child support payments

[wolfhead]

My spouse knows that I'm in a very difficult financial position yet the Judge based my support on an imputed income of $45,000. I make about $22,000 currently. Based on the support granted to my wife, I have less than $8,000 a year to live on. She receives 80% of my after tax income of $45,000. I cannot survive in New Jersey on this amount and am being forced to move NJ to Florida to survive. Of course this is want she wants as I will not be near my children. Her boyfriend gives my children gifts of money and expensive items. Her boyfriend/employer is very wealthy. What can I do? I'm desparate to be able to live close to my children.

[stepmomtwo1]

I can't help much but have you had a modification since your income went down? Is that what happened?

I do know that the courts are never fair and as far as I have ever seen they are never for the fathers side. They will just tell you to get another job to help pay for the child but rarley even attempt to tell the mom to get a better job to help support her child.

I thought that the wife could not take more then 50% of your income? I might not be even close to right with this. I'd say talk to the child support bearue and see what they say.

All we are doing here is counting the days until the evil witch is a part of our past. One year and 7 months to go. Then I will send her the last red penny she will ever touch that we have worked for.

I'm sure our public officials who have gone through divorce find ways around paying every last dime to the ex but when it comes to the middle class people like us...were stuck!

[Vanillaskydiver]

> They will just tell you to get another job to help pay for the child
>but rarley even attempt to tell the mom to get a better job to
>help support her child.
>


On the subject of getting another job.. When my ex and I seperated we
figured our income ratio as 60:40 and based my voluntary child support
payments on that ratio during the process of our divorce.

During the year leading up to our final divorce I took on every bit of overtime or extra shiftwork I could get hold of to help offset my new lower household income, extra expenses associated with the divorce and the child support I was paying..

When it came time to actually finalize the divorce, my ex and her lawyer produced my W-2 that included a heck of a lot of OT on top of my basic salary and argued to up my child support based on an artificially high earning statement. So I finally ended up paying about $200 more a month in child support and have to work myself into an early grave with OT.. I cant afford to simply work a 40 hr week anymore.


I havent got any sage advice.. If youre rich, you pay a lawyer thousands to hash everything out.. If youre truly poor, you have nothing to give so no one bothers to chase you.. but if youre middle class, I guess youre expected to just suck it up, hand your paycheck to your ex and live in a cardboard box yourself.. Hell, my ex lives in a nicer place today than we could afford while we were married (with the help of my paycheck of course...)

Good luck

[VeronicaGia]

And if you get another job, make sure it is cash paying, such as a waiter, bartender, etc.  

However, it is illegal for your employer to take that much from your salary.  Unless you modify the order though, you will go into arrears for the balance.  You need a modification.

[I cry_ in_the_dark]

http://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-800.html#6500303

This link is  for the CCPA. While I understand that your income was imputed, I don't understand how they can garnish more than the 50%. I would think that they could only garnish the 50%, with the remainder to be arrears.

What kills me is that my X never had his income imputed...and he gradually worked himself down from $425 a month to $150 a month. At one point I received NOTHING for a year, as he had been sick and spent that year working under the table!

Now that he has custody, he's back to making the big bucks, which of course, raises the amount of child support I pay to twice what he was paying me! HA....right  x(   Try living on $450 a month...yep, that's what I'm left with!

Now, I did appeal and have a new CS hearing in March.  First, they included overtime that I had received due to a temporary position I had at my work.(The accountant had surgery, so I received a crash course in accounting which included extra training hours and overtime for the last four months of the year.) As well, I had been tax exempt so no Federal Taxes were taken from my pay. With my X now having custody, I am no longer tax exempt. I told them this at the hearing, but they failed to consider my income with the taxes taken out, which makes a HUGE difference.


I addressed this issue to Socrateaser last month, and this was his reply:

Your order will remain as it is until the other parent requests a modification of support. At that time, if you have additional income then you are obliged to disclose this fact, and the court must consider it for the purpose of calculating support.

However, you have considerable negotiating leverage with regard to a second job if you are already working full time, because no court can order a person to work more than 40 hours per week supporting their child (that would be presumptive slavery). Therefore, if the other parent demands support based on the additional job, you can simply state that you will quit and there isn't a damn thing that anyone can about it.

And, once you quit, then the motion to modify would become moot because there would no longer be a change in circumstances (no income change), and the court would be forced to deny the motion.

So, as a practical matter, the answer to your question is NO.

[leon]

 there is no sage advise when you work harder to improve or maintain youre lifestyle you automatically give these people(man or women)the oppurtunity to ask for more, try this for example i spent most of my time in the bush working when my son was young to pay my bills and child support,long hours and consistently in sub zero tempatures,but in the long haul i was able to build myself and my new wife and her two kids a new house, now my ex girlfriend who has two more kids with a guy who doesn't work and they all live together got even more jealous and now wants even more money and since i deney her this she decides too pull my visatation and sends me to CSED.Now this is where it gets interesting years back we where going through CSED and then one day decided to pull it from them since she was not on public assistance at the time and deal with it ourselves wich we have done for three years now,how ever when she reactivated by going back on public assistance  they now contend that i was not paying the amount i was supposed to and say now i owe over $9,000 in back support and have sent a lein against my tax return and are sending notices to the credit boroughs. The point here is that they say even without a court order as in are case that they can impose any amount they CSED see fit and that two grown adults cannot make a decision different than theres even when they where told to back when in fact we (the ex and I) whent in to there office and signed a affidaveate
to not interfere with us and to have no part in child support or enforcement of there such.