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That's pretty close.  I'd say that if you know in advance that you can't give an ordinary child help beyond basics -- and that in fact you're going to have real trouble with even the basics -- you probably shouldn't have kids.  Love is great, but the kids still have to eat, live in safe places, get whatever help they may need, and compete in the end with strong, healthy kids who've been to school and been free to work hard there & develop their talents.  I think you have to ask yourself what kind of a life you're setting a kid up for, and if it's not too nice, well, you don't have to do it.  It's not like we're short on people.

Nobody here has talked about protecting kids from everything.  I think you're reading in to what I'm saying.  The majority of the have-it-all kids do very well for themselves, btw.  I'm thinking now of my college friends; most are high-income with multiple degrees, successful businesses or practices.  Most enjoy their lives, and their struggles come from things like deaths of parents, not lack of health insurance or fear that their kids won't get basics.

OK, I gotta get back to work, yikes.

Hey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be unsupportive.  I'm aware you're on both sides.  All I'm saying is that yes, there is freelance/WAH work available online that pays considerably better than paper routes do.  If your prob is no money, that's a potential solution.  I'm not a career service, but the jobs are there if you look for them.

Whether X works or not, or is a tramp or not, is, it seems to me, her problem.  It doesn't change your hub's obligation to the kids, and though it may not seem so to you, $1200/mo for 5 is really not a lot.  Average middle-class kid costs $200K to get to age 18, depending on cost of living where you are, and at that support level, your husband's contributing about  $52K total, birth to 18, per kid.  So at most about a quarter of the cost of raising them at what most would consider a good standard of living.  Just talking about the money there and leaving aside all the other wreckage their mom brings in.  I think a lot of these support conversations devolve into "but she could __________", and wander away from the idea that the support obligation is absolute.  Has nothing to do with what the other parent does or doesn't, has or hasn't.

How is she able to run up bills you can't pay, btw?

I would never say some kids should go without while others get.  I think that's wrong.  I just believe in planning for these expenses and the possibility of divorce.  In my 20s I saw a lot of friends end up in bad trouble when their husbands left them with little kids and no education, and it was hell.  Decided I'd wait till I could do it reasonably on my own if necessary.  Glad you have a wonderful hub.  

Also glad you've made peace with your x's arrearages.  I'd still be going after it aggressively till the expiration of the statute.  To me it seems that belongs to the kids.  Obviously you can't get blood from a stone but if he gets an inheritance or anything else down the line, it may be possible to get it for the kids.  

Yeah, that's probably how it'll go.  I'd prefer that we figure it up and do it legal, though, because otherwise I have no guarantee he'll pay.  He might say that, say, music lessons are a great idea, pay for the first month, and then stand there turning his pockets inside out (he's got disability income of -- well, let's just say the amount that the insurance co. pays into his retirement account alone is more than he'll be paying in c/s monthly, and if he's off disability he's capable of making big bucks, just wants to switch to a low-pay career and go to school).  Then I'm there stuck either telling the kid "no more music lessons", with the lesson attached that there's no point working at something because it's just going to get yanked, or paying for the whole thing myself.

I'll have primary care.  Liberal visitation.  

OK, gotta reply real quick:    

"I agree to split the costs but then split ALL the costs, not just the copays. I do not ask my ex to give me $7.50 (half co-pay) when he is pays child support. The bigger costs (daycare, big dentist bill) then we split. Activites-I talk to him and we see if we can both do it or if I can do it alone."

I agree about splitting all costs, but if you pick up more than that, you short yourself on retirement saving.  In the end makes retirement hard for you and the children, since they're the ones who'll have to decide how to support you if you need substantial help in old age.  Meanwhile they'll have kids of their own to raise.  Old women make up a very large percentage of poor.  Caring for Mom/Dad over long declines is increasing source of stress/poverty/job loss for middle aged, leaves grandkids without college help.  Being old is expensive here now, will get more so as baby boomers break the system.

"Housing costs should not be haved. You would need to a place to live. It is the child's portion of those bills and if you really added it up it would not equal the cild support guidlines (not in my case anyway...we chose to not go by guidelines but my actual costs)."

