Have you ever had a financial plan built entirely around a number you didn’t fully control? When I sat down with Monique Rollins at her kitchen table in Charlotte, North Carolina, on a gray Thursday afternoon in late March, that was exactly the situation she described — a family budget balanced on the assumption that the IRS would cooperate.
I’d heard about Monique through a neighbor at a block party the previous weekend. The neighbor, lowering her voice over a paper cup of lemonade, told me that her friend down the street had been through the wringer with the IRS this tax season — and that she might be willing to talk. Monique agreed to meet me two days later. She was precise, organized, and clearly someone who had thought hard about every dollar. Which made what happened to her all the more jarring.
A Family Budget Under Pressure
Monique, 45, manages a mid-size retail location in the Charlotte metro area. She’s been in retail management for nearly fifteen years, and she carries herself with the kind of calm efficiency you’d expect from someone who handles inventory crises before most people have finished their morning coffee. But the 2025 tax year brought a set of variables she hadn’t planned for.
Her husband, Darnell, was laid off in October 2025 from a logistics company where he’d worked for eight years. Before the layoff, the couple’s combined income was in the upper-middle range — enough to feel stable, but not enough to absorb a sudden half-income drop without consequences. By the time January 2026 rolled around, Darnell had collected roughly $11,200 in unemployment benefits through North Carolina’s Division of Employment Security.
Then there was the credit card debt. In the spring of 2024, Darnell had required an emergency appendectomy followed by two nights in the hospital. Even with insurance, the out-of-pocket costs totaled just over $6,100. Between that bill and other expenses that accumulated during the recovery period, the couple had put roughly $18,400 on two credit cards by the end of the year.
“We were managing it,” Monique told me, smoothing the edge of a folder on her kitchen table. “The plan was always to use the tax refund to knock a big chunk of that down. That was the whole strategy.”
Filing Early, Expecting More
Monique filed the couple’s 2025 federal return on February 14, 2026 — Valentine’s Day, she noted with a dry laugh. She used tax software and filed electronically with direct deposit. Based on prior years and her initial calculations, she had estimated a refund of around $4,800. That number had shaped months of financial planning.
What she hadn’t fully accounted for was the tax impact of Darnell’s unemployment income. The $11,200 in benefits, reported on a Form 1099-G, pushed the couple’s taxable income higher than she’d modeled. There was also a withholding gap — Darnell had not elected to have federal taxes withheld from his unemployment payments, an option available under IRS Form W-4V but one that many recipients skip.
“I thought I had it figured out,” she said. “I’ve been doing our taxes for twelve years. But I’d never had to deal with unemployment income before. I didn’t realize how much it would shift things.”
When the IRS Portal Stopped Updating
For the first week after filing, Monique checked the IRS Where’s My Refund tool every morning. The status moved quickly at first — from “Return Received” to “Return Being Processed” within three days. Then it stopped. For seventeen days, the portal showed the same screen.
On March 4, she received a letter in the mail. It was an IRS Letter 5071C, requesting that she verify her identity before her refund could be released. The letter directed her to the IRS Identity Verification Service online or to call a dedicated phone line.
Monique completed the identity verification online on March 6. The process took about forty minutes, she told me, and required uploading a photo ID and answering questions about her financial history. She passed on the first attempt.
“Once I finished that, I felt better,” she said. “But then I looked at the timeline and realized I was probably looking at weeks more of waiting. And we had a credit card minimum due on March 18.”
The Number That Arrived Was Not the Number She Planned For
On the morning of April 6 — five days before the federal filing deadline — Monique’s phone buzzed with a bank notification. The IRS had deposited $3,127. She was sitting in the parking lot of the retail store she manages, reading the notification on her phone before her opening shift.
The $1,673 gap between what she’d expected and what arrived wasn’t arbitrary. It reflected the tax owed on Darnell’s unemployment income, combined with a partial offset for an outstanding balance from a 2023 state tax underpayment she’d nearly forgotten about. Monique hadn’t received an advance notice of the offset — she pieced it together herself after the fact using the IRS online account portal.
With $3,127, Monique paid off one of the two credit cards entirely — a card with a $2,900 balance at a 24.99% APR that had been costing her roughly $60 per month in interest charges alone. The remaining $227 went into the family’s checking account to cover a childcare co-pay that was overdue.
The larger card, carrying a $15,500 balance, remained untouched. That had been the target of the original $4,800 plan — a partial paydown to reduce the minimum payment and free up cash flow while Darnell continued searching for work.
What Monique Said She Would Do Differently
When I asked Monique what she wished she had known going into this tax season, she didn’t hesitate. She pulled out a small notebook — she’d actually written down her thoughts before we met, which felt very on-brand for her — and read from it.
“First, I should have had Darnell elect withholding on the unemployment payments from day one,” she said. “You can have 10 percent taken out automatically. We chose not to because we needed every dollar coming in. That decision cost us on the back end.”
She also said she hadn’t thought carefully enough about how Darnell’s income shift would affect their overall withholding picture at the household level. When he stopped working, her withholding — calculated based on a two-earner household — no longer reflected reality. According to the IRS Tax Withholding Estimator, taxpayers who experience a major income change mid-year are encouraged to recalculate withholding to avoid surprises.
“The identity verification thing — I don’t blame them for that,” Monique added. “I get it. But it added three weeks onto a timeline that was already stressful. If I’d known that could happen, I would have filed even earlier.”
As I gathered my notebook and prepared to leave, Monique walked me to the door and mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that she’d already started a spreadsheet for the 2026 tax year. She was tracking Darnell’s new job search status, their projected childcare costs — which were running $1,600 a month for two kids — and what their combined income would look like under three different employment scenarios.
The $15,500 card balance was still there. So was the determination to address it. What had changed, she told me, was her assumption that the refund would arrive on her schedule, in the amount she expected, without complication. That particular assumption, she said, she’d retired for good.
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