I’ve been divorced for five years. My ex and I have shared custody, but my daughter primarily lives with her and her new husband. I had my daughter every weekend for the first 2 years, now every other weekend with 3 weeks in the summer and the bulk of the school holidays. For 6 years we’ve worked out the schedule on the phone two or three times a year – I’m pretty flexible, but there are the odd weekends that I cannot do. Also, I’ve never missed a child support payment, tuition payment, summer camp payment, or any other payment, and I am not hiding income from her or the IRS.
Two weeks ago I received my weekends/vacation summer schdeule in the mail with no previous discussion. When I sent the monthly support check, I said that the times selected were fine, but that I objected to her suddently deciding the schedule by fiat, and that I would consult a lawyer about my rights if she did it again.
She called me on Monday to let me know that that she had a “new address” for me to send support checks to – the address of her lawyer.
My initial thought was that she’s just overreacting to my comment in the lettter – which would be characteristic – but on further though it surprised me that she would put up with getting the check a few days late, and having to pay a lawyer to handle it on top of that, just to be pissy. It just gives me a bad feeling – made worse by my feeling that Family Court is pretty much where fathers go to be told they’re useless, and that I’m powerless to stop all sorts of things that she might do to make it harder for me to have a relationshp with my daughter.
I’m not asking for legal advice (I will be talking to my lawyer next week), but just for anecdote about what can go wrong here. What badness could she possiibly be up to? Is there any compelling reason for me to refuse to send child support checks to a lawyer (especially a lawyer in another state – she lives in NY but the lawyer is across the border in MA)? Should I brace myself for an audit or something like that?
Without knowing more about your ex and the nature of your relationship, it’s really hard to say. Is she the petty and vindictive sort? For that matter, are you?
From what little you posted, it seems that her puzzling actions were triggered by you using the L word first, but pretty out of proportion. At any rate, since there is no court order stating otherwise, you can probably send the check wherever you want.
Are you on amicable enough terms that you can simply ask her why the odd behavior?
She needs to show that she’s in control of the relationship, I think. She pays lip service to the fact that our daughter needs a relationship with me, but only as far as its convenient to her. If anything, I’m probably too passive in dealing with her because I don’t want my daughter to get stuck in the middle of anything worse than she already is. I’m not vindictive with her mainly because I’d rather keep my dealings with her at the absolute minimum. I think this comes off as sullen.
I could ask, but I doubt she’d tell me the truth if it didn’t benefit her in some way. Case in point: about 2 years after the divorce I went to a couples counselor with her once a month for 4 or 5 months because she thought “we needed to communicate better.” (Ain’t that the truth. My initial impulse was to refuse this as too little, too late, but at the urging of the person I was dating at the time I went.) After one particularly difficult session where I had to sit and be lectured to for an hour about how I hide my feelings (in between her berating the therapist for agreeing with me on something), she then tells me in the parking lot on the way out that she was moving 200 miles away for personal reasons, despite our divorce agreement that limited such a move to 50 miles. I would think that the actuall counseling session about communication might have been the time to bring that up.
So, no, I don’t trust her, and if she’d thought she could get herself a better deal in California or Taiwan she’d go in a heartbeat and text me from the airplane.
It could be that she moved or is planning on moving again and she doesn’t want you to know the new address. If she was moving within the same general area, she would probably just get a P.O. Box. She may be moving to a new town entirely and doesn’t want you to know.
I recommend having your employer electronically transfer the funds from you weekly/bi-weekly check right into her account of choice. No waiting for checks to clear - no record keeping needed.
This is what I do. It’s prompt (she gets paid on my paydays, instantly, into her checking account) and it’s automatically documented. I mean, there’s no way my ex could claim I’ve missed a payment - they’re all right there on her own bank statements.
To be honest, sending the check to her lawyer is better for YOU than for her. Let her “win” this one. If your check goes to her lawyer, she can never claim that it wasn’t recieved, that it was short or late or anything else. Do not balk at this – it’s a pretty stupid pissy move on her part, and really good for you (unless you are chronically late on the support or don’t pay it or whatever). I would go so far as to suggest that if she ever wants you to send the check elsewhere that you balk at that idea – always best to have proof of that check being sent for child support on time etc. Trust me – I could screw my ex out of a lot due to our agreement never having been done through the courts and him not having “proof” of paying the child support. I wouldn’t – but I could.
Also, you might want to send the check to the lawyer as a registered letter (with return reciept) with a copy of her instructions to you included. Just in case the lawyer isn’t up to speed on what your ex is up to.
Or, more accurately, doesn’t want me to find out until it’s so late in the process that a judge won’t stop it, which is what happened last time.
Well, she hasn’t moved yet (I dropped my daughter off at her house a week ago), and if she’s planning on selling their house and sneaking off to parts unknown without telling me, its hard to figure out what the checks going to the lawyer will gain her. I speak to my daughter on the phone at least every other day, so that’s the longest I’ll go without finding out. Even if she dodges the phone thing entirely, I’ll figure it out in 2 weeks when there’s no kid to pick up. I suppose I could check and see if their house is on the market.
I have electronic copies of her cancelled checks, so I’m not worried about being accused of not paying. I was 2 weeks late on payments for a few months the first year, when I was unemployed, but have not missed the first of the month since. I’m sure if her lawyer figures out that due to cumulative rounding errors I owe her four cents, they won’t go to court over that. It’s not like she found a free lawyer coupon on the ground somewhere.
And: It would presumably be risky for her to choose to suddenly play financial hardball, since she and her husband are in a mostly-cash business, and the one time I had dinner with this scumbag – about 6 months – before I found out about their affair, he bragged that he always hid a bunch of the cash from the IRS. And I’m sure they still do it. I get direct deposit and a single W-2; not a lot of wiggle room there.
I would think the act of her cashing a check from me every month with “child support” written in the memo would be enough proof. And she can hardly claim that I’m late if she’s introducing a whole new process that’s out of my hands entirely. And if she wants direct deposit, she can ask for it.
I would agree with the consensus that if she’s doing anything crappy it’s going to be moving again, possibly without husband #2 and thus on the QT; hard to see how the check thing would help that. On the upside, if she suddenly pulls my daughter out of second grade and moves her somewhere new without telling her aboout it more than a day in advance, maybe a judge will see what a nut she is.
It seems to me that you overreacted first by bringing up the “L” word, then she overreacted in a similar way. I would just let it drop and send the check wherever she wants.
You might be surprised just how easy it is to convince a judge that those checks were for …sex or drugs or whatever. Just because they say “child support” doesn’t mean shite. I often write checks to Pizza Slut with a note in the memo field stating “for a kilo of cocaine” – no one ever reads the memo field. Hell, when I say “I wrote my DL # and expiration in the memo field” I have had idiots turn the check over trying to find the ever-elusive memo field.
While she may be up to something such as moving (I don’t know her), it really still is in your best interest for her lawyer to see those checks each month.
No advice to give you, I’m just commenting to say that I’m surprised that you actually send her the checks directly. As I recall from my childhood, my dad sent the checks to Domestic Relations, who then cut a check to my mother. It seems like the most sure way for the courts to know who is and is not paying what’s owed. We lived in Pennsylvania.
I am surprised that the checks had been going to her directly too. I suggest you check with your own lawyer though. IAAL but this isn’t my field, however, in some states child support payments that aren’t paid through the county child support enforcement agency aren’t considered to have been legally made at all, even if you’ve got cancelled checks showing payment, so exwife could still conceivably sue for non payment of support. Like I said, check with your own lawyer and if you don’t have one, get one!
