The road to financial health is paved with compassion and resilience
Images by Nathana Clay Photography
To SaverLife member Roshelle, tax time is an opportunity to celebrate the strides she’s made on her financial health journey. A voracious learner, Roshelle is constantly educating herself on how to strengthen her financial health, especially at tax time. Her tax refund enables her to build up her savings and take stock of the progress she’s made to increase her credit score and maintain financial stability. It’s a positive reminder that her actions can positively impact the future she’s working hard to create for her children.
But Roshelle hasn’t always viewed tax season with this level of appreciation.There was a period of time when her tax refund was used to play catch up rather than get ahead. This led to her having mixed feelings about receiving her tax refund. While she was relieved knowing the money she earned will go toward necessary expenses, she was disappointed it could not be put toward her own savings goals.
Roshelle’s story highlights the many emotions that tax time raises for people living on low-to-moderate incomes. While it’s an opportunity to catch up on expenses, pay down debt, and plan for the year, a tax refund can also symbolize, as Roshelle puts it, “financial freedom”: the flexibility to build a brighter future, and not just get by. And with this passing tax season, Roshelle sees herself as one step closer to achieving financial freedom on her terms.
Forging a path to financial health
When asked about her financial health journey, Roshelle will tell you that it’s been a long and complex learning experience. Originally from Jamaica and raised in New Jersey, she relocated her family to several states before finally settling in Missouri. Here she hoped to build community, strengthen her financial stability, and get her family’s future “back on track.”
To connect with others and learn more about local resources, Roshelle took a job readiness course at a nonprofit. Through this course, she gained tips and advice to hone her resume writing and interviewing skills. She also teamed up with an accountability partner to check in with throughout the class.
Roshelle’s engagement and excitement for the job readiness course left a lasting impression on the training team, and after she completed all the classes, Roshelle was invited to serve as a volunteer instructor. Little did she know, this invitation would be a transformative moment in her career. While Roshelle holds a degree in healthcare administration, she had never felt fulfilled by this work. When she was asked to volunteer, and later hired on full time, Roshelle felt like she had finally discovered her passion, for both child care and nonprofit work. It was this passion — fueled by the support and encouragement from her coworkers — that inspired her to take the next steps toward her financial dreams, too.
Roshelle began tracking her budget and researching financial information that she could use to improve her credit score, build savings, and plan for retirement. Through this process she also became a SaverLife member and began to connect with those who were working to maintain financial stability. She explains, “It's always good to hear other people's stories because you think, 'okay, I'm not the only one who's going through something like this.' There's millions of us who are dealing with everyday life. This is the reality of it, but to know that you have a platform to help you navigate it, it makes you feel good."
With a new job and support from the SaverLife community, Roshelle started to see financial stability, a dream that had felt unattainable for many years, as something she could achieve. And this gave her the confidence boost to accelerate her savings and keep stashing away money when she could.
Trading long-term goals for stability
Even with the progress Roshelle made and the additional work she put in to learn more about her financial health and build community, she still encountered challenges that impacted her long-term goals. Roshelle often made tradeoffs between saving her money and paying for necessary costs of consumption, like groceries, utility bills, and rent. According to Roshelle, her decision making started to sound like, “Okay, well, I need my lights on, and I need money to buy my kids food. It might be a longer process for my landlord to say, ‘Okay, well, we're gonna start the eviction process.’ So we’ll wait on rent and deal with the problems when it comes to head.”
The 2023 tax season offered Roshelle the relief she needed from these decisions, but it also left her feeling frustrated. For every day that her rent was late, Roshelle’s account accrued a $5 fee, leading to a large debt on top of her monthly payments. When her 2023 tax refund arrived, she was able to use this money to pay off her remaining balance and catch up on rent payments. But this also affected her outlook on the steps she had been taking toward her savings goals. “I didn't ever want to put myself in that position again,” Roshelle says. “Because that money, the money that I gave my landlord: I could have done something else with it.”
Tax time gave Roshelle the breathing room to catch up on payments. It also provided an opportunity for her to reassess her financial goals and adjust how she was progressing toward them. She treated herself and her choices with compassion, knowing that the tradeoffs she made on bills were the best she could do at that moment. But she also decided that she would never put herself under that kind of stress again, determining that she would always prioritize immediate payments moving forward — even if that meant reducing how much she put into savings.
Tax time brings many reasons to celebrate
Now in the 2024 tax season, Roshelle is proud to say that she’s held true to her commitment. After prioritizing bills and necessary expenses all year, she was able to put her entire tax refund toward her financial goal: building up her savings for the future. “I got my refund, and I was so excited,” Roshelle explains. “I did what I said I was going to do, which was take a portion of it and put it away. I haven't touched it, which I’m elated about, because sometimes me and money, we're not the best of friends. I have goals that I’m trying to reach, and I set my refund aside and I've been doing good: staying on course.”
To achieve this outcome, Roshelle learned as much as she could about tax credits and the filing process. As part of her research, she also consulted the SaverLife tax time guide to ensure that she didn’t make any filing errors and that she maximized her total refund. “SaverLife made understanding the tax process so much easier to understand because I could make sure I wasn’t doing something wrong. It gave me the necessary pointers that I needed to figure out where to go from here,” she describes.
This year’s tax time served as a moment of reflection for Roshelle: a reminder of how far she’s come on her financial health journey, even in the last year. It was also an important reminder that financial health is a learning process, and it takes time, flexibility, and self-compassion to achieve her goals.
Most importantly, the 2024 tax season shored up Roshelle’s desire to share her successes with her kids, passing down valuable information that will keep them financially healthy throughout their lives. She’s achieving this by working with her children to teach them how to manage money and save for the things that they really want. For her oldest son, this looks like helping him think through how to save and budget for a car, covering topics like: how to make a monthly payment, budget for gas, and create an emergency fund for unplanned repairs.
Even if her children do encounter their own financial challenges later on, she wants her money lessons to guide them through hard choices, so that they don’t have to experience the stress that she had while dealing with disruptions. “I want them to be able to have those teachings to fall back on,” Roshelle explains. “That way they can say, ‘Oh, mom did teach me that. I need to put some money aside, or I need to save up for this.’ Things of that nature. Because just saving those essential pieces of information will make it a little bit easier to navigate those overwhelming challenges.”
Roshelle is also committed to sharing her experiences with her community, supporting the people around her to keep working toward their financial goals, even when they feel impossible. Most recently, she encouraged her coworkers and nonprofit participants to take advantage of a free tax-filing service that the local university offers every year. This way, they could maximize their refunds and avoid filing incorrectly.
She concludes: I have a team of people who just believe in me, and with them believing in me, that makes me want to keep going. That lets me know that there's so much more to me. They pour life into me, and I want to do the same for them.”
Roshelle’s story is part of SaverLife’s new Tax Time storytelling series that explores the unique realities that people living on
low-to-moderate incomes experience during tax season. This series wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of H&R Block.
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