Agreed, child's portion.  Have 3br house (2br, one office) with modest mortgage, exc. school down the street.   Have added it up, and it still costs about $600/mo more than I'd spend on myself.  Half of the overage seems fair, & that eats more than half the c/s min.  True I live here; I also do the work of maintaining/cleaning, & protect his equity, will do the work of selling it in the end.  No lasting benefit from the overage, either, as it's a young mortgage and nearly all the payment goes to interest, taxes, insurance.

"Why would you be surprised? There's a reason you're getting divorced after all. Put the shoe on the other foot. If you are NCP, how much will you give your ex?"

Are you serious?  How about everything I make beyond retirement saving and living expenses as skinny as I can make them, which -- in my case -- is pretty skinny?  (I don't have family around here, or it'd be even less.)  It's not giving it to my ex; it's giving it to my child.  If I thought my ex wouldn't take good care of the money or use it for the intended purposes, I'd just structure the c/s so that all money above state min went to specific service providers (preschool, camps, etc.)  

And yes, retirement saving is also part of providing for children.  If we don't do it, they'll have to pick up our slack.  Which is a lot more money and responsibility, for a lot longer, than it was for previous generations.

Yow -- at least I know the ex isn't thinking that way about it.  He doesn't fear I'm going to spend her money on me.

Sorry if it comes across as judgmental.  I'm just shaking my head at some of what I'm hearing here.  If you can find your way to a message board and post messages like what you've got there, I guarantee you can do better hourly in the wee hours than delivering newspapers.  Look around online, if you want.  

I gotta get back to work.  More tomorrow on this one, maybe.  I'm serious, the obstacles I'm hearing here sound to me surmountable.

I have a second job, and post-divorce it looks like I'll be providing 75+% of our income.  I'm also in school doing PhD prepwork so that eventually the high-wage piecework is replaced by something high-wage with good benefits, security, and satisfaction for me, and I work it so that school pays for itself.  I look for and go after high-hourly-rate work that I can do on a flexible telecommute schedule; next after that is high-wage flexible.  I do a lot of the work after my daughter's in bed, when she wouldn't be spending time with me anyway.  I'm also the one there with her when she wakes up in the middle of the night, in the morning getting her breakfast, taking her to gymnastics and watching through the parents' window (while working, yes, and it's annoying to try to work while the non-employed parents are talking, but that's what it is), taking her to daycare, taking her grocery shopping, making her dinner and eating with her, playing games with her in the bath, answering her questions ("Why are bananas this shape?" "How old is the sky?"), dancing with her, teaching her how to write her letters, taking her to church, etc., etc.  I'm also careful to live in a safe, high-quality, low-cost town with good public schools.  I don't date and I fit my socializing in with work and church, and I'm not planning on having more kids.  I can swing college for one, but probably not two.

I am a tired lady.  That's OK.  I expect to be tired for a long time.  She gets one childhood, and when she gets to adulthood I want her to be able to do whatever work she loves, instead of whatever work she has to do to pay off loans.

You know, there are people who go to other countries to work so that their children can have good, better-than-scraping by lives, college educations, etc.  Really, I don't think this is such a big deal.  You guys seem to me to be throwing up a lot of surmountable obstacles.

I work at home and frequently adjust my work schedule so I can work at night and spend time with her during the day.  That way she gets to see me, and while the nanny is over, she can come visit me in my home office and I can take breaks to come play with them.  I take her to gymnastics one morning a week, and every so often take mornings off to have a special breakfast out with her.  We spend most of the weekend together.  

There are ways to work these things out.

Yes, a second income will up the CS.  That's the point, upping the CS to better provide for the child.  And of course you can't just throw money at a child.  There has to be teaching and parenting along with it, or they won't know what the money is worth.  It's possible to do both at once.  It happened for me, and it happened for many of my classmates at college, many of whom were from very well-off families.  

It takes some imagination, is all.  

"When you pay hundreds of dollars a month and then the BM asks for half a copay is just ridiculas."

