In Ohio, the forumula for figuring out the the amount that the non-custodial parent should pay per year for each child goes (basically*) like this:
(NCP’s Income + CP’s Income) * X% * (NCP’s Income / Total Income)
…where X is whatever the Legislature has determined is the percentage of a couple’s income that is appropriate to spend raising a child.
I don’t recall the exact amount at the moment, but I vaguely remember the case of a corporate lawyer making about $400k/year. His ex-wife was a homemaker.
He paid her something like $6000/month for each of their two children, plus alimony and other payments.
By my (extremely) rough estimate, Johnson should be paying about $2.7 million to the mother this year, before any adjustments.
Relatively speaking, $70k is jack shit. The kid should be able to afford being a sixth year senior at the Ivy League school of her choice, and a Porsche. Or at least a Corvette.
It sounds ridiculous, but that’s how the law works. If you think about it, it’s really the only way that’s fair to the kids.
I’m not counting any deductions or other adjustments in the formula - such as for additional kids living in the NCP’s home, because I can’t remember exactly what they all are, and I don’t know how many of them apply to the Unit’s case. This is just a rough, slightly informed estimate.
I’ll start with the easy stuff first: your father sounds like a jerk; of the Randy Johnson variety, apparently. Because your father did not see the familial, societal or moral imperative to provide for you is no reason that society should be as myopic. I can’t imagine where we would be if all parents took the selfish, self centered appraoch as your father and Randy Johnson.
It is common for a parent to be given the legal obligation to pay for college costs as part of a divorce. It is also common for a parent to continue to pay court ordered child support for a dependent child who is a full time college student. common.
There is a moral imperative as well. Most sound financial planners would advise that a middle aged parent fund their own retirement first, before paying for college educations. OTOH, if a parent has the means, providing a good college education will make them more productive, statisically better off financially and almost certainly put their future in a better stead, including any grandchildren they may have.
You help your ADULT children because you LOVE them, you help them because you want their future to be SECURE, you help them because YOU brought them into the earth, you help them because it is fundamentally what families do, you help them because you CAN, you help them because you’re not a JERK. You help them because you’re making a MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. You help them because you’re not a self centered MAGGOT. You help them because, on the ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS you will earn as a ballplayer, the amount you will spend on the child you sired will amount to a ROUNDING ERROR on your tax return. This is not a case of, “He has the money he should pay” but rather, “He made a child and he needs to act like a man and provide for his daughter.” (whether he has chosen to abaondon her or not)
But it is not uncommon for a divorced parent to pay court ordered child support for an ADULT full time [dependent] college student.
Nor is it unseemly for the mother to revisit this now. She’s providing for her daughter. I applaud her for being her daughter’s advocate and taking whatever heat she’s taking in the media and on internet message boards for fighting for her daughters future.
Randy has a daughter, like it or not.
Randy has A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.
Randy has a moral responsibility to pay a pittance of his earnings to provide fore his daughter.
And because Randy is morally tone deaf, I hope this girl’s mother makes this a legal resonsibility as well.
I don’t agree with Martin Hyde very much - in fact this may be the first time - but I’m pretty sure I do this time.
If Johnson’s child support payments were insufficient, doesn’t the mom have the ability to go to court and say “given the changes in his income, child support should be greater?” I’m asking because I don’t know - is there no such recourse? If there is and Heather now needs the money for the truck and computer and college courses, couldn’t this have been dealt with years ago, making it unnecessary for her to ask him for the extra money now?
Not to be an idiot, but his lifetime earnings in baseball come to a hundred million dollars. That certainly doesn’t mean he HAS a hundred million dollars.
And he is paying it, and has paid it. The argument is that he’s not paying enough, and I think we’re seeing two legit sides to that debate.
Randy shouldn’t have to pay for this girl’s education. Not al all.
Instead of paying for Randy’s ADULT DAUGHTER’s edcuation, they should simply go back to each individual year of her life and retroactively assess Randy what child support would have been required of him in each of those years, based on the formulas/ guidelines and rules in place in each of those years.
The fact is that this country is full of well paid parents who make no where what Randy Johnson is making, and who pay more child support than what Randy Johnson paid.
Randy made out like a thief for 16 years. Like a thief. And the final indignation is to deny HIS DAUGHTER a community college education.
At least in Ohio, either parent has the right to an administrative review every three years, and a judicial review at any time. The latter is accomplished by filing a motion with the court that issued the current effective support order.
In either case, the CSEA official or judge/magistrate basically recalculates the support using the same formula and updated income information for both parties.
I’ve seen cases where the CP didn’t thing the NCP was paying enough, requested a review, and was rather perturbed to discover that the payment amount actually went down, because his/her income had increased in the intervening time while the NCP’s had decreased or stagnated.
IMHO, it’s further proof the Johnson’s had it easy. If Mom were on the ball, those payments should have gone up at least every three years.
I missed the part of this argument where Randy did not provide for his daughter. Granted, he hasn’t made her filthy rich, I guess that’s enough for people to consider him a deadbeat dad.
Don’t give me any of this patent bullshit that he is denying his daughter a community college education. He’s given her $70,000 tax free money every year for 8 years. In excess of a half a million. If she can’t afford an education, it’s because she or her mother have squandered the money assuming they could squeeze more from him to bail their asses out.
