Single parent with 1–2 children, head-of-household filing, EITC eligible, stretched budget, limited retirement savings.
A-02 is the head-of-household filer with at least one qualifying child, an EITC and refundable-CTC profile that drives the tax-refund-as-emergency-fund pattern, and a single-earner income that has to cover what A-01 covers with two.
A-02 captures the single-parent household in the early-accumulation phase. The defining technical surface is the §2(b) Head of Household filing status (every one of the 25 corpus households files HoH), the §32 Earned Income Tax Credit interaction with the §24 Child Tax Credit (now substantially refundable post-TCJA via the ACTC), and the §21 Child and Dependent Care Credit on childcare expenditures. The §152 qualifying-child / qualifying-relative tests are load-bearing — particularly in cases where custody is split and the dependent claim alternates by year. Behind the federal credits sit the state-by-state EITC supplements (CA, NY, IL, etc.) that materially change net income for the same gross. The tax refund — typically several thousand dollars between EITC and ACTC — functions as the household's de facto emergency fund and arrives as a single annual lump rather than a smooth-cash-flow benefit, breaking any savings-rate planner that assumes monthly periodicity.
Cash-flow shape is constrained but not bottom-of-distribution. Median gross of $66,892 is higher than F-01, F-02, or F-04 — single parents in the corpus skew toward Technology, Healthcare, and Professional Services industries rather than retail or service. Median net worth of $162,877 is meaningfully positive, largely because 12 of 25 (48%) are homeowners with mortgages that pre-date the single-parent status (the 'kept the house in the divorce' pattern). Every household carries credit-card debt; 13 of 25 carry student loans alongside an active education-funding goal for the child. The 25-of-25 education-funding-goal prevalence is the highest in any cohort — single parents over-index dramatically on 'better outcomes for the kid' as the central financial goal.
A-02 is distinct from neighbouring archetypes because of the filing-status, credit-eligibility, and single-earner-with-dependents combination. A-01 has the same dependent profile but two earners and MFJ filing. U-02 (Low-Income Working Family) overlaps at the lower end of A-02's income range but is two-parent and EITC-maximised differently. The S-01 (Divorce in Progress) household is the lifecycle moment immediately before A-02 stabilises into its post-divorce single-parent steady state.
Aggregated across the 25 A-02 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Tyler is a young single-parent household at the corpus median income, working in technology in a mid-cost Georgia metro. The diagnostic friction is the $1.04M education-funding target sitting above a $42k net worth — a 25x gap that is structurally unbridgeable at current savings rates and exemplifies the A-02 aspiration-versus-capacity tension. Behind on home purchase, behind on retirement, behind on education funding; on track only for the modest debt-payoff goal. This is the household that needs planner UX to surface partial-attainment scenarios rather than binary on-track flags, because none of the three big goals will fully land at current trajectory.
Every A-02 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles draw on A-02 most heavily. Consumer tax-prep platforms with EITC-eligibility focus, plus VITA-partner platforms, use the corpus to validate §32 EITC interaction with §24 CTC and the §2(b) HoH filing status, including state-EITC supplements at the CA/NY/IL state-of-residence level. Public-benefits-screening and integrated tax-and-benefits platforms (including single-stop nonprofits) use A-02 for the household-composition tests that determine SNAP, WIC, and child-care-subsidy eligibility in parallel with federal credit eligibility. Term-life insurance issuers and underwriters (digital term-life issuers, plus military-affiliated insurers where applicable) use A-02 for the canonical single-parent income-replacement need-analysis where there is no second earner.
A-02 is the post-divorce or never-married single-parent steady state. The household in active divorce proceedings with QDRO-pending retirement-asset splits, alimony/spousal-support determination, and pendente-lite expense allocations belongs in S-01 (Divorce in Progress); A-02 picks up after that resolves. The two-parent low-income household with similar EITC profile but two earners is U-02 (Low-Income Working Family). The widowed-with-children household has different beneficiary structures (survivor Social Security, life-insurance proceeds, spousal-IRA-inheritance) and lives closer to a custom blend rather than A-02 directly. Blended-family scenarios with stepchildren and split-custody complexity belong in BL-01. Finally, A-02 does not stress child-support-paying-parent flows — the corpus models recipient-side dynamics, not the obligor side.
Income and homeownership distributions during v3 synthesis referenced Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) single-parent tabulations and Census ACS PUMS data for HoH-filing households in the 28–42 age band with one or more children under 18. EITC parameters reference the published IRS tables; state-EITC parameters reference the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities state-by-state schedules. Childcare cost ranges referenced Child Care Aware of America cost-of-care tables. Geographic concentration in GA, FL, and TX reflects the empirical concentration of working single-parent households in mid-cost metros rather than a uniform-state assumption. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is frozen; these notes describe priors applied at synthesis rather than a reproducible regeneration path.
A-01 has the same dependent profile but two earners and MFJ filing. The cash-flow squeeze is similar in shape but materially less severe; the tax surface (no EITC, full standard MFJ deduction, two retirement-plan coverages) is entirely different.
S-01 is the divorce-in-progress household where QDROs, alimony, and asset divisions are unresolved. A-02 is the post-divorce steady-state where filing status has stabilised to HoH and asset division is complete.
U-02 is the two-parent low-income working family with similar EITC profile. A-02 is single-parent by construction with the load-bearing variable being HoH filing status and the no-second-earner cash-flow shape.
BL-01 is the blended-family household with stepchildren and split-custody dependency-claim complexity. A-02 assumes biological/adoptive single-parent structure without stepfamily layering.
A-02 — Single Parent models the unmarried head-of-household filer with at least one qualifying child in the 28–42 age band. The defining technical surface is §2(b) HoH filing, §32 EITC, §24 CTC with refundable ACTC, and the single-earner cash-flow shape that has to cover what dual-earner A-01 covers.
Empirically, single-parent households over-index on 'better outcomes for the kid' as the central financial goal — 25 of 25 corpus records carry an education-funding goal, the highest prevalence of any archetype. The targets reflect 4-year private or out-of-state-public tuition rather than community-college-then-transfer paths, even though current savings rates rarely match. This is intentional: the corpus is the right fixture for testing planner UX that needs to surface partial-attainment and goal-rescaling rather than binary on-track flags.
The EITC + ACTC refund is treated as a single April-arriving lump rather than smoothed monthly income. This breaks naive cash-flow projection tools that assume constant monthly net income and is exactly the testing surface for refund-anticipation, refund-advance, and refund-as-emergency-fund product flows.
Recipient-side child-support receipts are included where applicable, but the corpus does not model the obligor (paying parent) side. Households whose primary financial pattern is child-support obligation paid to an ex-spouse are not in this archetype.
S-01 is the active-proceedings phase with QDRO-pending retirement-asset splits, alimony-determination uncertainty, and pendente-lite expense allocations. A-02 is the post-resolution steady state where filing has stabilised to HoH and asset division is complete. They are lifecycle-adjacent rather than overlapping.
No. The shipped v3 A-02 corpus is frozen as of the corpus drift confirmation on 2026-05-09. Sampler improvements land in a future v4 release; the current 25 households are not reproducible from current code.
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