Have you ever done the math on your own finances and felt the floor drop out from under you? Not a dramatic collapse — just a slow, stomach-sinking realization that the numbers simply don’t add up, no matter how many times you run them?
That’s the moment Tommy Bianchi described to me when I sat down with him at a coffee shop in Phoenix on a Tuesday afternoon in early March 2026. He had a yellow legal pad covered in handwritten figures. He’d been doing that math for three years.
A Settlement That Kept Taking
Tommy Bianchi is 46 years old, a licensed HVAC technician with more than two decades in the trade. He works long hours in the Phoenix heat, pulling in roughly $76,800 a year before taxes. By most measures, he earns a solid living. By his own measure, he feels perpetually broke.
When I asked him to walk me through what happened after his divorce was finalized in 2023, he leaned back and exhaled slowly. “The settlement wasn’t even that complicated,” he told me. “She got the house — which, fine, the kids needed stability. But the lawyer fees just about killed me.”
Tommy put approximately $22,000 in divorce attorney fees on two credit cards. At the time, he told himself he’d pay them down within a year. Three years later, he’s made progress, but between interest charges and minimum payments, the balances have proven stubborn.
His child support order mandates $1,600 per month — exactly 25 percent of his gross monthly income. That figure is locked in through a court order and doesn’t flex when his truck needs new brakes or when a credit card statement arrives higher than expected.
He rents a two-bedroom apartment for $1,450 a month. His kids, ages 11 and 14, stay with him every other weekend. “I want those weekends to mean something,” he said. “I know I overspend. I know I take them to TopGolf and buy them new sneakers when I shouldn’t. But I only get four days a month with them.”
When He Started Looking at Housing Assistance
The idea of applying for housing assistance came from a coworker, Tommy told me. Someone on his crew had used a state-backed down payment assistance program to purchase a home in Mesa about eighteen months ago. Tommy started researching on his own — quietly, he said, because he didn’t want to admit to anyone how stuck he actually felt.
What he found first was the Arizona Department of Housing and its Home Plus program, which offers down payment assistance of up to 5 percent of the loan amount for qualifying borrowers using a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. On paper, it sounded like exactly what he needed.
Debt-to-income ratio — DTI — is the figure that determines how much of a borrower’s gross monthly income goes toward debt payments. Most FHA-backed loans, which are commonly paired with Arizona’s down payment assistance programs, set a maximum DTI of 45 to 50 percent, though according to HUD’s lending guidelines, borrowers with DTIs above 43 percent face heightened scrutiny and may require compensating factors like significant cash reserves.
Tommy ran his own numbers. His $1,600 child support payment, roughly $480 in credit card minimums, and a prospective mortgage payment on a modest Phoenix home — he estimated around $1,700 at current rates — placed his DTI somewhere between 47 and 49 percent. Technically within range. But barely, and with almost no margin.
What the Housing Counselor Actually Said
On the advice of a HUD-approved housing counseling agency he found through the Arizona Department of Housing website, Tommy scheduled a one-on-one session. He told me this was the most useful and most deflating conversation he’d had in years — both at once.
The counselor confirmed something Tommy had suspected but hadn’t wanted to say out loud: his credit card balances were dragging his credit score into a range — he described it as “hovering around 630” — that would likely disqualify him from the most favorable interest rates, and potentially from some assistance programs with minimum score requirements of 640 or higher.
“She wasn’t unkind about it,” Tommy told me. “She laid it out clearly. She said, here’s where you are, here’s the gap, here’s what would need to change. I actually respected that. I just didn’t love what I was hearing.”
The counselor gave him a prioritized list of steps. Tommy shared it with me:
The Gap Between Knowing and Doing
Here is where Tommy’s story becomes less about programs and more about the quiet mathematics of single parenthood. When I asked him what had gotten in the way of saving more aggressively over the past three years, he didn’t hesitate.
“The weekends,” he said. “I know exactly what I’m doing. I know I’m spending money I shouldn’t. But when my son asks if we can go to a Diamondbacks game, I’m not going to say no. I’m not going to be the dad who can’t do anything.”
Tommy estimates he spends between $400 and $600 on his kids during each two-weekend visitation period. Multiplied across twelve months, that’s potentially $9,600 to $14,400 annually — money that, redirected, could eliminate one of his credit card balances within a year and a half. He knows this. He told me so, almost word for word.
“I’ve done that math,” he said. “I hate that math.”
There’s no housing assistance program that addresses this tension. The Arizona Home Plus program doesn’t ask why a borrower hasn’t saved more. FHA underwriters don’t weigh emotional context. The numbers on a loan application are simply numbers.
Where Things Stand Now — and What He’s Changed
When I spoke with Tommy in March 2026, he was three months into a more disciplined approach. He’d set a hard limit of $300 per visitation weekend with his kids — a figure he described as “painful but necessary.” He’d made one large payment toward his smaller credit card balance using a tax refund of approximately $2,100, bringing that balance down to roughly $1,400.
His credit score, last checked in February 2026, had moved from approximately 630 to 641. He’s technically eligible now for Arizona’s Home Plus program on that metric alone — though his DTI and thin cash reserves remain real obstacles. He told me he plans to schedule a second housing counseling session in September 2026 to reassess.
The outcome here isn’t triumphant. Tommy Bianchi has not bought a house. He has not escaped the financial crater left by his divorce. What he has done is build a documented path forward and started walking it — slowly, with a $300 weekend budget and a credit score that moved eleven points in three months.
As I drove back from that coffee shop, I thought about the legal pad Tommy had brought with him — all those handwritten numbers. He’d been doing that math for three years, alone. Finding a housing counselor who finally did it with him, who named the gap plainly and handed him an ordered list, seemed to have meant more to him than the numbers themselves.
“Nobody told me any of this during the divorce,” Tommy said, near the end of our conversation. “The lawyers talked about the house in terms of the settlement. Nobody talked about what it would take to get another one.”
That absence — of information, of guidance, of someone to sit across the table and explain the mechanics — is the thing that lingers with me from Tommy’s story. The programs exist. The path is navigable. But for a 46-year-old man running HVAC units in a Phoenix summer and trying to be a good father on four days a month, none of it is automatic.
Related: She Rebuilt Her Finances After Divorce — Then Her Mom’s $7,400 Monthly Care Bill Hit, and Medicare Covered None of It
Related: After His Divorce Cost Him $22K, This Phoenix Dad Found Relief He Didn’t Know He Qualified For
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