It’s CHILD support, it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t want or need it because the money is not for her, it doesn’t matter that he didn’t know he had to pay it because the child still needed to be paid for.
That is the situation here too.
No need to be snarky.
Re read my posts. If he appeared in court and didn’t contest the allegations, he in essence is saying implicitly “I’m a douchebag.”
If he didn’t have a lawyer to contest the allegations, he’s admitting to douchebaggery by default.
I’ve also stated, that unless he walks into court and says-----through direct or indirect means----I’m a douchebag, the court doesn’t know that.
More importantly, several recent posts have assumed things not in the OP, or put words in the OP’s post.
I don’t see “HE DID NOT CONTEST THE EX-WIFE’S STATEMENTS THAT HE HAD PROVIDED NO SUPPORT SINCE THE DIVORCE.”
Enlighten me.
Put in all caps please. It helps me understand it better.
If it were any other way, you’d be incentivizing parents who never intend to be custodial parents take joint custody and default on it in as long and dragged out a way as possible. It would have gotten this guy an extra $3,000 bucks as a reward for bucking his legal and moral responsibility.
When you become a parent in the United States, you automatically take on an obligation to care for that child every single day until they are 18. This obligation does not come from a court order or any specific action. It’s just the way things are.
This obligation can be fulfilled in many ways. It can be met as a married couple acting as a financial unit. I can be met by arranging to have another person or couple take on the obligation through adoption. It can be met as two single or divorced people who have developed a private arrangement that works for both of them or a court-ordered arrangement And this support can take many forms, encompassing a range of combinations of financial support and daily care taking. Generally parents are free to arrange for this obligation however they want, but when one parent does not feel the situation is fair, they can petition for the courts to step in and create a legally enforceable arrangement.
When the couple filed for divorce, he chose to fulfill his obligation through shared custody. He then chose to ignore that for six months, and not contribute at all to his child’s upbringing in any meaningful way. That doesn’t make the obligation to care for his child, which he has had from the day his child was born and will have until the child is an adult, magically disappear for those six months. That obligation has always been there, it never went away, and it’s only because he chose not to fill it that the courts have to make him. And since he chose not to take the opportunity to fulfill that obligation providing his share of the daily childcare, all that’s left is to make it up financially.
If you watch enough “Judge Judy” episodes, you eventually learn ALL about child support.
Her Number One rule is: you make a kid, you support it.
Even if there is no child support order in place.
Even if you don’t have a job, or are buried under expenses, or have other kids to support.
If there is no child support order in place, the non-custodial parent needs to make regular, documented payments to support his/her child. NO cash payments, no “I bought diapers and formula,” no dancing around, no kidding.
If there is an order in place, I can see how a payment outside of that order can be considered “a gift” (IMHO, very unfair!), but prior to an order, any documented payments should be considered child support. A paycheck stub showing a regular deduction, or cancelled checks, or money order receipts, any kind of documentation.
A co-worker’s son had gotten married and divorced with a baby involved, and the kid was really too young to understand all the legal stuff. He was working for barely more than minimum wage, and his ex-wife had told him, “Just go. I keep the baby, I just want you gone.”
I said, “So he doesn’t see his child?” Co-worker said, “No.”
I said, “Does he pay support?” Co-worker said, “She didn’t want any.”
AHHHH. I told her that was nothing but TROUBLE. Granted, the boy-husband was barely scraping along, but I told her that he NEEDED to pay SOMETHING, regularly, even if it was just ten dollars a week, and keep the cancelled checks or money order receipts. I said, “Ten years from now, this will come back and seriously bite him in the butt!”
~VOW
I agree with you.
I have no concern for this guy. He didn’t pay and the system caught up with him.
My concern is how the system caught up with him. (which isn’t clear from the OP and people have assumed just how the system caught up with him.)
If the system caught up with him because he admitted to being a douchebag, great. If the system caught him in a drag net that assesses everyone retro actively, then you’re creating a system where men will A) pay twice, or,B) put money in escrow (thereby putting a hardship on the kid) until the court order and CS program is set up.
Does that help?
And every man I know has paid more CS than he was required to. Didn’t reduce their obligations to pay CS as designated.
I’ve never heard that it is required to be paid through the CS system here, but I do know several people that opt for that just to make life simpler.
Regardless, your story bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the OP’s story, so I’m at a loss as to why your mistake has anything at all to do with the situation or deadbeat originally mentioned.
It’s not that hard to document what you are spending on your kid, especially if you are a non-custodial parent providing direct payments to the custodial parent. In that case, all you need is a copy of the cancelled check. If it’s really that tough, try getting a separate credit card for kid stuff. Boom! Instant record. I mean, somehow we all manage to save our receipts when we are getting compensated for business travel, right?
In reality land, it’s not really that difficult to distinguish if someone is paying for a child or not. Are you spending your money on daycare, orthodontists, Chuck’E’Cheese and trips to Disneyworld? Probably a kid in there. Spending your money on bars, fancy restaurants and trips to Vegas? Less likely to be kid-expenses.
