Parenting After Divorce (AND during marriage!)

Today I read an Opinion piece in the New York Times, and it’s so good, I think it deserves a spot in my blog for ya’ll to read. This article is just about parenting after divorce, but gives some insight into How NOT to Get Divorced. I particularly encourage all those who have an iron grip on what they believe their “rights” are with custody. You might be cutting off your nose to spite your face.

It's the End of the World As We Know It…

*Updates to the courts procedure while we’re going through this COVID-19 thing can be found at this link, which is to the Utah Courts webpage for updates.

Ok, so not really. It IS the end of the world as we know it for at least a few weeks to months. I’m avoiding Facebook, etc., myself, because I had been before (depression + Facebook=kill me now, most of the time) but it’s even worse now. My family is basically prepared. When the store shelves cleared immediately of toilet paper and water, I had a dozen and a half or so rolls, and kept wondering who these weird people were who thought a pandemic was the equivalent of an earthquake, and that our city water would suddenly become contaminated and undrinkable.

That’s not how pandemics work, ya’ll. That’s how earthquakes work (which as a sidenote, actually happened this morning early in the Salt Lake Valley, so maybe those folks are glad they bought up all the water…more about THAT here.).

Anyway. The beauty of my job is that I really CAN do it anywhere there’s an internet connection, and on Monday, I dragged my desktop home from my day job, and got myself set up to work from home for the next few weeks. I love working from home. As an anxious depressive, getting out of bed in the morning is excruciating, especially knowing I’ll have to, like, put on pants and makeup and not look like a slob and stuff. These past couple of days, I have literally dragged myself out of bed, put on my bathrobe, and sat down at my computer at 8am. No makeup required. No pants required. That’s straight up perfection, my friends.

Feels like straight up Magic, actually...

It’s also really fantastic that most of us really DO have technology literally at our fingertips that allows for all kinds of communication without having to be WITH anyone. My smartphone has face to face calling (Facetime because it’s an Apple, but Skype and Facebook Messenger do the same thing). I can text if I don’t feel like talking. I can receive and send email from my phone as well. And so can 95% of the world’s population (that’s totally a guess. I have no data to support that percentage.)

The population that I’M speaking to now, though, you folks in Utah, you who are scared or confused about the legal system, who are afraid to leave your homes, but afraid to not be able to leave your homes, I’m still here for you. I’ve been doing a lot of family law legal consulting. For those who would qualify for CAPSA’s services, I do it for free. For those of you who actually CAN pay some legal fees, I charge $75/hr, which I can take through Venmo or Paypal or Square on a credit card. You CAN still talk to a lawyer–I can Facetime/etc with you. Or you can email.

The point here is this: Don’t feel like you’re stuck in a situation that you don’t want to be in because you don’t have access to any legal counsel. I’m available virtually by appointment (which you can make by emailing me–see my About tab at the top of this page). Or you can just email if you have a specific question. A lot of your FAQ’s are already answered on my blog here…just go to the “search” box at the top right of the page, and type in a keyword you need info on, and everything I’ve written about that topic will come up. Hell, if push came to shove, the courts are still open, and I can e-file any case documents for a legal case I’m working on, without having to leave my home office. (I actually HAVE completed entire cases without ever traveling to a courthouse.)

So keep that in mind. Don’t panic. It may be the End of the World as We Know It, but You Can Still Feel Fine ;).

For your listening pleasure…Never lose your sense of humor, folks 😉

Child Support: How it’s Calculated (Utah Specific)

Child support calculation can be a bit of a mystery to those who haven’t had to deal with it before. And honestly, that means just about anyone who’s not had a family case.  In Utah–and LET ME BE TOTALLY CLEAR ON THIS:  I’M JUST TALKING ABOUT UTAH–the income numbers used are whatever your gross income is on a 40 hour a week job, if you’re a W-2 employee.  The gross income number is different if you’re self-employed, so we’ll get to that in a different post.

The Office of Recovery Services has included a child support calculator on its website, which you can find here.  This is what the calculator on the website looks like:

 

You input the names of the parents, the number of kids, the number of overnights (if you’re doing a joint physical custody plan), income of the parents, push the button, and TaDa, you have a child support worksheet printed out that you can file with your documents, like this:

And now the details:

Your income that you input is for one months’ worth of one 40-hour per week job, UNLESS you have ALWAYS worked overtime or ALWAYS get a big bonus at the end of the year.

