The volunteer at the folding table slid a printed worksheet across to Janine Hensley, pointed to a number circled in blue pen, and said, “Did you know you were eligible for this?” Janine told me she stared at it for a long moment before she answered. “I’ve been filing taxes for thirty years,” she said. “I had no idea.”
I met Janine in February 2026 at a VITA-sponsored free tax preparation clinic held at a community center in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was waiting in a folding chair with a manila folder on her lap, her coat still on despite the warmth inside. She looked like someone bracing for bad news. By the end of our conversation, her posture had shifted entirely.
A Budget That Stopped Adding Up
Janine Hensley is 50 years old and has worked as an insurance claims adjuster for nearly two decades. She and her husband Marcus, 52, a logistics coordinator, bring in a combined household income of roughly $145,000 a year — comfortable by most measures, but not immune to the financial pressure that has squeezed families across Tennessee over the past few years.
The breaking point, as Janine described it, was a lease renewal letter that arrived last October. Their landlord in West Knoxville was raising the rent on their three-bedroom home from $1,650 per month to $2,145 — a 30% increase, effective January 2026. That is an extra $495 every single month, or nearly $6,000 more per year.
Stacked on top of that rent increase was $47,000 in remaining student loan debt from an MBA she completed at the University of Tennessee in 2018. Janine had gone back to school at 42, betting that the degree would accelerate her career. It did — she earned two promotions in the years that followed. But the $520 monthly loan payment has followed her ever since.
“I don’t regret getting the degree,” she told me. “But I did not think clearly about how long I’d be paying for it. I thought I’d have it done by now.”
The College Cost Looming on the Horizon
Adding urgency to all of this is Janine’s daughter Kylie, 17, who was accepted to the University of Tennessee’s nursing program and is set to begin classes in the fall of 2026. Janine and Marcus have been saving through a 529 plan since Kylie was in middle school, but the account holds roughly $22,000 — a good start, though well short of what four years at UT Knoxville will cost.
According to the University of Tennessee’s student billing office, in-state tuition, fees, and on-campus room and board for the 2025–2026 academic year total approximately $28,500. That number is expected to climb. Janine and Marcus planned to cover the gap with a combination of loans in Kylie’s name, part-time work, and whatever tax credits they could find.
It was Kylie’s upcoming enrollment, Janine said, that finally pushed her to seek out free tax help instead of filing on her own as she usually did. She had heard about the VITA clinic from a coworker and figured she had nothing to lose.
What the Tax Clinic Uncovered
When I spoke with Janine about what happened inside that appointment, she described it as a kind of slow-building surprise. The VITA volunteer — a retired accountant named Gerald — worked through her return methodically. And then he stopped at a section Janine had always skipped past.
The first discovery was the student loan interest deduction. Janine had assumed that her household income was too high to qualify. She was right to be cautious — the deduction phases out for married couples filing jointly between $165,000 and $195,000 in modified adjusted gross income, according to the IRS. Because Janine and Marcus’s combined income landed below that ceiling, they were still eligible. In 2025, they paid approximately $1,940 in student loan interest — an amount that could reduce their taxable income dollar for dollar, up to the $2,500 annual cap.
The second discovery was larger. Gerald explained that once Kylie begins college in fall 2026, Janine and Marcus may be eligible for the American Opportunity Tax Credit — worth up to $2,500 per year for each of the first four years a student is enrolled at least half-time in a degree program. Unlike a deduction, a tax credit reduces what a family owes dollar for dollar, and 40% of the AOTC is refundable even if no taxes are owed.
The credit begins to phase out for married filers with a modified AGI above $160,000, according to the IRS’s AOTC guidance. Janine and Marcus’s income sits close to that threshold, meaning they may qualify for a partial credit — but Gerald estimated they could still claim somewhere between $1,200 and $1,800 in credit for Kylie’s first year.
The Numbers, Up Close
Janine and I sat down after her appointment to walk through what the clinic had actually found. The student loan interest deduction on her 2025 return, applied to her marginal tax bracket, translated to roughly $460 in tax savings. Not life-changing on its own, but meaningful when every dollar is already allocated.
Gerald had also helped her identify a health savings account contribution adjustment that had been entered incorrectly in prior years — a technical fix that added another small but real correction to her return. In total, her expected refund for 2025 had grown from her initial self-estimate of about $310 to approximately $870.
“The $870 isn’t going to fix everything,” Janine told me plainly. “But it’s real. I’m going to put it straight toward the student loan.” She paused and then added something that has stayed with me: “It’s not the amount. It’s that I’d been leaving it on the table for years and I just didn’t know.”
Hope With an Asterisk
When I asked Janine how she felt leaving the clinic that afternoon, she was honest in a way that felt hard-earned. She said she felt hopeful — but specifically the kind of hopeful that comes with an asterisk. The rent is still $2,145 a month. The student loan balance is still $47,000. Kylie still needs to get through four years of nursing school.
“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” she said. “Like, okay, we caught a break here, so what breaks next?” It is a feeling familiar to anyone who has spent years managing a budget where every gain seems to be offset by a new cost somewhere else.
There is something almost painfully relatable about Janine’s situation. She earns a good income. She made deliberate choices — the graduate degree, the savings plan for Kylie, the decision to stay in a rental rather than overextend on a mortgage. And still, she arrived at 50 feeling like the numbers were not quite cooperating.
“I did what I was supposed to do,” she said quietly near the end of our conversation. “I just wish someone had explained the tax part a little better back when I was 30.”
Reporting this story, I kept thinking about the families who never make it to that folding chair at the VITA clinic — who file quickly and move on and don’t realize what they’ve missed. Janine found her way there almost by accident. The $560 difference in her refund and the knowledge that a $2,500 credit may be waiting for her next year won’t eliminate the $47,000 balance or bring her rent back down. But she left that community center with something that had genuine value: a clearer picture of where she stood.
Whether that clarity will hold, or whether the next rent increase or unexpected bill will erode it again, Janine doesn’t know. She told me she’s trying to stay hopeful. She said it like a person who knows hope is a choice she has to make every morning.
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