How To Understand Child Support

As a general rule of thumb, if you and your ex have children then one of you is going to be legally ordered to pay child support. That being said, regardless of which parent is awarded custody of the children, BOTH parents have a legal responsibility to make sure that their children’s basic financial needs are met. Basic financial needs include items like clothes for school, equipment / gear for extracurricular activities, and child care. In the majority of child support cases, the final amount of support that is ordered will hinge entirely on the computations. Each jurisdiction has it own set of computations. At the end of your case, a final computation will be calculated and whatever number (dollar amount) that the computation produces, that is the amount of support that the judge is going to order. Producing an accurate computation is hard to do. The issue of child support includes several factors and is very hard to compute accurately. In the event that you are going through a child custody case right now or know someone who is going through a child custody case right now, we recommend that you conduct some independent research about the workings of support computations. More specifically we recommend that you develop a working knowledge of the FUNDAMENTALS of support and support computations. Below is a list of at least three of those fundamentals to help you get started: Fundamental Number One: Support Computations. Just like we stated above, the computation is king in your case. Towards the end of your case, whatever number (dollar amount) that the computation produces, that number represents the amount of support that the judge will order to be paid. Fundamental Number Two: Child Custody. As a general rule of thumb, the judge will award custody to one of the parents. The judge will then order the other parent (the non-custodial parent) to pay support on a monthly basis. Fundamental Number Three: Monthly Income. When calculating support, the monthly income of both you and your ex will be an important factor. We strongly recommend that before the final support computation is produced, you make sure to provide your lawyer with current, accurate financial statements for both you and your ex.