I always thought that was actually the main reason for high child support payments when the non-custodial parent in a couple is richer than the other. It’s pretty good reasoning, really. It’s a pretty good recipe for fucking a child up, having them spend weekends living like Lords with one parent and then weekdays living like peasants with the other.
Someone above said that the non-custodial parent’s other minor children (from relationships before or after the relationship in which this kid was born) don’t count towards reductions in child support payments. Is that true? I know it’s not in the UK and I’d be surprised if anywhere in the US had that in law. If that is true, then that’s fucked up and I doubt many people on here would argue otherwise.
Another good point made above was that there is a difference between physical custody and legal custody. If you don’t have physical joint custody, you have can still have legal joint custody and you absolutely can argue for your choice of school for your kid.
The situation where you can’t do that is where you don’t have legal joint custody, which would happen for a reason (even if that reason is you not knowing the difference and not applying for it), and even then I suspect there are situations where you could still go to court and make your argument if your grounds were genuine. Like, the child had always gone to the local public/state school and was happy there and it had good facilities and moving them would not be beneficial to them, or where you had religious objections to your ex’s choice of school.
At least in my state (Kansas Child Support Guidelines), it’s not true. Child support paid in other cases is not included in income (that is, if your gross income is $2400/mo and you pay $400 to support another child, your obligation in the current case is figured as though your income was $2000). There’s also a “Multiple Family Adjustment” if the parent not having primary physical custody has children from another relationship living with them.
The custodial spouse has little to no incentive to take anything less than the maximum that they can get. At worst, it’s money for their kid that does not come out of their pocket and from which they incidently benefit from, and at best it’s money under their control with basically no oversight as to how it’s spent.
99% of people would go for the max that they can reasonably get in this circumstance, even if they are not “gold-digging bitches”.
It should be noted, though, that child support is not tax deductible (nor is it taxable to the custodial parent). So someone with a gross income of $2,400 and paying $400 to support another child has a lower net income than someone with $2,000 of gross income and no other child.
In theory this could be offset by allocating the dependent tax deduction to the payor. But my understanding is that the deduction is generally given to the custodial parent.
Either parent can claim the child, regardless of custody arrangements, as long as the child spent at least half the year with that parent.
I could conceivably* have an arrangement with my ex in which we alternate years, even though our son lives with me most of the time. Technically, she would not be allowed to claim him at all. But in practical terms, as long as only one parent claims the kid, the IRS doesn’t really much care about the actual percentage of time. They have easier fruit to pick.
(*Yanno, in theory. Not that I have such an arrangement, nor would I ever admit to it on a public forum if I had.)
Sure they have incentive. Not everything is about money. A cordial relationship with the other parent that allows them to work out problems without having to pay lawyers is worth something. So are other incentives: adjustments to the custody/visitation schedule, somebody willing/able to take off from work to tend a sick child when you absolutely cannot, give-and-take on which school or which church/temple/synagogue/mosque, and so on.
In Kansas, per the guidelines above cited, “The parties are encouraged to maximize the tax benefits of the dependency exemption for a minor child and to share those actual economic benefits.” In practice, that usually means alternating the deductions year-to-year. If the parties don’t agree, the court has the authority to adjust the child support amount to reflect the tax benefits.
[QUOTE=Kansas Child Support Guidelines]
Example: A noncustodial parent has one minor child and has an Adjusted Gross Income in 2011 of $22,750 and assumes the noncustodial parent is in a 15% marginal federal income tax rate and a 6.25% Kansas marginal income tax rate. Accordingly, if the custodial parent will not alternate the exemption, the calculation for the value of the exemption would be calculated as 3,700 x .15 for the federal amount and $2,250 x .0625 for the Kansas rate. The resulting total, $696, would be divided by 12 to arrive at the monthly value of $58, which should then be multiplied by 68% (the noncustodial parent’s share of the combined income) producing an adjustment to the guideline child support of a monthly credit of $39 to the noncustodial parent.
[/QUOTE]
Similar calculations apply to the child tax credit and other income tax factors.
The IRS has special rules for children of divorced/separated parents. As long as the child was in the custody of at least one of the parents for at least half the year (i.e., not in state custody, 3rd-party, etc.), and the parents between them paid at least half of the child’s expenses, the parents are legally entitled to make their own agreements about who claims the deduction. See Publication 501 and Form 8332
That’s something. That’s why I said “little to no incentive”.
Note that I’m not claiming all divorcing spouses end up in court fighting over child support. I said “99% of people would go for the max that they can reasonably get in this circumstance”. If the other side is offering something close to what they would likely get in court anyway, based on the guidelines, then a lot of people will settle. But if what’s being offered is significantly different than the guidelines, people are not going to turn this down.
There are exceptions to everything. But this applies to 99%. My point, again, is that saying that people should come to mutual agreement about the appropriate level of spending ignores the reality of the situation, in which one side really has no incentive to take a balanced view, and this is fundamentally different than would be the case with married parents who would share the same cost/benefit equation.
[I’ve known some exceptions in which the custodial side has been far wealthier than the non-custodial side, and have essentially used the threat of support payments as leverage to extract significant concessions on custody arrangements.]
What is being pointed out to you is that this does not apply to 99% of people in this situation, that people do in reality come to mutual agreements all the time, and that people do have incentives to take a balanced view, and often do.