No, that's half the noncovered cost.  If you're splitting the cost of raising the child half and half, well, copays are part of the cost.  If you're only paying hundreds a month, then probably you aren't paying half the real cost of raising the child.  Maintaining the home, food, utils, medical, daycare, clothing, furniture, gas, dental, promotions foregone because you have childcare responsibilities, all these are fairly basic costs.  I added up what my daughter costs monthly in dollars, not counting foregone income, but including med and daycare.  She's healthy, we live in a cheap housing market with good public schools.  For those essentials plus summer camp, one or two activities like music lessons, two plane tix a year, college savings, and scholarship-supplemented ed enrichment, the total is around $2K/month.  Which is actually on the low end of the 'what it costs to raise a child to 18' calculators you can find online.

I view college saving as an essential.  College is necessary to getting most jobs you can actually live on, the job market is more competitive than it was, and college is a lot more expensive than it used to be.  I live in a college town, and I see a lot of very worried and exhausted 18-22 year olds accumulating major debt while working part-time and churning through school as fast as they can.  That debt's going to keep some of them from going after the work they want to do, and will delay homeownership and families for many of them.  It's not a nice thing to hang on a kid, especially if you don't plan on saving enough for retirement.  Then the kid has to pay off school debt while raising a family and trying to help you out, too.

OK...I'm going through a divorce now, will likely be CP, and to my great surprise, c/s is turning out to be an issue.  I'm mostly just shocked that stbx is even considering going with the state minimums, and in visiting c/s boards, I'm surprised by how many people are trying to get support orders lowered.  Shoot, one of the ads on this page says "lower your child support."  I think it's terribly sad.  

I support myself and if necessary could support our daughter alone, so that's not an issue.  I wouldn't have had a kid if I hadn't been pretty certain of my ability to do that.  And I certainly don't expect stbx to support me.  But I thought the point of having the kid is that you give the kid everything you can.  If the kid needs money for activities, college, whatever, you don't wait for someone to drag you into going out to earn it -- I'd think, well, you just go do it.  

My dad had a professional career, but when he wanted more money so my brother and I could do things, he drove truck early morning to make a few bucks on the side.  His dad got up at 3:30 am and worked like a madman all day.  I'm pretty soft compared to them, but plenty of 1:30 AMs see me up in the kitchen working on a freelance job or figuring out how to bump up the hourly rate, even though I know I'll have to be up by 7.  I do that partly so my preschooler can have morning nanny, someone who'll actually pay attention to her, instead of having to be in fulltime daycare in a sea of kids.  I want to make sure she can go to gymnastics, hockey, whatever activities are going to get her working and playing at something with some discipline and focus.  She'll have significant college savings so that she doesn't have to walk out of college with a heavy debt burden.  I'll have retirement savings so she doesn't have to try to support me as she's raising her own family.  She's got an insurance trust in case something happens to me, so she'll be able to stay in her home and school, have college paid for, and have money to help her dad pay for nannies & household help.  If I die, I don't want the rest of her life busted up, with her shuffled around among relatives feeling like a burden.  Yes, it's a lot of money.  That's what it costs to give a child good odds of a comfortable, healthy life, one where she can freely use her talents and gifts and make herself as happy & productive in society as she can.

Which I'd think is the goal, and which is why I need to get back to work now.  

But please enlighten me.  Why are you guys fighting buying life insurance -- possibly the cheapest insurance there is --  and paying for braces?  Why not pick up another job?

Wow, this is all so sad.

It seems to me that the ones who get slammed the most through all this are the kids.  I agree with the idea of enlisting them in being responsible for their own activities, understanding what the arrangements are, and what they need to do per the decree if they want to do an activity.  If they can get some outside support in negotiating that, some trusted counselor who can also occasionally advocate for the child, then that sounds like a good idea too.  

With luck this will open the door to conversations about divorce & the ethics of divorce law, some sense of their parents' intense interest in and love for them, and maybe some thought about what they want to do with their lives when they grow up.

I am continually amazed, though, at the lack of accountability, and the sense that everything is always up for grabs.  My ex is a basically generous, kind guy, but even as we negotiate custody, he's talking about how we'll have to change everything if he gets a job 50 miles away.  I had to pull him back to earth and explain that once we make an arrangement, it's up to each of us to live up to it.  If we want to change it, we can ask,  but the other is under no obligation at all to do so, unless a judge orders it.