If someone gave YOU that kind of money do you think you could manage to educate yourself on it?
No one has the right to “impute” a set of moral values to Randy Johnson. He has the moral right to not pay her.
But by any reasonable measure he has been given close to a legal free ride. On his earnings, any reasonable court in the land would have assessed him much more in support than he has paid.
I live in Ohio so I can vouch for black455. It’s all in a formula, and in fact all the DR lawyers have the same software that the Child Support Enforcement Agency* has. You plug in the incomes of both parties, make just a couple adjustments for health insurance etc and the software spits out the required support. There is no need to negotiate or haggle. It’s entirely perfunctory. The judge doesn’t even set the support—it’s by guidelines and it is elementary.
If Randy had gone through that process anywhere, and had it reviewed regularly (in Ohio every 3 years) he wouldn’t have paid $70K/yr. He ripped off his own kid.
*In Ohio there are no private child support arrangements. If you have a divorce with kids, the STATE will set your support and the STATE will collect your child support. Far from being a gold digger, either this woman is a saint or an idiot.
I live in Ohio (Montgomery County). My exwife took me back to court for additional support and my support went down, even though I wasn’t even asking for a reduction.
I agree he got off easy, but he didn’t steal a thing and didn’t rip anybody off. You’re calling him dishonest, but he’s paid the number he and the girl’s mother agreed to. If it wasn’t high enough, and obviously he’s capable of paying a lot more, isn’t it the mother’s responsibility to make sure her daughter gets what she’s owed?
Hang on a second. As Cheesestreak noted, she is 16 years old. This is apparently about taking some classes at a community college, not her entire college education.
But let’s pretend she IS going off to college: $69,000 a year in child support is enough enough to pay for ANY college in this country. If you cut that number in half, it’ll still pay for almost any college - and the mother does have her own income. The girl is not being denied a college education. Just from these numbers, all things being equal she will probably be able to go wherever she wants.
I’m getting a bit hotheaded over this topic, internally at least, so I’m going to restate my opinion a bit more rationally.
At a certain point, I believe these payments stop providing for a child’s needs, and start providing for a child’s lifestyle. At that point, I think it’s inappropriate to require the non-custodial parent to keep paying more and more. Further payments should be at the parent’s discretion. The fact that a state might technically require a payment of $1M or more per year just illustrates to me how crazy some of these rules are.
Randy did get off cheap in comparison to many other fathers, but I don’t believe for a moment that his daughter is hurting as a result. She’s taken home more after tax in the last 8 years than I’ve earned before tax, and I’ve managed to make a pretty decent life for myself.
(1) Unless she is some kind of child prodigy, she is not going to college at 16. If she is some kind of prodigy, she wouldn’t be going to community college. Mr. Johnson is not "deny"ing his daughter an education.
(2) The relationship between the mother and Mr. Johnson is not good; that’s fairly apparent from a read of TSG article. Mr. Johnson did provide for a comfortable lifestyle for his daughter (and her mother). He does not wish to pay more. I can understand this: his daughter doesn’t need more, so he is supporting the mother’s lifestyle.
(3) That said, if the mother feels more money is owed, her recourse is through the courts, who will decide on the state of the agreement and amend it as necessary. Mr. Johnson should rightly have legal representation and protect his own interests and not roll over to every demand simply because he is rich.
(4) No one has enough information to know the reasons for the non-existant relationship between Mr. Johnson and his estranged daughter.
I was raised by my mother (in Ohio, coincidentally) and I believe before he died when I was 10 years old my father paid my mother maybe $100 in child support. No, I didn’t leave off any zeros.
As to why the mother didn’t push it, maybe, like my mother, she just didn’t want to fight. She was getting what was a decent amount of money already, and figured what the hell, it’s something. (I mean Johnson’s ex, NOT my mother.)
Some people on this thread seem to have missed the fact that the girl is only 16, and therefore not legally an adult. She’s probably going to community college as part of some kind of advanced study program, and my guess is she would need a car of some kind to get there.
I agree Johnson is being a skinflint. He could buy her a junker for $5000, tell the college to send HIM the tuition bills, and within two years he’d never owe either of them a dime again. Why he doesn’t want to do it is anyone’s guess. (And everyone here is guessing.) It’s possible the woman has poisoned the child against him, so he figures why give money to people that hate him? It’s possible he feels the woman trapped him way-back-when, and he’s still resentful.
But having said that, all Johnson really did here was provide sperm to a woman who then broke up with HIM. To me, that sounds a little fishy. I’m not suggesting anything, but pro athletes are surrounded by gold-digging women on the make. The mother may be one of those people, or she may not have been. In any case, it’s tasteless to air this kind of personal business in public.
I just read my last post and realized my main point was not clear. Basically, I was trying to say that there appears to be no good guy in this battle. Johnson did not skip out on the mother, she broke up with him. H did pay child support, of whatever amount. He is not obligated to buy material goods such as cars, especially if he suspects they might not be exclusively for the child’s use.
So, I see no one to root for in this mess.
That’s true. Although I’m not sure anybody has done anything wrong either.
By the way, Cheesesteak, I’m sorry for misspelling your name. Although what I typed sounds kind of cool. And I think we can all agree that if this girl looks anything like her father, she deserves some pity.