Approximately one in three divorced Americans who owned a home before their split are still renting five or more years later, according to estimates from U.S. Census Bureau housing surveys. For many of them, it isn’t laziness or indifference keeping them out of the market. It’s the financial wreckage that divorce leaves behind — debt, support obligations, and a savings account that never quite recovers.
When I sat down with Tommy Bianchi at a diner off I-10 in Phoenix on a Tuesday morning in late March 2026, he ordered black coffee and didn’t look at the menu. He’d already told me on the phone that he was trying to spend less. That detail — small, almost throwaway — turned out to be the key to understanding everything else.
The Damage the Divorce Left Behind
Tommy Bianchi is 46, a licensed HVAC technician who’s worked the Phoenix metro area for nearly two decades. He’s not struggling in the way the word usually implies — he earns a steady income, he shows up, he pays his bills. But when I asked him to describe his finances since his divorce was finalized three years ago, he exhaled through his nose and stared at the table for a moment before answering.
“I came out of it with my tools, my truck, and about $22,000 in credit card debt from the lawyers,” Tommy told me. “The house went to my ex. That was part of the settlement. I understood why. The kids needed stability. But I’ve been renting ever since, and I can’t seem to get my head above water.”
Tommy’s child support payment of $1,600 a month represents roughly 25 percent of his gross income — a proportion consistent with Arizona’s child support guidelines, which are calculated based on both parents’ incomes and custody arrangements. After taxes, the support payment, and minimum payments on his credit card debt, Tommy estimates he has about $1,800 left each month to cover rent, food, utilities, and everything else.
His rent for a two-bedroom apartment — he keeps the second room for his kids — runs $1,350 a month. That leaves roughly $450 for groceries, gas, and any unexpected expense. There is no line item for savings.
The Weekend Problem Nobody Talks About
Every other weekend, Tommy picks up his two daughters, ages nine and twelve. He gets them Friday evening and drops them off Sunday night. Forty-eight hours to be their dad — to compete, as he put it, with a house they’ve always known and a routine he’s no longer part of.
Tommy estimates he spends between $300 and $500 on his daughters during each visit — meals, activities, small purchases. Over twelve months, that adds up to roughly $7,800 to $13,000 in additional spending that he acknowledges isn’t sustainable. He knows it. He just can’t seem to stop.
“My older daughter asked me once if we were poor,” he said, and then went quiet for a second. “That was the worst day. I told her no. And we’re not, technically. But try explaining ‘technically’ to a twelve-year-old.”
What He Found When He Finally Asked for Help
The turning point came in January 2026, when Tommy’s HVAC employer offered a free financial wellness consultation through an employee assistance program. Tommy almost didn’t go. He told me he figured it would be a lecture about lattes.
Instead, the counselor flagged something Tommy hadn’t considered: Arizona’s Arizona Department of Housing offers a program called HOME Plus, a down payment assistance initiative that provides a grant of up to 5 percent of the loan amount — money that does not need to be repaid — to qualified buyers who meet income and credit requirements.
For Tommy, who had been treating a down payment as an abstract, distant goal, the news that a grant program existed — one he might actually qualify for — was the first concrete foothold he’d seen in three years. The counselor also referred him to a HUD-approved housing counseling agency in Phoenix for a formal assessment of his situation.
“I didn’t even know HUD did counseling,” Tommy admitted. “I thought it was just, like, apartments for people with no income. I didn’t think there was anything in there for a guy like me.”
The Complicated Reality of the Benefits Gap
What the housing counselor found wasn’t a simple fix. Tommy’s situation illustrates what advocates sometimes call the benefits gap — earning enough to be disqualified from most need-based programs, but not enough to accumulate the savings that stability requires.
His credit score, which had dropped to 611 following the divorce and the ballooning credit card balances, posed an additional hurdle. Most conventional mortgage lenders require a minimum score of 620. FHA loans — backed by the federal government and designed for first-time and lower-income buyers — accept scores as low as 580 with a 3.5 percent down payment, according to HUD’s FHA program guidelines.
The counselor laid out a twelve-to-eighteen month plan for Tommy: aggressively pay down one credit card to reduce his utilization ratio, dispute two errors on his credit report, and — the hard part — cut back on discretionary weekend spending with his daughters. The counselor framed the last item carefully, telling Tommy that getting into a home faster would ultimately give his kids far more stability than any single weekend activity.
Where Tommy Stands Now — and What He’s Still Working Through
When I spoke with Tommy at the end of March 2026, he was two months into the plan. His credit score had crept up to 624 — he’d paid off $3,200 of credit card debt and had one error removed from his report. He’d also cut his weekend spending with the girls to roughly $150 per visit, which required conversations with both daughters that he described as harder than any job he’s done.
He isn’t there yet. He may not make his original target. He told me he’d had two weekends where he slipped back into old habits — one involved a concert for his older daughter that cost him $380 in tickets and merchandise alone. He doesn’t talk about that weekend with regret. He talks about it with something closer to defiance.
What strikes me most about Tommy’s story isn’t the debt or the divorce or even the child support math. It’s that he spent three years assuming the programs that existed weren’t for him — that assistance was for people worse off, that the system had nothing to offer a working man who simply needed a foothold. It took a throwaway employee benefit and a counselor willing to spend ninety minutes with him to change that assumption.
Whether he buys a house in 2027 or 2028 or later, the shift in what he believes is possible seems to be the thing that actually changed. That, and maybe slightly fewer rounds of Top Golf.
Related: I Pay $1,600 a Month in Child Support and Still Can’t Catch a Tax Break
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