Lunch & A Divorce Lawyer - Divorce Deconstructed: Setting Child Support
THIS MONTH:
This month we do a DEEP DIVE on setting child support.
**When can it start?
**When can it stop?
**How is it calculated?
Setting child support is super complex.
LEARN how you can GET child support or FIGHT child support.
Attorney Peter Olson:
Great to have you live, appreciate you watching this after the fact that's the great part about a digital resource. You make it one time and then it's forever. Sometimes that's bad but – in this case I hope it's a great resource for you.
This Third Thursday, I'm flying solo. I have some great exciting guests lined up for my next few months, a realtor, an attorney who's going to talk about reproductive rights and surrogate parenting and things like that, and actually a bankruptcy attorney who we're going to talk about some bankruptcy issues because that's always relevant to family law oftentimes particularly divorce as well.
This month I'm going back to deconstructing a divorce, different parts of a divorce did one of these on preliminary questions and things to ask yourself before you're filing for divorce, get another one on temporary things you need to think about during that year or year and a half when your divorce might be pending.
This month, I'm doing a deep dive on Setting Child Support, super deep at least as deep as I can go in about 15 minutes. This is like, you could almost do an entire semester on Child Support or at least a few – probably an entire 90-minute lecture on it. So, this is a 20 minute cliff notes 20 minutes but I think I can really give you a great overview with some real important points you need to be thinking about in terms of Setting Child Support, Fighting Child Support, because there's some very important things you need to be looking for. Look, it's important. A lot of money is at stake because it's one of these things. It's like my electricity bill or something. It's every month, it's not that I'm buying something one time. Child Support can be every month for 10-15 years and if you do a math on that in some, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So, setting it correctly is super important to you whether you're on the side of getting your and your child's financial needs met or if you're on the other side where you're fighting it. Maybe you can't fight the idea that you're gonna be paying support but you know how much a couple hundred a month ends up being thousands over 10-15 years.
So, let's do a deep dive on setting child support right now. Obviously, this is a live Facebook, so we'll be looking at comments real time, but also obviously this is on our business page here at Chicago Family Law Group.
Ready!
First, who is entitled to child support.
Well, I need to have a child, let's start there. Going beyond that, if you're a parent who has at least 50% of the parenting time. I think there are a few fringe cases out there that have been decided in Illinois over history where somebody who has actually less than 50% of the time, has gotten child support but those are super fringe and I'm not going to go into them. I think the only examples were somebody's multi-millionaire parent who is the majority parent and then the person who might be having alternate weekends who would extremely rarely get child support. The imbalance of incomes was so extreme. It's like 20 thousand dollars a year – 2 million dollars a year and even though the 2 million person was the majority time parent, they had to pay child support to the 20 thousand person because of just that huge imbalance, but that's like 0.05% of the time.
General rule for you to think about is if you're getting half of the parenting time, you might be entitled to child support. If you get half or more and in my situation, you earn less money than the other parent, that's your guide post on, “are you entitled to child support?” So, are you in that box?
That's why I oftentimes in cases I'm dealing with as I go through a divorce, really try to get the parenting time and the non-financial issues set first or at least as soon as possible because really the parenting time setup in the division of parenting time, so it is really going to guide child support. Child support can be a lot easier to set once the parenting time that alligation 100% is taken care of. So first, that is who is entitled to child support. Is that you? Do you have 50% of the time with your child or children?
Second! When does parenting time start? We're talking about divorce specifically and typically child support is gonna start. If you're that person who's entitled to child support, I'm gonna just talk about one child just in all my examples, so I'm not using more words than I need to. If you have your child more than 50% of the time and you're the lower income earner between you and the other parent, I'm going to file right at the start of a case. If my client is the one who's entitled to child support, one of the first things I'm gonna do is to start a case.
File a petition for dissolution of marriage. Probably, the second thing or even simultaneously what I'm going to do is I'm going to file a petition to set temporary child support. So, as soon as there's a case active, that's typically when child support is gonna start. So, my goal at the start of a divorce case – if I'm on the correct side of the case, I'm gonna file and have the goal of really getting temporary child support; going probably 60-90 days from the start of the case. That's kind of the realistic time frame in terms of how fast I can get the court system to move, but 60-90 days is realistic to get temporary support going.
Beyond that, it's obviously also going to be included in your final divorce judgment for what I would call permanent child support. What's going to live on once the case is finalized.
So, who is entitled to child support? We answered that question. When does it start? I just answered that.
When does it stop? If you're on that side of things, just something to think about. Temporary child support would end once the divorce is finalized and then when does child support end more globally meaning, if it's set in your divorce, when can you stop it? I think I actually have an entire YouTube video on the topic in our YouTube channel if you go to our Chicago Family Law Group YouTube Channel, but just really quick when does child support stop? It's gonna be one of three times. The most common time would be when your son or daughter graduates high school and then the other two scenarios usually depending on your child's birthday. Are they a young member of their class or are they an old member?
