Hello, I am Lee Rosen of the Rosen Law Firm in Charlotte, North Carolina. Let's talk about child support. Recently I had the opportunity to help a mom that needed child support. Her name is Helen and she has three children. The kids are ages 7, 9, and 11; two girls and a boy. Her husband has a good job and a good income. The husband is, however, self-employed, he works for himself, and Helen was concerned that her husband would hide income and would try to pay less in support than he might actually owe. She had had some conversations with some relatives, who I think had really gotten her worried about this.
At our first meeting, Helen and I did some calculations and determined how much child support we thought Helen was owed according to the North Carolina Child Support Guidelines. We used the calculator at our website at rosen.com. You can run your numbers there as well.
Now, the numbers that Helen and I ran were guesstimates. We didn't have documentation. We didn't know exactly how much Helen's husband was earning. So we made some guesses about that and cranked out some numbers.
After the meeting, I went ahead and I contacted Helen's husband to get the documents that we needed. I asked for his Income Tax Returns and for some other records from his business. Helen also went home and went to work. She photocopied some records. She went through the file cabinets and copied all of the things that she could find that related to income. She copied all of the records on a printer that she had purchased, and I want you to know about this.
She bought a copier/printer from amazon.com for $65. It cost a lot less and it's a lot easier than you might imagine to have a copier at home and to be able to copy your own records. In these situations it's definitely worth the investment to go out and get a copier for yourself.
Now, two weeks went by and we finally heard from Helen's husband. He had a lawyer and that lawyer gave us the records that we asked for. What we did is that we compared the records we already had to what we had received from Helen's husband, and we felt pretty confident that everything was in order and that everything was accurate, and that there really wasn't any income being hidden.
Helen and I also talked a lot about the lifestyle that her family had been leading. How much they had been spending on vacations and on housing and different things, and we concluded that what she had been spending was pretty consistent with what we thought the income for the family was based on the documentation.
Now, we ran more calculations on the child support calculator and then we started negotiating. About a week later, Helen got her first child support check. Her husband made that payment and he has made a payment on the first of every month since then. Things worked out pretty well.
Now, you have probably heard lots of horror stories about child support. Fortunately, the horror stories are the exception and not the norm. Most child support cases go just like Helen's. They go pretty smoothly. Most are resolved without ever going to court, and it's important for you to know that because it makes lots of sense for you to put your energy into reaching agreement and not to allow well meaning relatives to get you agitated and to get you focused on courtrooms rather than on settlements. You are very likely to work this all out by agreement.
Now, be careful. Don't use child support to service something more than as support for children. It shouldn't become a symbol of the conflict in the relationship. Don't withhold it. Don't demand more of it. Don't make late payments or anything else that you might think of doing as a means of perpetuating a dispute with your former spouse. When those things happen, when people use child support as a weapon, the children suffer. They either don't get the financial help they need or they suffer from the emotional turmoil of the conflict.
In Charlotte, we have a very good government provided service for establishing and collecting child support. Child support can also be handled by your divorce attorney. To find out more about the system provided by the State, visit www.ncchildsupport.com. To find out more about private attorneys, visit our site at rosen.com. Obviously, we can't reach agreement in every child support case, and when we do reach an impasse, a negotiation, it's a good thing that we have judges in courts to make sure that children are taken care of. But most cases, and very likely your case, can be resolved without going to court. I am Lee Rosen for the Rosen Law Firm.
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