Joint custody. do we need to pay support?

fedupwithmoneygrabbers

Please help if you can.
My husband is currently paying his ex wife £150 a month in a private arrangement. we have his daughter at least 50% of the time often more when she is away on business. It has been this way for the last 8 years.
We recently have been finding it a struggle to pay her and she is on a much bigger salary than my husband. He has asked her if there could be no monthly payment to her but to split any big bills regarding their daughter between them so it is more fair. She is not happy with the suggestion and has threatened my husband that she will involve the CSA if necessary. We have a son of our own to take into consideration and I am not working as I am studying at the moment. Does anyone know where we stand? We're worried that if she does involve the CSA that we will be paying more than we already do and we just can't do it.
Any advice would be most appreciated. Thanks.

kevin137

Take your husbands net income, -15% for your child, then 15% of the remaining is what the assessment would be.

From that you have to calculate how many night (provable) you have the child, so if 50% it will either be 3 or 4 it can't be 50% stupid system but that is how it is. So if you worked on 3 then take 3/7ths from the assessment..

Anymore info just ask...

Caz3121

CSA don't cope well with 50/50 care

You need to calculate the number of nights per week that the daughter stays. If for example it averages out at 3 nights a week the CSA calculation would be

Net salary less 15% (for your son)
15% of the remainder
the discount of 3/7th for the 3 nights per week

eg net salary £1500 per month = maintenance of £109 per month

If it turns out that the child is with you an average of 4 nights a week then in theory you are the main carers and could claim the child benefit and maintenance from the mother! - although you may find she disputes that and daughter ends up staying less

fedupwithmoneygrabbers

Thank you for your replies. That is another thing that concerns us is that she may become difficult and we see his daughter less. As it is, it is a great agreement, his daughter stays with us 3 days a week (more if she is away) but we feed her at least 4 days a week and sure that is what the payments are about? actual costs? We just want it to be fair. We both generally have a good relationship with her and hope we can sort this out without involving the CSA.

missbunbury

No it's about overnight stays only so if three then 3/7 reduction. Contrary to what Kevin says above, they can actually deal with 50/50, it's done as 3/7 plus a further reduction, or "abatement" of £7 a week which I am led to believe is intended to reflect half of the child benefit (but at old ChiB rates).

kevin137

missbunbury wrote: »

No it's about overnight stays only so if three then 3/7 reduction. Contrary to what Kevin says above, they can actually deal with 50/50, it's done as 3/7 plus a further reduction, or "abatement" of £7 a week which I am led to believe is intended to reflect half of the child benefit (but at old ChiB rates).

Which just shows they do NOT deal with 50/50 care at all, as it would be nothing to pay if it was...

missbunbury

Kevin, with all due respect I have noticed on several threads that the information you give is often coloured by what I can only assume are your bad experiences of the CSA. I'm not having a go because I see that you do try to help people and a lot of what you say is right, but you make some mistakes and also sometimes present opinion as fact, as here. Your initial answer, that it is either 3/7 or 4/7 reduction, was incorrect and I gave the correct info. I now see that when you said they don't deal with 50/50 what you meant was that you do not like the way they deal with 50/50 - this is a different subject and probably better suited to the discussion forum.

I don't want to start a fight because I do understand that you are trying to be helpful and do in fact often offer very useful advice, just a bit off on this occasion!

kevin137

I don't want a fight either, but shared care is and always will be shared. And that means everything, including cost. Why should shared care mean that one parent pays the other. If it is truly shared that cannot be the case surely.

And yes you are right, i had extremely bad experiences with the CSA, and a lot of them, but i always paid regardless of what i thought wa right until they broke the law and used an expired DEO to extract money unlawfully from my wages, then it was a different matter, and i fought back in a way they where not expecting or used to. And the end result was i did not pay, they then used underhand and devious tactics to claim a debt that was not owed and was shown as not owed by the court in applying for an LO using an address i did not live at as they could not use the address i did live at as it was not in the UK. Do i have the right to be angry at them yes i do, and this is one of the things that really gets my goat.

You may well be correct in how the legislation works, but that does NOT make it correct.

In answer to the OP's original post, start documenting the amount of time you have, keep a diary take lots of pics etc to prove the time you have and do definitely consider making an application using this info to the court for custody, if it is decided that the custody remains shared, then use the proof to go after the CSA to ascertain that you are the primary carer by way of the amount of nights that is spent at your house. Shared care is decided in these cases by the SOS meaning the CSA, and you have a right to appeal and go to tribunal and if that fails then ICE.

Do not give up fighting though, or you will end up paying. You can't have it both ways. And it is wrong that you should be forced to pay up because of an outdated bureaucracy is not capable of making a decision that most normal people would be able to see straight away..!

clearingout

shared is rarely shared though, is it? that's the issue. How on earth do you monitor or measure if care is genuinely being shared from a financial point of view? It may well be the case that both houses have to have bedrooms and toys and clothes and have the same heating bills and food costs, but if one house is paying 100% of the child care costs, school lunches, school uniform, shoes, haircuts, taking time off work to deal with illness etc. then 50/50 is starting to be skewed off to the side in some way, isn't it?

Sorry OP, that's not to suggest your case isn't 'genuine', but rather to point out that even with 50/50 of overnights, there are situations where the costs of bringing up the children concerned are not fairly shared.