Roughly one in five eligible families fails to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit each year, according to the IRS EITC Central — leaving billions of dollars uncollected by the households that need them most. When I met Carlos Mendez at a corner booth inside a Denny’s in Hialeah, Florida on a Tuesday morning in late February 2026, he was one of those people who couldn’t afford to leave anything on the table.
He was 55 years old, wearing a collared manager’s shirt, nursing a black coffee, and checking his phone every few minutes. He wasn’t waiting for a text. He was checking the IRS Where’s My Refund? tool — again.
How COVID Erased 20 Years of Financial Progress in 14 Months
Carlos Mendez spent the better part of two decades working his way up through Miami’s restaurant industry. By early 2020, he was managing a mid-size Italian restaurant in Brickell — a job that paid him roughly $62,000 a year and came with a modest benefits package. He and his wife, Elena, had built up about $18,000 in savings. Not wealthy, but stable.
Then the restaurant closed in April 2020. It never reopened.
“I watched everything we saved just disappear month by month,” Carlos told me, setting down his coffee cup. “By the time I found another management job, we had maybe $400 left in the account. That was it. Fourteen months of bills, groceries, rent — all of it gone.”
The new position paid $47,500 a year — nearly $15,000 less than his previous salary. And his household hadn’t shrunk. He has two biological children, aged 14 and 11. Elena has two children from a previous marriage, aged 16 and 9. Four kids. One income. And a child support arrangement with Elena’s ex that Carlos described, carefully, as “inconsistent.”
When I asked Carlos how Elena’s ex’s child support payments factor into their monthly planning, he exhaled slowly. “Some months he pays, some months he doesn’t. We stopped counting on it. You can’t budget around money that might not come.” According to Florida’s Department of Revenue Child Support, inconsistent payment is one of the most common enforcement challenges in the state, with millions in arrears accumulated annually.
Filing Taxes with Four Dependents — and What Carlos Was Expecting
Carlos filed his 2025 federal return on January 28, 2026 — early, deliberately. He used a paid tax preparer he’s trusted for years, paying $210 for the service. With four qualifying dependents and a household income under $50,000, he was eligible for the Child Tax Credit, the Additional Child Tax Credit, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
His preparer estimated a total federal refund of approximately $4,850. For context, the average federal tax refund issued in 2025 was around $3,170, according to IRS filing season statistics. Carlos’s refund was above average — because his family size pushed his credits higher.
Carlos knew about the PATH Act delay — his preparer had warned him. What he didn’t anticipate was an additional hold placed on his return in early February. The IRS’s automated system had flagged his return for identity verification, a process that affects approximately 1 million filers per year, according to agency estimates. He received a CP05 notice on February 10th asking him to do nothing — but to wait up to 60 additional days.
Nine Weeks of Watching the Portal and Stretching Every Dollar
I asked Carlos to walk me through what those weeks looked like, practically. He didn’t hesitate. He’d clearly thought through the math many times already.
His take-home pay after taxes and benefits deductions runs about $3,050 per month. Monthly fixed expenses — rent, utilities, two car payments, insurance, and Elena’s younger child’s asthma medication — total roughly $2,600. That leaves approximately $450 for groceries, gas, school expenses, and anything else for six people.
“I stopped eating lunch,” he told me. He said it plainly, without drama. “Not because I forgot. Because if I bought lunch, that’s ten dollars. Ten dollars is gas to get the kids to school twice. So I stopped.”
During those weeks, Elena’s ex missed two consecutive child support payments. Carlos told me he didn’t say anything about it to Elena at first — didn’t want her to panic on top of everything else. He covered the gap by putting groceries on a credit card he’d been working to pay down since 2022. That card now carries a balance of roughly $1,100 again.
When the Refund Finally Hit — and What Happened Next
The $4,790 landed in Carlos’s checking account on the morning of March 11, 2026. He was at work when he got the bank notification. He told me he stepped into the restaurant’s back office and sat down for a minute by himself.
He and Elena had a list. They’d been building it for weeks — the things that would get paid the moment the refund arrived. The credit card balance went first: $1,100. Then two months of irregular expenses they’d deferred: $340 for the 16-year-old’s school trip deposit, $180 for the 11-year-old’s cleats and uniform for spring soccer. A car registration renewal they’d pushed back: $87.
After all of it, roughly $2,200 was left. Carlos and Elena debated — briefly — whether to put it in savings. “We said we would,” he told me, a small, self-aware smile crossing his face. “Then the AC unit made a noise it shouldn’t make, and we put $900 aside for that. So now we have $1,300. That’s our savings account right now. $1,300.”
What Carlos Wishes He Had Known — and What He Told His Kids
I asked Carlos, toward the end of our conversation, what he would have done differently if he could go back to January, knowing the refund would be frozen for nine weeks. He didn’t blame the IRS directly. He was more measured than that.
“I should have filed even earlier,” he said. “And I should have had more conversations with my preparer about what a CP05 notice means before I got one. I got that letter and I panicked because I didn’t understand it.” The CP05 notice, for context, does not mean a filer has done anything wrong — it is a routine review hold, typically resolved without any action from the taxpayer.
What struck me most, sitting across from Carlos Mendez, was what he said about his kids. His two stepchildren know their father’s support payments are unreliable. His biological kids know the family is tight. Nobody is being shielded from the basic reality. Carlos said he made a deliberate choice to be honest with them — up to a point.
When I left the Denny’s that morning, Carlos was already back on his phone — not checking the refund portal this time. He was texting Elena. He’d mentioned the AC unit noise again on the way out. Whatever the $1,300 had been earmarked for, the priorities were already shifting.
That’s the part of Carlos’s story that stayed with me: the refund arrived, and it mattered enormously, and it was also already almost gone. For millions of American families filing with the EITC and Child Tax Credit in 2026, the timeline between a frozen return and a deposited refund isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s the difference between catching up and falling further behind.
Related: The IRS Letter That Almost Cost Me My Full 2025 Tax Refund — And What You Can Do Right Now
Related: His Wife’s Ex Stopped Paying Child Support. At 55, Carlos Mendez Is Still Feeding Four Kids
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