Tax season closes fast. The April 15, 2026 deadline is less than three weeks away, and for millions of Americans who went through major life changes in 2025 — divorce, job loss, custody shifts — the numbers on their return may look nothing like what they anticipated. When I met Tommy Bianchi at a diner near his rental apartment in north Phoenix on a Tuesday morning in late March, he had already filed. He was still processing what came back.
Tommy is 46, broad-shouldered, with the kind of hands that have spent two decades inside ductwork and rooftop HVAC units across the Sonoran Desert. He is not someone who talks easily about money. He ordered black coffee and spent the first few minutes talking about his kids — a daughter, 14, and a son, 11 — before circling back to the reason we were meeting.
The Divorce That Rewrote His Financial Life
Tommy’s marriage ended three years ago after 14 years. The split was not quiet. Between the house sale, the legal proceedings, and the final settlement, Tommy walked away with approximately $22,000 in attorney fees — every dollar of it charged to three credit cards he is still paying down today. He does not own a home anymore. He rents a two-bedroom apartment for $1,485 a month so his kids have a room when they visit every other weekend.
“I don’t regret fighting for what I thought was fair,” Tommy told me, stirring his coffee without drinking it. “But I also didn’t understand what the financial reset was going to look like. I thought I’d be further along by now.”
The child support order requires $1,600 each month, which according to Tommy represents close to 25 percent of his gross income as a licensed HVAC technician. He earns approximately $72,000 annually working for a commercial HVAC company in the Phoenix metro area — solid money by most measures, genuinely thin when you subtract $19,200 in child support, $17,820 in rent, and minimum payments on roughly $14,000 in remaining credit card debt.
He had been counting on his tax refund to do some heavy lifting this spring.
What He Expected vs. What the IRS Sent
Tommy told me he had mentally budgeted around $3,800 in federal refund based on his withholding and what he “figured” he was owed. That number was not arbitrary — it was rooted in memory. When he and his ex-wife filed jointly during their marriage, their combined refunds sometimes exceeded $5,000. He had adjusted his W-4 at work, held onto receipts, and filed electronically through a paid preparer in early February 2026.
The IRS accepted his return within 24 hours. According to the IRS Where’s My Refund tool, most electronically filed returns with direct deposit are processed within 21 days. Tommy’s hit his bank account in 18 days.
The deposit was $1,240.
“I stared at the notification on my phone for probably two minutes,” Tommy told me. “I kept thinking the rest was coming in a second deposit. It wasn’t.”
His tax preparer, when Tommy called, walked him through the math. Several compounding factors had quietly eroded his expected return. Filing as a single filer rather than married filing jointly placed more of his income in a higher bracket. His divorce agreement allows each parent to claim one child in alternating years — 2025 was his ex-wife’s year to claim both children, which meant Tommy could not access the Child Tax Credit of $2,000 per child that he had factored into his mental estimate. And unlike the years of his marriage, there was no second income to anchor a joint standard deduction.
The Weekend Math He Can’t Stop Doing
One of the threads that kept surfacing in my conversation with Tommy was the weekends. Every other Friday, his kids arrive. He picks them up, takes them to dinner, plans activities — a hiking trip, a movie, go-karts, whatever keeps them happy for 48 hours. He knows he overspends. He says it plainly and without much defensiveness.
Tommy estimates he spends between $300 and $500 per visit weekend, which adds up to roughly $600 to $1,000 a month on top of his child support obligation. He describes this spending as emotional, not rational. He knows what it is. He is not looking for someone to tell him to stop.
What he wanted from his tax refund was breathing room. The $1,240 covered one month of minimum payments on two of his three credit cards. That is what it amounted to in practice. The $22,000 in original legal fees has crept down to approximately $14,000 through three years of payments, but the interest has extended his timeline well past what he originally planned.
How Filing Status After Divorce Actually Works
When I asked Tommy whether his tax preparer had explained these shifts before he filed, he paused. “She went through it,” he said slowly. “I just didn’t absorb it the first time.”
The structural changes to a tax return after divorce are not intuitive, and Tommy’s situation reflects patterns that tax professionals see repeatedly. The transition from married filing jointly to single filing status is one of the most financially disorienting changes a household can go through, according to guidance published by the IRS in Publication 504, which covers divorced or separated individuals.
Stuck, But Not Giving Up
Tommy still wants to buy a house. He says it the way people say things they believe but can’t quite reach yet — with conviction and a slight wince. He rents in a neighborhood he likes, about four miles from his kids’ school, and he watches Phoenix home prices the way a person watches a door they can’t open.
“I need probably $35,000 for a real down payment on something in this market,” he told me. “At the rate I’m saving right now, I’m looking at years. Multiple years. And that’s assuming nothing breaks.”
His plan going into 2026’s tax year is more deliberate. His daughter turns 15 this year, and per the custody agreement, 2026 is Tommy’s year to claim both children on his return. He is already adjusting his W-4 through work to better align withholding with his actual expected liability, a step he should have taken two years earlier by his own admission.
He has also, somewhat reluctantly, started tracking his visit-weekend spending. He showed me a note on his phone — a simple running tally by month. He is not cutting the trips or the dinners. But he is watching the number now, which he wasn’t doing before.
When I asked Tommy what he would tell someone going through their first post-divorce tax filing, he took a moment before answering. “Learn it before you file, not after,” he said. “I lost two years being surprised by things my preparer tried to explain to me. That’s on me.”
He picked up his coffee, finally. Outside the diner window, a commercial HVAC van idled in the parking lot — not his company’s, but close enough that he glanced at it. He had a job site in Tempe by noon. Four days until his kids came for the weekend. He already knew where he was taking them.
Related: After 32 Years at the Post Office, This Pittsburgh Retiree Is One Broken Furnace Away From Crisis
Leave a Reply