Under the new child support guidelines the presumptive amount of child support to be paid, and allocated pro rata to each party based upon their respective incomes, is the expected cost of an average intact family to raise the number of children that are to be supported.

 

What is important about this is that this is the expense to raise children in an intact family; it states nothing about the cost of raising kids while the visiting or non-custodial parent has the children.  It is actually rather non-sensical to expect that a parent who has visitation or less than primary custodial status is not going to be spending money on their children.

 

To address this issue, the initial draft of the child support bill made a mandatory child support adjustment based upon the amount of parenting time the non-custodial parent had.  Opponents of this bill, in what was an effort to get courts to ignore shared parenting time, and therefore issue higher child support orders, were successful in removing the automatic parenting time adjustment from the bill.  This is now a discretionary deviation.

 

So what we are left with is the most significant deviation factor for a parent to reduce their child support relegated to a discretionary deviation that most attorneys and therefore judges will ignore because attorneys are not arguing this point.

 

That is not the case with the Shaw Law Firm.  Even if you just have standard visitation, you have expenses that are not accounted for in the presumptive child support calculations and that need to be taken into account by the court.  Standard, every other weekend visitation is approximately 21% custody time; many non-custodial parents actually have 30 or even 40% custody time with their children making for an even more compelling argument to deviate from the child support guidelines based upon parenting time.  Such a parenting time adjustment is appropriate for just about any case, and should be brought forward in any settlement agreement or if necessary argued to the court in order to set the fair and proper amount of child support in each case. 

 

Point of this article being, do not go into a child support case assuming that all there is to it is figuring out the income of the parties, and applying it to the guideline tables.  Even the non-custodial parent with bare minimum visitation is going to have out of pocket expenses for the care of the children, much less parents in a more joint custody arrangement.  The parenting time deviation is perhaps the largest deviation to consider, but there are other often overlooked deviations.  Child related tax benefits to the primary custodial parent can amount to hundreds of dollars of benefits a month to the custodial parent, which may include head of household benefits and dependency exemptions, and child tax credits.  Each of these deviations can add up to hundreds of dollars per month, which adds up to thousands of dollars per year, and they should not be overlooked in any case where child support is being set. 

 

The Shaw Law Firm is fully aware of and capable of determining the proper child support for your case.