That is a good point. Too much income inequality between the two parents could lead to that being used as leverage to coerce the kids into picking one parent over the other.
I agree with everything you have said in this thread. The family courts are a joke whose sole purpose is to punish men.
Now, if you aren’t mad enough already, think of this. The judge orders this outrageous support amount of say $25k per month to be paid to the custodial parent (usually the mother) for the support of the child. You’ve already talked about how this is ridiculous because you never before had a legal obligation to provide your child with that type of lifestyle, but in divorced its mandated.
Fair enough, you suck it up because you want to give your child that lifestyle. Here comes the dirty, open secret. Your ex is under no obligation whatsoever to use that $25k on your child. So long as the child has enough that CPS doesn’t investigate, she can spend that $25k on whatever she wants. No accounting is required and she can openly admit that she didn’t spend the money on the child. So, if it’s “all for the children” why is this allowed to happen?
Family courts are notorious for doing things and ordering remedies that other courts stopped doing hundreds of years ago. Jailing people for unpaid debts (like child support) went out for other debts centuries ago. They have forced parents to actually quit a lower paying job that they enjoy to take a higher paying job to support a child, something no so far removed from slavery and an unthinkable remedy in other contexts. They are intrusive, overbearing, and arrogant under the guise of “protecting children.” Hopefully, one day the Supreme Court will grow a set and stop these abuses.
I have no problem caring for my child, but as has been pointed out, I shouldn’t be required by law to do more than I was required when married, and I damned sure ought to be able to see that the money goes to the child and not the ex and her new boyfriend.
And if the millionaire in fact lived in a $90,0000 house, clipped coupons , didn’t buy the 16th birthday Ferrari , told the the kids they were on their own for college throughout the marriage and is willing to live that way after the divorce, I’d say fine. But that never seems to be what happens. Instead the kid who turns 16 before the divorce gets the Ferrari, and the millionaire doesn’t want to pay for a Ferrari for the younger kid who turns 16 after the divorce. Millionaire lived a millionaire livestyle before and after divorce, but somehow the spouse and kids should live a middle-class one.
You talk about no one being able to force the still married millionaire to buy a Porsche for his wife- but while they are still married, the wife presumably has something to say about how the money is spent and has agreed not to spend money on a Porsche, not to send the kids to expensive camps, etc. I certainly don’t think kids should live better after a divorce simply because one parent can afford it- but neither should they live worse because one parent doesn’t want to pay for it.
As I understand it part of the reasoning is that the success of one spouse can be credited to some extent with the stay at home spouse who helped support them while they were building their business. It can be hard to put a clear financial value on that.
It’s sort of like the “Ann Romney never worked a day in her life” situation. She was dependent on Mitt for all her money. That works great unless he decides one day not to pay her anymore and she has no marketable job skills. Well, maybe they aren’t the best example but you get the idea.
As has been mentioned in some of those discussions, all her financial value is is whatever she is worth to her husband. If that suddenly changes because her husband finds a younger woman she has lost all her investment (I know the roles are reversed sometimes, just trying to illustrate the point).
There are probably some who people take unfair advantage of the system and others who get screwed. I don’t know what a perfect solution would be.
Did you ever see War of the Roses?
Why does it have to be that way in “fact”? People are always allowed to change their lifestyles (so long as they stay married and the courts don’t get involved). Even if our millionaire friend actually provided luxurious vacations and sports cars to his kids, he is under no legal obligation to continue to do so. Maybe the kid starts acting up in school and both parents decide that he loses his car privileges?
But in a divorce, it is just a straight cash calculation. If the parents want the kid to live a frugal lifestyle, that’s okay, but the custodial parent still gets the court allocated amount, and the parent is free to do responsible or irresponsible things with that money. It violates every principle of equity.
I agree with you, actually. When my first babydaddy and I split up, no one asked if I needed child support (which, actually I did, but no one asked, it was simply assumed) and no one except me considered whether the cost of accepting that support was too high to make it worth it. And it was - when he paid his support, he treated our son like crap. When he didn’t pay his support, he disappeared and didn’t treat our son like crap. So I decided it was worth it *not *to take his support. Yet according to the state, he’s tens of thousands of dollars in arrears, even though I don’t *want *the money.
