The conventional wisdom about tax refunds is that getting one means you did something wrong — that you handed the IRS an interest-free loan all year. But for millions of hourly workers living paycheck to paycheck, that annual refund isn’t a financial mistake. It’s the only lump sum of money they’ll see all year, and what they do with it carries real weight.
When I sat down with Brittany Holloway at a coffee shop off Charlotte Pike in Nashville, she was still deciding what to do with the $800 that had hit her checking account eleven days earlier. She had her phone out. She’d bookmarked four TikTok videos. She looked less like someone who’d received money and more like someone who’d been handed a test she hadn’t studied for.
A First-Generation Graduate in a City That Keeps Getting More Expensive
Brittany Holloway is 25, a dental assistant at a private practice in the Bellevue neighborhood of Nashville, and the first person in her family to complete any college education. She finished a two-year dental assisting program at Nashville State Community College in 2022. She’s proud of that. She said so twice during our conversation, unprompted.
She earns $17 an hour. At 40 hours a week, that’s roughly $35,360 annually before taxes. After federal and state withholding — Tennessee has no state income tax on wages — she takes home approximately $2,600 a month. Her rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Antioch area is $1,195. That’s not counting utilities, car insurance, groceries, or the $180 minimum payment she makes each month split between her student loans and credit card.
The $8,000 in student loans came from federal direct loans through her community college program — modest by national standards, but not insignificant at her income. The $3,000 credit card balance carries an interest rate she described as “somewhere around 24 percent, I think.” She wasn’t sure of the exact figure. She’d never logged into the card’s full account portal.
Filing Taxes for the Third Time — and Still Feeling Lost
Brittany filed her 2025 federal return in late January using a free online filing service. She was eligible for the IRS Free File program based on her adjusted gross income. She received her W-2 from her employer in the first week of January and submitted her return on January 28, 2026.
The IRS accepted her 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. Brittany’s refund of $847 — she’d rounded down to $800 in her memory — arrived via direct deposit on February 18, 2026, exactly 21 days after filing.
“I refreshed the Where’s My Refund page probably four times a day for two weeks,” Brittany told me, laughing a little. “It felt like tracking a package. But a package that could change something.”
She claimed the standard deduction — $14,600 for single filers in tax year 2025 — and did not itemize. She also received a partial Earned Income Tax Credit, which she said she only discovered existed because a coworker mentioned it. She hadn’t known to look for it the previous two years she’d filed.
The TikTok Problem: Three Plans, Zero Consensus
Before the money even landed, Brittany had been doing what she always does when she has a financial question: watching videos. She follows several personal finance creators on TikTok and has a playlist she calls “money stuff” that she’s been building since 2023. By her count, she’s watched over 200 videos on budgeting, debt payoff, and investing.
The problem, as she described it to me, is that the advice contradicts itself constantly.
She pulled up her phone and showed me the three plans she’d written out in her notes app the morning after her refund arrived. Plan A: put the full $847 toward the credit card. Plan B: put $500 in savings and $347 toward the card. Plan C: open a Roth IRA with the full amount because she’d seen a video about starting early. She’d been cycling between the three for eleven days.
What struck me wasn’t the indecision — it was how reasonable all three plans sounded, and how genuinely difficult it was to evaluate them without knowing her full financial picture. She didn’t know her credit card’s exact APR. She wasn’t sure if her employer offered any retirement matching. She didn’t have a clear sense of her monthly cash flow after fixed expenses.
What She Actually Did — and the Quiet Regret That Followed
By the time we met, Brittany had made a decision. She’d put $600 toward the credit card and kept $247 in her checking account as a loose buffer. It wasn’t any of the three plans. It was a compromise she’d arrived at on her own, mostly because she felt paralyzed and needed to do something.
“I just picked a number that felt responsible,” she said. “I don’t know if it was the right number. I’ll probably never know.”
The $600 payment reduced her credit card balance to approximately $2,400. At a 24% APR, that balance accrues roughly $48 in interest per month. The $600 payment will, over time, reduce that monthly interest charge — but without consistent additional payments, the balance will rebuild slowly through regular spending.
She mentioned a college friend who had recently posted about maxing out a 401(k). Brittany’s employer does not currently offer a retirement plan. She found this out only when she asked, about four months into the job. Nobody had told her to ask.
The Bigger Picture Behind an $847 Refund
Brittany’s story isn’t unusual. According to the IRS filing season statistics, the average federal tax refund for the 2025 filing season hovered around $3,100 for all filers — but that average is heavily skewed by higher earners with more complex returns and larger withholding. For workers in Brittany’s income bracket, refunds in the $600–$1,200 range are common.
What makes her situation representative of something larger is the gap between having access to financial information and having the context to use it. She’s not uninformed — she watches financial content regularly. She filed her own return correctly, claimed a credit she was entitled to, and used a free filing tool. By most measures, she did everything right on the tax side.
The harder part, as she described it, is that nobody in her family had ever talked about credit card APRs, retirement accounts, or tax withholding. Her parents didn’t have credit cards. Her mother handled money in cash. The first time Brittany heard the phrase “compound interest” was in a TikTok video, not a classroom.
She’s not asking for sympathy. She was careful to say that when I asked how she felt about her situation overall. She likes her job. She’s good at it. She’s thinking about pursuing a dental hygienist license, which would require additional coursework and clinical hours but could more than double her hourly rate over time. She has a plan, even if it’s still forming.
When I left the coffee shop, Brittany was back on her phone. Not TikTok this time — she’d pulled up the IRS website to look up whether she could adjust her W-4 withholding to get slightly more in each paycheck rather than a lump sum refund. She’d seen a video about that too. She was trying to verify it.
That instinct — to check the primary source, to verify before acting — might be the most useful financial habit she’s developed. It won’t solve everything. But it’s a start, and it’s hers.
Leave a Reply