Child Support

In New York State, the non-custodial parent pays child support to the custodial parent. Now that issue gets a little sticky when we have parents who are sharing custody equally. Under New York case law, the non-custodial parent is the parent who earns more money however that does not mean that in every case of shared custody that we have a payment of child support going from one parent to the other.

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In shared custody cases, which are often common in uncontested divorce cases, we often have a shared expenses arrangement where the parents share all of the expenses that the children incur. In New York State under the child support standard act, child support is formulaic. It is based on the number of children in the household and the total family income; however the child support standards act is ten pages of fine print. There are many nuances and grey areas. When we address your case, we explore all of those issues with you to determine what child support should be.

Now the support I just talked about is basic child support. There are other components to child support as well. There are mandatory add-ons to the basic child support in New York. The mandatory add-ons are for health insurance, the cost of the premiums for the children, unreimbursed medical and dental expenses and yes, that includes orthodontic in most cases and day-care expenses for the children. Day-care expenses are those expenses necessary for a parent to work or to go to school. There are non-mandatory add-ons and those are add-ons that are not required under the statute that parents often agree upon. They may include extracurricular expenses, they may include things such as car insurance and then we also do address when we can, the cost of college for your children.

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