The language people use is very telling: “He shouldn’t get away with that!” is the most common. “You should nail his ass to the courtroom door!” “Take him back to court and the judge will hand you his deadbeat head on a platter!” It’s very obviously punitive.
Child support is a punitive measure against the person who is not taking care of the children 51% of the year. Not the spouse who initiated the divorce. If it wasn’t, and I was Queen of the World, you wouldn’t be paying nearly what you’re paying, if anything at all.
My ex-husband and I pay no child support to one another, by mutual agreement and court stamp of approval. But that’s because she spends 50% of her time with me and 50% with him. The judge didn’t even blink when we said we didn’t want to bring child support into it unless the time spent in each house got decidedly uneven. We each buy her clothing and food and toys and books and school supplies that stay at our homes, and we split school fees, activities and medical costs 50/50. Both of us end up spending fewer dollars than the formulas would have one of us paying under court ordered support. Those formulas don’t have anything to do with the cost of caring for a child, they’re based on income. So if you shop at discount grocery stores and thrift stores for clothes and say no to $60 hair cuts, it’s much cheaper to pay the actual expenses than the child support.
So there’s an alternative to child support: support your child. Of course, that requires a working, if not amiable, relationship with your ex.
They still can’t force you to spend it on “opulence” if you’re divorced. They can force the non-custodial parent to pay it to the custodial parent, but that’s the end of the forcing. Your ex can write you a check in an equal amount each month, or put it into a trust fund for the kids for the future, or give it away to gypsies.
Not to add another argument to the thread, but this is the part I have the most trouble with, myself. There’s no requirement than child support actually be spent to support the child, and no system for tracking expenditures to ensure that it is. I think that’s wrong.
And, on preview, I see **jtgain **just brought up that point. So, er, yes, I agree. It’s ridiculous.
That’s the traditional argument for alimony, and I don’t disagree with it in limited circumstances. If they divorced, Ann Romney would get a split of the marital assets, and Mitt would have to pay alimony to accommodate her current lifestyle.
I would argue that it should only be done for a limited time, and now that the marriage is over, Ann needs to take some night classes and start looking for a job. This isn’t 1910 anymore where women can’t have careers.
And this is a separate issue than child support, in that alimony is out in the open support for the ex-spouse. Child support purports to be for the children when in fact, it is back door alimony.
Define “opulence”. Seriously. I know you’re talking about wealthy people, but it goes all the way down the scale. I know middle class men who happily paid for camps and other extracurricular activities pre-divorce, but resent having to contribute post-divorce. In a conversation I was once involved in regarding child support, it was mentioned that the custodial parent’s housing costs would be higher due to the children. One man was of the opinion that his ex-wife didn’t need a three bedroom apartment like they had during the marriage- his son and daughter could share a room and the ex-wife could sleep on the couch. No doubt there is a man someone who believes that although he has a six figure income, his child support should only be enough for his ids to eat rice and beans and get their clothes from Goodwill- although neither he nor they lived that lifestyle during the marriage.
You and your ex are to be commended for working it out. You took the future decision of care for your child into your own hands instead of some judge who would come up with a silly solution.
Even if two people decide that they can’t get along and stay together, there should at least be enough love there from when you created the child that you can sit down like adults and decide on a plan to move forward.
Too often people let their emotions get in the way and want to take the ex to court to soak them for as much as they can get. That builds resentment, a lack of future honesty and cooperation, and hurts the child more than any difference in money would make.
The family court system is like WarGames. The only winning move is not to play. Agree to divorce, split your assets, agree on a child care plan, and have your attorney draft the order for the judge to sign. Yes, judge sign here, and initial, here, here and here. Thanks. Have a nice day.
