The first thing Tommy Bianchi did when I walked into the diner on East McDowell Road was slide a folded piece of paper across the table. It was a handwritten budget — income on one side, bills on the other. The two columns didn’t come close to balancing. “I figured if I wrote it all down,” he said, “maybe it would stop feeling so out of control.” It hadn’t.
Tommy is 46 years old, an HVAC technician who has worked the Phoenix heat for nearly two decades. He’s the kind of guy who fixes other people’s problems for a living. His own, he told me, have been harder to crack.
A Divorce That Didn’t End When the Papers Were Signed
When I spoke with Tommy Bianchi in late March 2026, he was three years out from a divorce that he describes, carefully, as “the worst financial event of my life — and I’ve had some bad ones.” The settlement cost him the house he and his ex-wife had shared in Tempe, and it cost him something less tangible too: the sense that he was building toward something.
The legal fees alone came to roughly $22,000. Tommy put all of it on credit cards. “I didn’t have a choice,” he told me. “The lawyer wanted money every week. I just kept swiping.” Three years later, he’s still paying those cards down, carrying a balance that has barely moved because of interest charges eating into every minimum payment.
The child support order came out of the settlement: $1,600 per month, every month, for two children ages 10 and 13. Tommy doesn’t dispute that his kids deserve support. What he struggles with, he explained, is the math that follows. After taxes, child support, rent, utilities, and minimum payments on the credit cards, he’s left with what he called “gas money and groceries, if I’m careful.”
The Numbers Behind the Stress
Tommy walked me through his monthly budget in detail, and the picture it painted was stark. His gross monthly income sits at roughly $6,400. After federal and state taxes, he takes home approximately $4,700. Child support removes another $1,600, leaving $3,100 for everything else.
His rent in a one-bedroom apartment near Scottsdale Road runs $1,450 a month — a number that has climbed twice since he moved in. Utilities add another $180 in summer months, more when the Phoenix heat pushes his window unit to its limits. His credit card minimums total roughly $420 monthly. “I’m paying for a house I don’t live in anymore,” he said, “and renting a place I can barely afford.”
What’s left after those fixed costs is approximately $550 a month. From that, he buys groceries, fills his truck, and tries to keep his phone and tools current — the tools being non-negotiable for his trade. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, HVAC technicians in Arizona earn a median wage close to Tommy’s range, meaning his income is solid — the problem isn’t what he earns.
Every Other Weekend, the Budget Breaks
Tommy sees his kids — a 10-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son — every other weekend. He gets them Friday evening and returns them Sunday night. Forty-eight hours, twice a month. He described those weekends to me with a mix of joy and visible guilt that was hard to watch.
A typical weekend with his kids costs him between $300 and $400, he estimated. That includes dinner out Friday, an activity Saturday — a movie, a trampoline park, once a Diamondbacks game — and meals through Sunday. “I justify it every time,” he told me. “And then Monday comes and I look at my bank account and I feel sick.”
This pattern — what psychologists sometimes call “guilt spending” among non-custodial parents — isn’t unusual, though Tommy didn’t use that term. He just called it “trying to be a good dad with bad math.” The spending doesn’t come from recklessness. It comes from a father who sees his children four days a month and refuses to let those days feel small.
The House He Can’t Get Back To
Before the divorce, Tommy and his ex-wife owned a three-bedroom home in Tempe. He paid $247,000 for it in 2017. By the time of the settlement in early 2023, its estimated value had climbed to around $390,000. The equity was split as part of the divorce decree, and after legal costs and the settlement terms, Tommy walked away with roughly $40,000 — which he used to pay off some debt and cover moving costs. He did not keep enough to serve as a down payment on a new home.
Three years later, Phoenix home prices have not softened meaningfully. According to U.S. Census Bureau housing data, homeownership rates among men ages 45–54 who rent after a marital dissolution are significantly lower than their married counterparts — a gap that tends to widen over time rather than close. Tommy is living that statistic.
“I did everything right for a long time,” Tommy told me, and I believed him. He worked overtime through his thirties, bought a home, raised two kids. The life he built wasn’t extravagant — it was just steady. What the divorce took wasn’t only the house. It took the trajectory.
What He’s Trying to Change — and What Hasn’t Moved
Tommy isn’t passive about his situation. When I asked what steps he’d taken since the divorce to stabilize his finances, he listed several. He picked up weekend overtime shifts when his employer offered them. He refinanced one of his credit cards to a lower-rate balance transfer last year, saving roughly $80 a month in interest. He cut his gym membership and two streaming subscriptions.
None of it has produced savings. Every dollar freed up by one cut seems to get absorbed somewhere else — a car repair, a medical bill, a school supply run for his kids. “I feel like I’m running on a treadmill,” he said. “I’m working harder than I ever have and I’m in the same place.”
The child support order is the one number that dominates everything and cannot be negotiated at the kitchen table. Arizona child support guidelines, administered through the Arizona Department of Economic Security, calculate obligations based on both parents’ incomes, parenting time, and other factors. Modifications require a formal court petition and a demonstrated change in circumstances — something Tommy said he’s considered but hasn’t pursued, partly because another lawyer means another bill.
Three Years Out, Still Looking Forward
By the time we finished talking, the diner had mostly emptied. Tommy folded his budget paper back up and tucked it into his jacket pocket. He wasn’t defeated, exactly. But he wasn’t optimistic either. He occupied that particular middle ground that a lot of people in their mid-forties find themselves in — too far from the beginning to start over cleanly, too far from retirement to coast.
His savings balance when we spoke was approximately $800. His goal, eventually, is a down payment on a modest house — he mentioned a number around $40,000, which he acknowledged was probably low for the current Phoenix market. At his current rate of savings, he has no clear timeline for reaching it. “Maybe when the credit cards are paid off,” he said. “Maybe when the kids are older and the support changes. Maybe never. I try not to think about ‘maybe never.'”
What struck me most about Tommy Bianchi wasn’t the bitterness — though it was there, carefully managed, surfacing in short flashes before he pulled it back. It was the discipline he applies to a situation that offers him very little room to maneuver. He tracks every dollar. He works overtime when it’s available. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t have expensive hobbies. And still, the math doesn’t work. That’s the part of his story that stayed with me long after I left the diner.
Divorce, as Tommy’s case illustrates, doesn’t end at the courthouse. Its financial consequences — the debt, the child support, the lost equity, the reset to renting — can stretch across years and reshape futures that once looked stable. For the millions of Americans navigating similar circumstances, Tommy’s handwritten budget on a diner table is a document that tells a very common, very human story about the distance between earning a living and building one.
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