• If you’re a normal, 9 to 5 worker, who doesn’t get bonuses/work overtime/have pay variations, you take the number of paydays you have per year, multiply the gross amount from ONE pay period by that many paydays, divide it by 12, and that’s your monthly income.  For example:  Say I gross $1000 per paycheck.  I get paid every other week–which comes out to 26 paychecks per year.  My total yearly gross income is $26,000.00.  Divide that total amount by 12 months in a year, and my gross monthly income that I’d put in for myself on the child support calculator is $2,167 (we round to the nearest dollar, which in this case means rounding Up.)
  • OR, take your hourly rate, multiply that by 40, multiply that by 52, divide by 12, and that’s your monthly income.  For example:  $12/hr x 40 (hours per week)=$480/per week, x 52(weeks)=$24,960(per year) / 12(months)=$2,080/month.
• If you get paid once a month, you use the amount of your gross income for one month, so long as there aren’t any big variations month to month on your income.  If there are, add up the 12 gross amounts of those paychecks, divide by 12, and that’s your monthly income.
• If you get paid twice monthly without pay variations, add up all of them for the year (all 24) and divide by 12.  That factors in the shorter month of February, but spreads that shorter month’s pay out over the year.
• If you’re one of those people who get bonuses every year, you’ll need to use your gross income tax that’s reported on your yearly tax return.  You’ll divide that number by 12, and that’s your monthly gross income.

You do the same for the other party.  That’s their gross monthly income that you input into the child support calculator.

If one parent has not been regularly employed, or has not been employed full-time outside the home (as in the case of a stay-at-home parent), the court will “impute” that parent at a minimum wage income.  That means that the court assumes that unless you are permanently disabled either mentally or physically, a stay at home parent could conceivably at least work at a minimum wage job.  Whether that’s realistic or not is something you might end up arguing in court, but minimum wage is the standard for a parent who hasn’t previously worked.  The UNLESS, here, is Unless that unemployed parent had been employed prior to being married, or had received special training or education at some point prior to or during the marriage, and could theoretically find work at a rate higher than minimum wage with that skill set.

Minimum wage is roughly $1,257.00 per month gross (rounding up, per U.C.A. 78B-12-205(8), though it doesn’t make any difference in the child support amounts to round up minimum wage–we’re just going for consistency here.)

In our sample worksheet picture, above, you see that child support calculation takes into account BOTH parents’ incomes.  (Our sample puts Mom at minimum wage, and Dad is set at a roughly $26 per hr wage. )  The monthly incomes are added together, the state’s algorithm is applied to determine how much of that total would theoretically be spent to support children if the parents were together, and then each party’s percent contributed to the total is determined.  Each parent is responsible for their portion of this total amount in child support–which means that the parent that the children do NOT live with full time pays their portion (in this example, $992.00) to the other parent, who doesn’t actually pay anything out to anyone else (unless you count the landlord, the power company, school lunch, etc.)

That’s the basic child support calculation.  There are other circumstances that the calculator takes into account, however–joint physical custody, for example.  Or split custody (each parent has at least one child living full time with them), or if one of the parties already has a prior court order requiring them to pay child support or alimony to another person.  Or if a parent has other children at home that they’re supporting.  Those circumstances will reduce the amount of income a parent is required to put into the “pot”, so to speak, of what the total income amounts are that are considered for the current child support order.  For example:

If you look at 2d in the picture above, you see a number that Mom’s income is being reduced by as a result of her having 1 child in her household that she’s supporting that’s not part of the child support order we’re working through.  You can run that calculator with the parent being single, or the parent being remarried.  If the parent is remarried, then the current spouse’s income is taken into account to determine how much the parent would be “paying” in child support to take care of the kids in the parent’s current household–something of a legal fiction there, since Mom in this example isn’t actually “paying” anything.  The point is to not take away from kids living in Mom’s household (or Dad’s, as the case may be).

If you have a straight up custodial/non-custodial parent time situation, you don’t need to enter the number of overnights.  If you have parents in a joint physical custody situation, however, you do need to.  It changes the child support numbers–not always by a lot, but it does make a difference.  Joint physical custody is any parent time schedule that has one parent having at least 111 overnights–the other parent would then have 254, as we’re looking at overnights in an average year (no, we’re not counting Leap Year overnights).  The new joint physical custody parent time statute, UCA 30-3-35.1, puts the parents at 145 and 220 overnights, respectively.  Using our same income amounts and plugging the overnights into the calculator, we get this:

Go ahead and run numbers yourself.  You can play with the split custody, overnights, income amounts, other kids in the house, etc…..there are a lot of variations in people’s different circumstances, and the calculator does a pretty good job with keeping up with those circumstances and making it easier to determine what child support will be.

Child support is not like alimony–there IS a number that applies to your situation, and it’s NOT generally negotiable…at least insofar as the court is concerned.  But there are legitimate variables, so make sure that you’re running the right calculator for your situation.

 

Change…Can be Good (but is it?)

Where the lawmaking magic happens in Utah…

Utah’s legislature is looking into a bill to change some of the wording/organization of the child custody determination factors in statute.  You can view the wording of the bill here.  Take a look at the changes.  If you’ve got issues with it, contact your representative.  OR if you think it’s great, that would be something to contact your legislator about as well.

Something to note:  The language about not favoring a parent based on their gender is still in the proposed language…they just relocated it further down in the text.  Some changes proposed in the bill are just reorganizing/re-numbering/condensing language from other statutes.

Anything that is underlined is new; text lined through is what would be removed in the new version.  Text not underlined OR lined through is existing text that isn’t being considered for change.

I’d be interested to hear what you think of it.  Leave me some feedback in the comments.