Of course, if both parents want the kid to live a frugal lifestyle , nothing precludes them from agreeing on a lower amount of support. The problem is precisely when the parents don’t agree on the future lifestyle , and when the rich parent lived opulently before and will continue to live opulently, it doesn’t look like a parenting decision to refuse to support the child’s similar lifestyle.
A divorce isn’t going to turn Ann Romney back into a twenty year old just graduating from college. She gave up the career she might have had by staying at home and she can’t go back now and reclaim it at 63. And we can assume the decision for Ann to stay at home was a mutual one by Ann and Mitt so they’re both responsible for its consequences.
I’ll say up front that I am single and have no kids so I won’t pretend any expertise or personal experience with the current system.
Changing the example to someone who doesn’t have the connections of Ann Romney, let’s just say like in War of the Roses it’s the wife of a fairly successful lawyer who has stayed home to take care of the house and kids. Do you think when she is in her fifties she can take a few night courses and make up for what she would have made if she had pursued her own career? What if she worked part time to help support her husband while he went to law school?
No one has a crystal ball to see what they would have been if they hadn’t gotten married. I have no doubt some people get screwed by the current system but I can see an argument that that the stay at home spouse at least in some situations should be entitled to some share of the other spouse’s financial success. I have no idea how to write a law to make things more fair though.
In cases where there is existing wealth before the marriage it gets murkier. I guess that is what prenuptial agreements are for.
I think the discussions in some of the Ann Romney threads were pretty interesting in the points they brought up about the value of staying home and raising kids. It’s hard to pin down any kind of financial worth and there were a lot of different views on who is/should be paying for the work mothers do.
I am not a fan of alimony, and my understanding is that “spousal support” isn’t often applied in Minnesota unless its transitionally. I actually got it for my divorce, but what I got was $100 a month to help pay for a car that he insisted we could afford two months before leaving…so I functionally got money for the term of the car loan to help pay loans he was committed to. (I kept the car, and the house, but the house I didn’t make him contribute to, I could take care of that myself, it was the car that put me over the edge.)
But wild swings in income aren’t great for children who have a hard time understanding them. Stability is important in a child’s life. It may be that keeping a child in the school that they were in, in the home they were in, and in the activities they were in involves a fairly big payment. However, I’m not sure we do kids any favors when we let them have a lifestyle that has five figure a month support figure attached to it, which the non-custodial parent resents, and then the money spigot is turned off when the obligation ends, either.
How far down do you expect the accounting to go? Should the custodial parent be required to obtain a separate receipt for the child/ren’s food so it can be scrutinized to make sure they haven’t slipped in a few items for themself? Would we see custodial parents in court arguing that they need to rent a four bedroom house for themselves because of the three children, while their ex shows real estate listings proving there are cheaper properties available to rent, insists each child doesn’t need their own room, and demanding the ex be solely responsible for any rent above what the cheapest property on the market costs?
A law requiring custodial parents to account for every cent spent on the child opens up a whole range of minutiae to be dragged in front of the court and argued about - and if the law doesn’t extend to accounting for food costs and so forth, there will still be bitter ex-partners complaining their ex is dining high on the hog on their dime, or making accusations that there were cheaper options available and their support money shouldn’t be used to pay for name brand pasta sauce or whatever. It’s also quite an intrusion into the custodial parent’s life, having every purchase open to scrutiny and criticism. I think non-custodial parents could grow resentful that they have no consultation in, or veto power over, everyday expenses.
By this logic, every contract is punitive, too, because if you don’t pay according to its terms, people will say you shouldn’t get away with it. That people get angry and want a person punished for failure to pay court-ordered support doesn’t mean the court was only interested in punishment to begin with.
It may seem punitive based on why some lady out in the world thinks support should be paid, but it isn’t punitive in its calculation or derivation. It would be obvious if it were; it’s not like court orders are closely kept secrets. In my state, it’s part of every case’s rote recitation of child support law that it isn’t allowed to be punitive or confiscatory. The factors that influence child support are publicly available, and they’re based almost entirely on income. If you want to know roughly how much child support spouse X will owe spouse Y, all you have to do is plug in the numbers. It may deviate from those calculations in one direction or another for reasons that we could argue are punitive, but the awards are not based on punishing anybody.