Sometimes, you get a situation where child support stops when your kid turns 18. Sometimes child support stops when your kid turns 19. Maybe the first or second most common question we get that people have the wrong idea on is, they think child support stops when their kid turns 18 and that's very uncommon. What is most common 80-90% of the time is child support stops when your child has graduated from high school.
We're talking about setting child support today on our Third Thursday Lunchtime with a Divorce Lawyer Divorce. I've talked about who's entitled to child support. If you're a parent with at least half time with your kid per court order, when does it start? Like I said, usually 60-90 days after the divorce case starts. When does it stop? We talked about those three times during high school graduation, turns 18-19.
So, now you should have a picture, basically are you genetically entitled to child support. Now, let's do it. Here's where that real nitty-gritty is, in terms of the deep dive, in terms of how much are you gonna receive? How much are you gonna have to pay? And really how is that calculated? I'll tell you, there's a lot of small nuanced levers that a good family law attorney is going to move to change that number and like I said that's a monthly number that's going to be every month for 10 years. So, it's super important.
Moving it $50 hours either way is thousands of dollars. Make sure you have somebody who knows what you're talking about because the State of Illinois is probably not going to move too many levers for you. You're probably going to get the minimum. If you got the State with their 50 cases handling in your case, you're probably gonna get five minutes instead of a deep dive that's gonna basically get you thousands of dollars or more.
Let's look at how child support is calculated and it really helps. You don’t understand the different levers that really move the number when we're talking about child support. I'm gonna jump on a software program here and actually do a little real time sort of calculation just so you know what the levers that matter.
Here, let's make some assumptions when we're talking about child support. The only assumption I'm going to make here is, we're going to talk about one child. Now I'm going to move a lot of levers. Here's the first critical lever. It's the number of overnights with your child because Illinois has two different formulas and the magic number, does the non-majority parent have 146 overnights or more or less? Let's just look at it. Look at how these numbers change.
So first, I'm going to say the custodial or the majority time period has 300 overnights. A typical year has 365 days, so if I'm giving the custodial (I don't even know what a custodial parent is) but if I'm giving the majority parent of 300 days, that means the non-majority only has 65. So, let's just mess around right here and look how these numbers change depending on which side of the 146 you're on, because that's critical. So, I'm going to assume each parent makes $8000. It's a pretty common income of $8000. Then I'm just gonna fill in some of this stuff just so it'll spit out a number. So, let's look at the number here.
I want you to see the difference in how overnight to really move the needle. So, here is our critical number here. We're looking at overnights, that's the first lever. I want you to be super clear. I'm going to calculate and see what we get here. Child's lever 787 a month. Now let's make a change. If I change this number to the majority type parent is only going to have 200 levers, let's think about it. Now, the non-majority parent has 165. So, obviously 165 is greater than 146 and it's just a random number, but that's what's in the law in Illinois. It's getting more than 146.
Let's look at how that changes the child support. We are currently at 787. I'm going to hit calculate and see where we go. I went down to 104. Do you see that's the biggest lever you've got. I'm talking around both sides. We have clients who are going to be receiving child support and I have clients who I'm going to be fighting child support against. That's the biggest and strongest lever you've got is the number of [_16:39_]. 100% biggest lever.
I want somebody to get a lot of time with their kids. It's also going to help them with child's support too.
Now let's look at another lever here. We're on here. I don't want to go on forever. Now I'm just going to go back to a baseline, let's just say this is maybe a typical situation where some man has alternate week overnight and I think technically that gets you to about – well what does that get you to. It gets you to about 26 x 2. It gets you to about let's just say the average; I'm just going to leave 300, just for kids. Somebody's alternate weekend parenting time. Now let's look at some other important levers here. So, we're talking about this person who's paying 787 a month in child support.
Now instead of a case like this earlier this week, this guy had a younger child we were setting child support on but he had an older child too that he was the primary parent of. So, we have this thing called multi-family adjustments, that means there is a child other than the child who we're setting support for.
So, let's look at how this scenario changes. This guy had one other child and now I'm going to hit calculate. Operation was successful. That went from 787 to 701. There are different ways to do it here. Is there a child support order with that other kid or not? That's irrelevant, but it's $86 difference. We were at 787, now we're at 701, 86 dollars. I'm not losing a lot of sleepover but $86 over the course of a year is basically $1000. You're talking about a 10-15-year obligation, now you're talking about real money.
