Putting the Children First

{3 minutes to read} In my last post I outlined how the Child Support Standards Act (CSSA) works in New York. I recently worked with a couple who created an agreement that worked much better than the result they would have obtained under the CSSA, not only for each of them but for their children!

This couple had decided to sell their house, and each of them was going to live in an apartment since neither could afford to purchase another house right away. They also decided to have a “shared” parenting arrangement where the children would spend about the same amount of time with each parent.

Since dad’s income was $90,000 per year while mom’s was $60,000, a strict application of the CSSA would have required dad to pay mom $22,500 per year in child support.

Because child support is paid with “after-tax” dollars (as I explained in the prior post), this would leave dad with about $42,500 per year to live on while mom would have about $67,500. With a shared parenting plan, each of them expected to spend about the same as the other on the children. As a result, neither of them felt that following a law that gave mom $25,000 more per year than dad was fair.

So what did they do? They ignored the CSSA and created an agreement where dad paid mom child support in an amount that allowed each of them to have about the same amount of net income.  In this way, the children would have a similar lifestyle regardless of which parent was caring for them.

Since it would have been the role of mom’s lawyer to get as much as he/she could for mom, I doubt that such a result would have occurred if the matter were being litigated in court. And while her lawyer might have felt like mom “won,” the real losers would have been the children.