I think there are a lot of problems with how family courts work – particularly with alimony, which is a whole different ballgame from child support – but the problem of judges not giving a shit what’s actually in the best interest of the subject children and not working to accomplish that is not one of them, in my experience. There are far more parents with offensive perspectives on their own parental duties than there are judges who want to interfere inappropriately with their parental rights.
I mean, of course a court is never going to come to the conclusion on your behalf “well, he’s going to treat the child like crap, so the best course of action here is to relieve him of any obligation whatsoever!” You really think you’d have appreciated that from the bench?
But what counts as “for the child”? Is paying an extra $300/month to live in a nicer apartment in a better school district “for the child”? After all, the custodial parent benefits from that as well. What about sending the kid to camp for two weeks in the summer? Is that “for the child” if the custodial parent goes on a trip with her friends at the same time? Should a parent eat rice and beans while serving their kid hamburgers because some of the grocery money comes from child support? Is the adult’s ticket when taking the kid to see “Animated Animals Fart III” a child expense or an adult one?
It gets even murkier when you realize that often, but not always, the custodial parent takes an income hit because they are the custodial parent: if the custodial parent misses a shift because the child was sick, should they pay themselves half of the missed pay out of the child support payments? What about the overtime shifts they don’t take because they have to/want to be home with the child? Then there are the intangibles, the career path not even considered because it involves travel or being on-call, the promotion not offered because of all the late mornings. Their is also less time for things that would save money: if mom is eating out more because she’s up at school helping build sets and sew costumes for the play that Junior is in, is that a child expense or an adult one? If she picks up dinner for Junior’s best friend as well because it would be weird not to, is that a favor that’s all on her, or is it from Junior, and so can be a credited expense?
Trying to untangle these things would be a nightmare. I’ve no doubt there are custodial parents who abuse the system, but I’m far from convinced that preventing that abuse is worth making the vast majority of well-intentioned parents suffer through a nightmare of record-keeping and pantries full of food labeled “mom” or “kid”.
I also think non-custodial parents vastly underestimate how expensive kids are. I mean, two-parent families often wonder “where the hell is all this money going?”, so it’s normal that non-custodial parents would ask the same question. You can’t just add up clothes and toys and activity fees: a kid in the house means higher grocery bills, higher gas bills, higher utility bills. Your whole life just costs more when you have kids in it.
Programs like WIC, SNAP and TANF certainly have figured out how to figure what additional money is needed for each child. The math can be applied to higher incomes than “poverty”.
And it is.
I would support some sort of sliding scale based on the amount of the payment. If the parents make $20k/yr each and there is, say, a $200 per month child support payment, then that is presumptively reasonable and by default no accounting is necessary.
If the child support obligation is $20k per month, then that obviously goes above and beyond what any child would consume and it would be a presumption that not all of that money is spent on the child and an accounting for be automatic.
I would propose that the non-custodial parent can demand an accounting at any time and have a “loser pays” for the accountant’s fees.
But as I said above, every other contract doesn’t contain a punishment of jail for a breach of it. The court won’t make you work at a higher paying job to pay off your contract judgment. Emotions are already running high in a family court proceeding and one side uses the leverage of financial devastation against the other party.
By having the structure the way it is, the courts encourage jilted ex-spouses to go for the jugular instead of being reasonable. And that hurts the children far more than a couple of hundred bucks a month either way.
I am a divorced father and I find this question kind of horrifying. Not the spousal support but the child support part. Divorce is a dissolution of the marriage not the parental relationship and a man should not blanch at paying to support his children as he is able to. Saying that a well-off father should contribute the bare minimum to his kids’ support is all kinds of wrong.
I had to fight my first wife over visitation all the time. But while I insisted on know where the child support money was going I do not feel remotely cheated at having had to pay it. My daughter is my daughter no matter what and I am not only obligated to support her I am privileged to do so.