting a two-bedroom apartment in Mesa since the divorce was finalized. The second bedroom is for the kids. He pays $1,450 per month — a price that felt manageable in 2022 and has since been raised twice by his landlord, most recently to $1,580 in January 2026.
He wants to buy a house. He talks about it the way people talk about a trip they keep planning and never taking. The math, as he laid it out for me, is brutal.
“I’ve got maybe two hundred bucks left at the end of the month if nothing goes wrong,” Tommy said. “And something always goes wrong. Last month my truck needed brakes. That was $380. So I put it on a card.” He gestured at the phone in his pocket as if the credit card was living there, waiting.
A conventional mortgage on a modest Phoenix-area home — say, a $280,000 property — would require a down payment of roughly $9,800 at 3.5% under an FHA loan, according to HUD guidelines. Tommy has saved approximately $1,200 toward that goal over three years. At his current rate, he estimates it would take him another six to eight years to reach the threshold — assuming nothing else breaks.
The Bitterness He’s Trying Not to Pass On
Tommy is not a man who hides his feelings well, but he is clearly trying. He mentioned his ex-wife three times during our conversation and caught himself each time, redirecting. “I’m not going to do that,” he said once, mid-sentence, and changed the subject. It was one of the more quietly dignified things I’ve seen in an interview.
He is bitter about the settlement. He believes he paid more in legal fees than he should have, that he was counseled to concede too much, and that the house — which has appreciated significantly in the Phoenix market since 2022 — would have given him equity he desperately needs now. He may be right. He may also be filtering the past through three years of financial strain. Probably both.
What struck me most was how clearly Tommy understood his own situation and how little that understanding had changed it. He knows the weekend spending is a problem. He knows paying minimums on $22,000 in credit card debt at interest rates between 22% and 26% APR is a losing battle. He knows that saving $200 a month — on a good month — will not get him into a house before his kids graduate high school.
Knowing and changing are different things, and Tommy is stuck somewhere in the space between them.
Where He Stands Now — and What He’s Hoping For
Tommy told me he recently looked into whether his child support order could be modified. His income has stayed roughly flat over the past two years — he got a small raise in 2024, about $1.50 an hour — but he hasn’t pursued a formal review. “I looked it up online,” he said. “It seemed like a lot of paperwork and I’d probably need a lawyer again. I can’t afford another lawyer.”
He has not applied for any assistance programs. He earns too much to qualify for SNAP benefits — the federal income threshold for a household of one is roughly $2,311 per month net, according to USDA Food and Nutrition Service, and Tommy’s net income, while tight, exceeds that. He has employer-sponsored health insurance through his HVAC company, which he described as “decent but not great.”
His retirement savings are minimal. He contributes 3% to a 401(k) to capture his employer’s match — “I’m not giving up free money,” he said, and that line was the most financially clear-eyed thing he said all morning — but he hasn’t increased contributions since the divorce.
When I asked him what he wanted people to take away from his story, Tommy was quiet for a moment. He looked out the window at the parking lot. “I just want people to know it doesn’t go away fast,” he said. “The divorce is over but the divorce isn’t over. You know what I mean?”
I did know what he meant. And three years in, with $1,200 saved toward a down payment and $22,000 still on credit cards, Tommy Bianchi is living proof that the financial aftermath of a marriage can outlast the marriage itself by a very long time.
He finished his coffee, left a cash tip on the table, and went back to work.
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