Do you really think this guy could have made a credible claim that he was supporting his kids? I’ll give you a hint- he didn’t even try.
Wait, men pay twice? I seem to have missed the penis part of the rule rule. I think you are talking about non-custodial parents. You lose credibility when you bring in the butthurt men’s rights BS. The father in this situation gave up custody voluntarily. This is not about his gender.
In this case, I think he was assessed because the mother filed to collect child support when the father stopped fulfilling his custody duty. When she was awarded child support payments, they were assessed from when he was first documented as not providing custody.
I’m going to bow out now. I really don’t have that much in common with these issues any longer, and I’m tight on time.
I’ll leave with 2 thoughts.
- In almost every single post I made it clear that this guy meant nothing to me, or what happened to him. He seems to have been treated fairly. He didn’t pay. They caught him, and now he has to pay.
My concern, then and now, is the process that made him pay. If everyone is retro actively assessed, it’s a bad deal for the father, and potentially the kid.
- Anyone with any experience with these matters knows that the overwhelming amount of people who are paying CS (or not paying their CS!) seem to have penises. Most states are mom-friendly, my woman lawyer was quick to tell me. It’s entirely appropriate to refer to non-custodial parents as “men” colloquially, without implicitly saying that there are no women in that situation. We know that the vast vast majority are men. Spare me the PC nonsense.
Gotta run. I probably won’t be back. Work calls.
- If you read my post: The retroactive was more than likely due to the dissolution being amended versus the custodial parent filing a new motion. Divorces are different beasts than paternity orders / orders for support.
- I have 19 years in the system and (as of next week) 16 years working for the system. Yes, the majority of people paying support are men. That’s beause in the majority of cases the mother is left raising the children - whether a mutual decision or not. In the 16 years I’ve worked in the system, the cases where the mother pays support has greatly increased. Where it used to be maybe 1 in 15, now I would say it’s 1 in 8 (at least where I am). I will not spare the PC nonsense as it is NOT fair to the men who are raising their kids in their household.
So you don’t like what you are hearing, and you’d rather hold on to your emotionally charged ideology rather than discuss the actual issue.
You and I both know that the majority of men paying child support are doing so as a voluntary alternative to the obligations of being the custodial parent. I will fight on the side of anyone who wants men fighting for custody to have an equal shake (and they don’t, but it’s getting better), but in reality what most “men’s rights” people are fighting for is for men to have the option to not support their child in any way at all, and to be able to walk away from their kids scott free.
I agree. He knew he had obligations. He was just choosing to ignore them.
But there was never any indication whatsoever that everyone is retroactively assessed.
That was just your knee jerking.
If you’re a good guy and you’re making payments - get a damn receipt.
Where is the problem? When great guys are actually getting screwed we’ll talk, right now, a douche is getting his just desserts, the way I see it.
I guy who’s doing the right thing can usually prove it, because he’s still talking to people about it, they are aware, she’s telling people too, etc. The cure is, as always, in such cases, get a damn receipt! What’s so hard about that? I’m just not seeing it, truly.
Because in many places, including this one, support paid outside the court system is considered by the court to be a gift and all that receipt is good for is wiping your ass. You’ll still end up getting nailed for retroactive support. Go ahead, ask me how I know this.
OK, how do you know this? 
Seriously, that’s pretty screwed up, if it’s still the law. If a parent is trying to do the right thing in order to support the child, he shouldn’t get nailed for retroactive support that he’s already paid. Having a policy or law like this isn’t good for either parent, and it’s not good for the kid(s), either. It’s not good for the parents, because the one who is paying support even before being ordered to do so is punished for trying to do the right thing. And if the non-custodial parent is wary about paying support because he (or she) might get nailed for the money again, then that penalizes the custodial parent and the child.
Well then, there is an easy solution for this, isn’t there?
If you don’t plan to be a custodial parent, don’t agree to take custody. And if you agree to become a custodial parent and decide that’s no longer much fun, tell the custodial parent and tell the courts so that everyone can get things arranged legally, rather than stringing everyone along for half a year until the lawyers actually force you to own up.
The custodial parent sure didn’t have the option to decide not to take care of their kids. They didn’t have the chance to decide that having the kids for the weekend was just too much bother. Instead, they had to deal with broken promises, not knowing what was going to happen, unexpected expenses they probably didn’t budget for, and the eventual process of having to get a lawyer and file paperwork just to get what was already promised to their child by that child’s own flesh and blood.
If the person in the OP had just said from the get-go “Look, yo, this parenthood isn’t really my bag. Why don’t I just cut a check, send the occasional Christmas card, and call it a day?” he wouldn’t have this problem.
What, exactly, do you believe you just brought to this conversation that was either factual or of some abstract value?
That in the case in the OP, any “double payment,” if it had existed, would have been entirely avoided by the father not fraudulently claiming that he intended to take 50% custody and then stringing it along for six months. In terms of the OP, it’s a non-issue.
I have no idea what your situation is, so I obviously can’t comment on it, can I?