A salary above $70,000 is supposed to mean you’ve made it. That’s the story most of us tell ourselves — that a professional income, a stable job, a plan, is enough. Samantha Reeves, 31, is living proof that in the wrong zip code, with the wrong set of circumstances, that story falls apart fast.
When I sat down with Samantha Reeves at a coffee shop near her apartment in Denver’s Westwood neighborhood, she was still in her scrubs. She’d come straight from a 10-hour shift at a community hospital, and her daughter, who is four years old, was at daycare — racking up another $70 in daily charges. She ordered a black coffee. She did not order food.
A Budget That Shouldn’t Be This Tight
Samantha earns approximately $72,000 a year as a registered nurse, which sounds comfortable until you run the numbers through Denver’s cost of living. Her rent is $1,550 a month. Daycare runs $1,400 a month — nearly dollar for dollar with her rent. Her income-driven repayment on $38,000 in nursing school loans adds another $310 monthly. That’s $3,260 a month before she’s bought a single grocery item, filled her gas tank, or paid a utility bill.
Her daughter’s father disappeared about two years ago. There’s an open child support case, Samantha told me, but she’s stopped holding her breath. “I’ve learned to budget like he doesn’t exist,” she said, “because financially, he doesn’t.” She picks up overtime shifts when she can — sometimes two extra per month — but she’s started noticing what overwork does to her patience at home, and she doesn’t love what she sees.
What I found most striking wasn’t the deficit itself. It was that Samantha had spent nearly a year assuming she made too much money to qualify for any assistance. She never looked. The assumption cost her.
The Moment She Actually Checked
It was a coworker who first mentioned SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — during a break room conversation last October. Samantha told me she almost dismissed it immediately. “I thought SNAP was for people who were unemployed,” she said. “I’m a nurse. I have a job. I figured I’d just be wasting everyone’s time.”
But the coworker pushed back. She pointed out that SNAP eligibility in Colorado is calculated on net income, not gross — and that certain deductions, including childcare costs, can dramatically reduce what the government counts as your household income. Samantha went home that night and looked it up on the USDA’s SNAP eligibility page for the first time.
Under SNAP’s rules, households can deduct dependent care expenses — including daycare — from their gross income before eligibility is assessed. For a household of two in Colorado in 2025, the net monthly income limit was approximately $1,580. Once Samantha subtracted her $1,400 daycare cost and applied the standard deduction, her countable income dropped sharply. She was close to the line. Close enough to apply.
The Application and What Came After
Samantha applied through Colorado’s PEAK benefits portal in November 2024. The process took longer than she expected. She had to submit pay stubs, her lease agreement, documentation of her childcare provider, and a phone interview that kept getting rescheduled because of her rotating shifts. “The system is not designed for people who work weird hours,” she told me, without bitterness, just observation.
Six weeks after applying, she was approved. Her monthly SNAP benefit came out to $187. It was not a life-changing number. She was the first to say so.
What $187 actually did was cover most of what she’d been spending on groceries — roughly $200 a month after she’d trimmed everything she could. “It sounds small,” she said, “but that $187 is the difference between me stressing about groceries and me not stressing about groceries. And when you’re already stressed about everything else, that’s significant.”
She also looked into the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit after a tax preparer at a volunteer site mentioned it. According to the IRS, qualifying families can claim a percentage of up to $3,000 in dependent care expenses for one child. Samantha had never claimed it before. For tax year 2024, she expected a credit that would partially offset what she’d paid in daycare — not a windfall, but money she’d been leaving behind.
What the Numbers Still Don’t Fix
I want to be honest about what Samantha’s story is and isn’t. It’s not a turnaround story. She is not thriving. She is managing — and management, for her, requires a level of mental effort that compounds the physical exhaustion of her job.
Samantha is also enrolled in her hospital’s employer health plan, which covers her and her daughter. The premium is $214 a month, deducted pre-tax. She’s grateful for it — she’s seen what uninsured families face in her own emergency department — but it’s another fixed line in a budget with very few flexible ones.
She looked briefly into Medicaid for her daughter to reduce the premium cost. Her daughter’s income-counted household puts them above Colorado’s Medicaid threshold for a family of two, which in 2025 sat at 138% of the federal poverty level — roughly $25,820 annually. Samantha’s income exceeds that threshold, and the CHP+ program (Colorado’s CHIP equivalent) also fell short of covering her situation. “I looked into everything,” she told me. “Some of it helped. Some of it I don’t qualify for. You just have to keep looking.”
The Question She Keeps Coming Back To
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Samantha what she wishes she’d known sooner. She didn’t hesitate.
According to the USDA’s SNAP program data, approximately 42 million Americans received SNAP benefits in fiscal year 2023. A meaningful share of those recipients are working adults in households with at least one employed person. The program was not designed exclusively for unemployment — it was designed for food insecurity, which does not discriminate by job title.
Samantha knows this now. She also knows it doesn’t solve the structural problem, which is that a registered nurse in a major American city, working full time, raising a child alone, earning $72,000 a year, is one medical bill or one missed shift away from genuine crisis. She is not bitter about that in the way I might have expected. She’s just precise about it.
“I became a nurse because I wanted a stable life for my daughter,” she told me, gathering her bag as our coffee cups emptied. “I have a stable life. It’s just a lot more precarious than I thought stability would feel.”
She had to leave to pick up her daughter before the $20 late fee kicked in at the daycare center. I watched her go and thought about that word — precarious. It’s doing a lot of heavy lifting in a lot of American lives right now, including ones that look, from the outside, like they’ve already arrived.
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