Overnight, it is a big lever whether or not there are children other than a child or children that we're studying to support for a big lever. I'm moving this back to 0. I'm just going to get this back to our baseline of 787. What if there's a maintenance obligation in your divorce case. That's something. You have to pay spousal support to your husband or wife. That's another one. If there is maintenance being paid or payable, let's just say it's $750 a month. I need to pay my ex-wife $750 a month for child support. Let's see how that lever moves next.
[User Error] I'm going to calculate. So, it moves the needle. You see it went down to 706. I mean what functionally maintenance does is it lowers the income that is used to calculate child support.
So, what are your big levers? Again, I'm just going through some levers when we're talking about changing child support in terms of how it's calculated. Number of overnights, are there other children? Are you paying maintenance or spousal support? Are you the parent who's paying for health insurance for the child? I'm getting rid of my maintenance and we're just going to get back to the baseline 787 because I really want you to just understand what these look like.
I had a recent case where a gentleman was going to have a child support obligation, a small one, but he was going to have one. However, he was in charge of or he was financially responsible. He had a good job at Elmhurst College. He had a pretty good benefits package, so he was providing health insurance. My recollection is he was paying the non-custodial. He was paying child support. The health insurance and I think it was right around $400 a month. So, this child who he might have had a child support obligation for, was paying the health insurance. He was already paying $400 a month in basically a financial obligation for the child. It actually served to wipe out his child support obligation entirely in the case I was talking about, just because the parent’s incomes were very minimally different and in this particular case, the parenting time was exactly even.
Let's just use our example. This guy's paying 787 a month in child support now but what happens when we have health insurance. That made a big difference because again he's already contributing $400 a month. So, what it really does is it puts the other parent on the hook for $200 of the health insurance and he's on hook for $200. So, it functionally basically reduced his child support by $200 levers a month and again what is that? Probably $40,000 over the course of a child's life if it's a young kid. So, that's a big lever of the child support lever. If somebody is paying for private health insurance, that's expensive.
As a small business person, I think after paying our staff, health insurance is our largest expense. I know how much that cost.
Let me talk about one final lever. I'd like to go too much in 20 minutes or so. Here's the lever here. Let's wipe this out just to get clear, I'm just going to go back to none. Get it back from 787. We’ve talked about a bunch of little levers here. Health insurance can make a big difference. Who's paying health insurance? If somebody's paying spousal support that makes a big difference. Are there other children, the multi-family adjustments that make a big difference?
What are your two biggest levers? Number one is the number of overnights. We saw that change. I think it was from 787 a month to $104 a month. A huge difference.
Let me talk about one other big one and that is this. It's basically gross to net monthly income. If you're a small business person. I have a few clients and this is me. I'm not paying child support to anybody right now. I'm actually married to my spouse and no other non-marital children up there but I'm a small business person.
The examples I'm gonna just that come to the top of my mind are truck drivers because I have a couple of cases right now where we have a client and/or the other side on a case who's a truck driver where this guy is having thirty, 40-50 thousand dollars going into his account a month but ordinary in reasonable business expenses, payroll, health insurance, paying your drivers and gas. Those are things that you get to deduct before we get to the net income because child support is foundationally set not on the gross income but on net income.
So that's why when you have a person who owns a small business, getting the credit for. Again, depends what side of the case I'm on – in terms of my approach but that gross income for the small business person versus the net income and what are appropriate and necessary business expenses is a huge thing because gross income of a lot of these truck drivers, it looks like their gross income and in fact their gross is pretty high, thirty to forty thousand a month. But there are a lot of expenses going out of that and sometimes I've seen maybe their net income is more like $5000 a month.
I'm just messing around with some numbers there. So, I'm just gonna start to land the plane wrap up here on Setting Child Support A Critical Issue Going Through A Divorce and obviously after that divorce judgment is entered.
Who's entitled to child support? When does it start? When does it stop? How does it get calculated? Note some of those important ways to move the needle a lot in terms of how it's calculated.
Just the final one in terms of how is child support calculated? Once in a great while you have a person whose income was hardly established or it's hard to ascertain. I have a current case where the opposing partying case is living from the outside a high-income lifestyle. Just the cars in the home and this kind of thing that would make you think he's earning a lot of money but he hides his income pretty well. It may not be totally legal income; let's put it that way. In those situations, you can do what's called a needs-based child support order where my client was able to show these are her financial needs for her son and we set child support based on what the child needs, food, clothing, housing etc. instead of this traditional income-based picture. So, keep that in mind when you have somebody who's a little shady with their money.
So, I'm going to leave it there. I went a little longer than I'd like to go but they are no joke. Setting child support is super important. It's super complex and you want to do it right because a lot of money is at stake.
I'm Attorney Peter Olson, Chicago Family Law Group. Drop us some questions, comments or if you need some one-on-one advice/consultation, we're at familylawchicago.com for your consultation.
I look forward to serving you, see you next month.
