Most people assume that if you own a home, you have cleared the hardest financial hurdle. The conventional story is that renters are vulnerable and homeowners are stable. Connie Jennings, 39, is living proof that this assumption can be dangerously wrong — and that the government programs designed to catch people like her are far harder to access than any agency will openly admit.
I met Connie on a Tuesday afternoon in late February 2026, at a free VITA tax preparation clinic held inside a community center in Albuquerque’s South Valley neighborhood. She was seated at a folding table across from a volunteer preparer, a worn manila folder on her lap and the unmistakable look of someone who had been rehearsing bad news. When the session ended, she lingered. I introduced myself, explained I was reporting on housing and benefits for people in economic transition, and asked if she would be willing to talk. She exhaled slowly and said, “I’ll talk to anyone who will actually listen at this point.”
A Budget That Never Quite Adds Up
Connie teaches yoga at two studios in Albuquerque — roughly 18 to 22 hours a week depending on the season, earning approximately $18,400 per year after her independent contractor expenses. That income has to cover her mortgage, utilities, groceries, and increasingly, the costs of caring for her mother, Linda, who is 71 and moved in with Connie in October 2024 after a fall that left her with limited mobility.
The mortgage itself — on a small two-bedroom house she bought in 2019 for $167,000 — runs $1,104 per month, including escrow. At her income level, that is approximately 72 percent of her monthly take-home pay. According to HUD’s housing affordability guidelines, households should spend no more than 30 percent of gross income on housing. Connie is spending more than twice that.
When I asked Connie to walk me through a typical month, she pulled out her phone and opened a notes app where she tracked every expense by hand. Groceries for two people: roughly $480. Utilities, which have climbed sharply: $210. Her mother’s prescription copays: $90 to $130 depending on the month. Gas for the car she needs to get between studios and to take her mother to medical appointments: around $160. What remains after the mortgage is negative.
“I’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul since November,” Connie told me. “I paid the mortgage in October and I couldn’t buy enough food. I bought food in November and skipped the mortgage. And now I’m two months behind and the bank has sent me a notice.”
The Anger Has Nowhere to Land
One of the first things I noticed about Connie is that her frustration is not directed at any single target. She is angry at her mortgage servicer, at the studios that classify her as a contractor to avoid benefits, at the cost of her mother’s medications, and at what she described as “a system that was built for people who already have enough.” But that anger sits without an outlet, which is its own kind of exhaustion.
Her distrust of the system is not unfounded. She applied for SNAP benefits in December 2024 after her mother moved in, correctly believing that the added household member and added expenses might make her eligible. She was denied. The denial letter cited a calculation of her income that included a business expense reimbursement from one of the studios — a $340 one-time payment for mats she had purchased — as recurring income. She appealed in January 2025. The appeal was denied in March 2025. She has not reapplied since.
According to USDA SNAP eligibility guidelines, a two-person household with a gross monthly income at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level — approximately $2,311 per month in 2026 — is generally eligible. Connie’s adjusted gross monthly income, excluding that one-time reimbursement, would be roughly $1,533. She should, on paper, qualify.
What the Tax Clinic Actually Unlocked
The VITA clinic where I met Connie was not just preparing her 2025 return — one of the volunteer coordinators, a woman named Daria who had worked in HUD-approved housing counseling for over a decade, was also doing informal screenings for benefit eligibility and housing assistance programs. It was Daria who first told Connie about HUD-approved housing counseling services, which are free to homeowners facing mortgage delinquency.
Connie told me she had never heard of HUD housing counselors before that afternoon. “I thought housing help was for renters or for people who’d already lost their home,” she said. “Nobody told me there was something in between.”
Daria referred Connie to a HUD-approved agency in Albuquerque — NeighborWorks New Mexico — for a free counseling session. According to HUD’s housing counselor locator, there are multiple approved agencies serving Bernalillo County. Connie called the following week and was scheduled for an appointment in mid-March 2026.
The Outcome — Partial, Complicated, and Real
When I followed up with Connie by phone in late March 2026, she had completed her housing counseling session and received some concrete movement — though not the resolution she had hoped for.
Her mortgage servicer, through the housing counselor’s intervention, agreed to a three-month forbearance on her payments, beginning April 2026. The $2,208 in overdue payments would be added to the end of her loan term rather than triggering immediate foreclosure proceedings. It was not forgiveness. It was not a fix. But it bought time.
The New Mexico HAF application, however, was still pending as of our last conversation. Connie had submitted documentation in March, but the program coordinator told her processing times were running six to ten weeks. She was cautiously hopeful but not counting on it. The NM HAF program, funded through the federal American Rescue Plan, has assisted thousands of New Mexico homeowners, but remaining funds are limited and the program has no confirmed continuation beyond its current allocation.
Her SNAP situation remained unresolved. The housing counselor was not equipped to assist with that, and Connie said she did not have the energy to restart the process — a response I have heard from other low-income applicants more times than I can count. “I know I should go back and try again,” she told me. “But every time I try to get help from the government, I spend weeks on it and I end up feeling worse than when I started. I can’t keep doing that to myself.”
What Connie’s Story Reveals About the System
Connie Jennings is not a cautionary tale about bad decisions. She bought a modest home at a reasonable price. She works. She takes care of her mother. She does not fit the image of someone who “fell behind,” and yet the machinery of assistance is built in ways that make people like her invisible — too high-earning for some programs, too cash-strapped to navigate others without help.
The detail that stays with me is the SNAP denial over a $340 reimbursement. That kind of bureaucratic miscalculation does not just cost a family groceries for one month. It costs them trust — and trust, once burned, is not easily rebuilt by a government that asks people to keep trying.
The clearest lesson from Connie’s experience is that free housing counseling — a genuinely useful, federally backed resource — is dramatically underutilized because almost no one knows it exists until they are already in crisis. By the time a homeowner gets a delinquency notice, they have often spent weeks trying to navigate a servicer’s phone system alone. A housing counselor changes that dynamic. But only if someone tells you to call one.
I left my last conversation with Connie feeling the familiar discomfort of a story that has not ended. The forbearance gives her a runway. What she does with it — and what the programs around her do or fail to do — is still being written. She asked me, at the end of our call, whether I thought it would get easier. I told her I was a reporter, not an advisor. She laughed. “Right,” she said. “Nobody’s an advisor until it’s too late.”
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