With one notable exception, even friends who’ve had acrimonious divorces have been able to work most things out between them, even if they need a judge to approve the final arrangements.
We have a fundamental disagreement on the level to which money is the only incentive.
For example, suppose I as the custodial parent clawed every last nickel and dime I could get out of the other parent. Now, I really want to switch which days my ex has the kids, because of a special family event. The ex, however, says, “Absolutely not. We will adhere strictly to the schedule, and if you attempt any deviation therefrom I will have you arrested for custodial interference.” Lather, rinse, repeat for however many years we have to raise a child together. Was that extra nickel and dime really worth it? I’d say not, and I think far more than one percent of custodial parents would agree.
The median child support payment due in the U.S. in 2009, per the Census Bureau link above, is about $370/month (and the median amount actually paid is less than half that). Per the OP, the cost of raising a child is about $1100/month. Outside of the super-wealthy, nobody’s getting rich, or even really breaking even, on child support.
You disagree with me based on nothing but your own opinions, F-P. And you’re entitled to those.
You’re not entitled to make claims like “99%” when I have seen and worked on cases that run directly contrary to those claims, and so have others in this thread. You are simply, flatly, mistaken about how this works, which is no surprise because you don’t seem to have any real world experience of it.
The question is: did they come to terms that differed significantly financially from what one side would have gotten in court?
The context of the discussion here is the comparison of a married couple - in which parents have discretion to set spending limits for their children - and divorced couples in which the non-custodial parent does not. In addressing this, several people have said that married couples come to mutual agreements about how much to spend and that divorced couples are also free to come to mutual agreements. And my rejoinder here is that divorced couples are facing a fundamentally different dynamic in this regard.
It doesn’t make a difference if some couples come to an agreement to settle for something close to what they would get in court because why make a fight over a small amount of money. What we’re discussing is a “mutual agreement” which is not driven by the guidelines looming overhead. (Robert E. Lee’s surrender at the Appotomax was also a “mutual agreement” if you want to get technical about it.)
Have you ever heard of a case where a custodial spouse decided to settle for an amount significantly lower than what they could have gotten in court because they felt the appropriate amount to spend on a child was lower? That’s what we’re discussing here. (Because this is analogous to the issue that was raised about the comparison to married parents.)
So do I. We’re not talking about “every last nickel and dime”.
This ignores a lot of people getting social assistance of various sorts.
But more importantly, median is not “everyone”. This thread happens to be about wealthy people.
Truth is that based on your performance in this thread so far I’m not even sure if you’re disagreeing with me or disagreeing with some distorted version of what I’ve said that you made up yourself.
But even if you are, it doesn’t count for as much as you think it does. Divorce is not some arcane area of life that a specialist has this unique insight into. A lot of people get divorced and most people know and know of a fairly representative amount of people who’ve been involved in divorce situations.
But the legal remedies that are being proposed here for the alleged “gross unfairness” imposed on wealthy people would apply to everyone. And as I noted back in post #86, they wouldn’t necessarily scale well to different circumstances.
I am entirely certain that you aren’t sure of that.
Maybe at some point before this ridiculous exchange I should have said something like “what are you basing this on” and found out what you had to support your claims.
The only people I’ve ever heard trying to low-ball “the appropriate amount to spend on a child” were people trying to get out of paying much child support.
Children are EXPENSIVE. Even if you don’t buy the kid all of the most fashionable clothes and coolest video games and whatnot, there are always better schools and tutors and music lessons and other goods/services that will help the child do better later in life. A better neighborhood, e.g., frequently means a better school (not always, but often enough), yet a better neighborhood brings a whole host of additional expenses.
Look at the statistics I posted earlier about the average cost of a child versus the average support order. For ordinary people, the 99-percenters that I know, there’s already such a huge gap there that any significant drop in the support order is going to cause financial difficulties.
For the one-percenters, it may well be different. (For Halle Berry’s kid, though, there are expenses most of us never have to worry overmuch about, such as bodyguards.) However, by definition the one-percenters are a tiny subset of the population paying and receiving child support.
I’ve not been proposing any legal remedies. I’m discussing the present situation.
In terms of your post #86, the part I would object to would be:
There’s almost no such thing as divorced parents working out mutually agreed-upon arrangements without legal interference. Because once the option of court settlement is in play, then that’s going to have an overriding influence on any settlements.
So it sounds like we’re pretty much in agreement in terms of what I’ve been discussing here. That being that, as a practical matter, no one you know is coming to any sort of “mutual agreement” to pay significantly less than what they can get in court.
You’re just saying that it’s justified. That’s a separate point. The point I’m making is that as a practical matter the law is not just stepping in in the absence of “mutual agreement” as some have claimed here. The law is what imposes “mutual agreement”.
That is not accurate. Divorced parents work out mutual agreements totally apart from the compulsion of the legal system all the time. There’s not almost no such thing; it’s a common occurrence.
The last person I talked to about this issue was actually a case of exactly the opposite of what you’re talking about. She’s the custodial parent of two little kids and doesn’t have an income. She’d be entitled to quite a bit of support because her husband is a reasonably high earner and barely ever sees the kids. But the husband is a jerk and has both the willingness and, she believes, the wherewithal to punish her and the kids for it if it goes to court. And she genuinely wants to have a decent co-parenting relationship. She’s running from the idea of legal interference. So she accepts a couple thousand bucks here and there and she raises the kids at her parents. It’s not worth it to her. This happens all the time.