Maintenance + Access.. help?!

FBaby

Also, are you sure that it is cheaper to drive? You can get a train ticket return for £36, and a hotel in Yeovil from £70 for two nights. You could do this twice a month for the cost of your car alone.


I'm not trying to undermine you problems, I do feel for you, but you do have solutions that mean you can continue to see your daughter regularly without costing you more than currently.

keep_flyin

Sell the car and hire one for the trips to your daughter. It will be new and cost you about £70 a trip plus fuel for each weekend you go to pick her up. (That is based on a small car on a national car rental firms website). You would save the insurance and maintenance costs.

jetplane

I think this situation has the potential to spiral out of control with battle lines being drawn. 5 years is a long time not to review a maintenance arrangement. Circumstances have changed for both of you.

Your ex may consider that by agreeing to receive less maintenance she has been subsidising your travel and car for the last 5 years. She may feel that her partner is not in a position to do this and she can no longer afford to do so. She may also feel that in 5 years all of the joint debt would have been repaid. However I do not understand her insistence on having a spare room for 2 visits a month, did she state her reasons?

CSA is calculated using the gross pay after pension contributions so on £2700 net your ex may be pretty close with her calculation. If you are considering an increase in your pension contributions to reduce the CSA payable then this will cause great annoyance with your ex. Is your pay increase £100 a week or a month as this will go towards the increase in maintenance. If its monthly then you need to look at saving approx another £35 week.

Could you not bring your daughter home on alternate access weekends and then stay in a hotel near her on the other weekend, she doesn't have to stay with you but you could have good times in her home town. This would reduce your costs.

Hopefully threatening to lose your relationship with your daughter over an increase in maintenance is due to frustration and not a serious consideration. If you want to see your daughter regularly you need to re evaluate your finances. If you cant reduce your weekly budget then the need for the extra room and the possibility of a move could be reconsidered. Have you compared the cost of downsizing your car or car hire? There are other ways to cut back and the boards on here are full of money saving tips and good deals.

You sound like you have a nice life, if you want your daughter to be part of it then you will need to make sacrifices in other areas its what parent do. :A

supersaver2

This doesn't seem like a very fair situation, she chooses to move hundreds of miles away and yet you have to foot the whole bill to keep contact with your daughter?!

Also shouldn't the debts from your relationship with your ex be split if they were built up during the relationship?

Cottage_Economy

I echo what others have said about trying trains and a hotel for the times you go down there.

A couple less car journey's a month might give you some wiggle room. You can get some very cheap advance fares by train. They are usually non-refundable, but if your access visits are pretty much set in stone it would be doable.

Alternatively, as someone else said try car hire. Hire the smallest most fuel efficient car possible to keep the costs down. You would be taking your ex's advice too to get a newer safer car. It just belongs to the rental company!

Don't write it off either until you've worked it all out on paper and tried it to see if it would work.

I would also go over to the transport board and see how to bring your transport costs down for moving around London in general. There are some very clever sneaky peeps over there who will probably know how you could shave the pounds off.

Mojisola

=booboo= wrote: »

I split from my wife nearly 5 years ago when my daughter was 2. As a result, she moved back to somerset where she could have the support of her family (completely understandable) which is 180 miles away.

At the time we made an arrangement that i would pay £200 pm maintenance as she was not willing to do any of the driving and this left me with £300 pm fuel costs on top of payments for a car (£190pm), insurance (£50pm), car maintainance etc...

Unfortuantely at the same time my ex has lost her job, and become pregnant within weeks of this happening.

Seeing that she is now only working part time and has lost income (and as her new parnter she lives with doesnt earn as much as she used to) she has asked for the full amount that the CSA would take (ie £460pm) without consideration for all of the other costs that i incur.

I wouldn't be surprised if he was angry and feeling resentful towards his ex - the arrangement that worked well for their daughter has been ditched because she and her new man are having another child.

On some level, he must feel that he is being made to contribute towards the new child to the detriment of his contact with his own daughter.

The problem is that anger and resentment can make it harder to see the solutions to the problem.

booboo - there are lots of ways around the problem your ex has presented you with and some of them might actually end up better than what you were doing before.

Stick with it - your daughter is lucky to have a good Dad!