The Mystery of Child Support in Temporary Orders

One of the most arcane-seeming issues in family law is the calculation of child support. It is easy to look at the worksheets and numerical tables and be tempted to throw your hands up. In reality, the determination is actually quite straightforward in most cases, as long as you have accurate data. It effectively works the same for temporary orders and final orders. I’ll try and limit the amount of detail in this discussion, since it is supposed to be a primer for temporary orders and how they might work for your case in Snohomish County.

Overview: The basic idea is pretty simple. Both parents are going to be out of pocket when they have the child in their custody. Things like food, clothes, books, utilities… you name it. The idea is that the parent who has the kid less (and is thus less out of pocket for parenting expenses) should pay the party who has the kid more in order to financially “balance the scales,” so to speak.

Child Support vs. Alimony: People sometimes mix these two things up. Child support is money paid from one parent to another to help with a child. Alimony (or as we call it these days, “maintenance”) is additional payments to a separated spouse over and above child support. It is awarded in some cases where there is a drastic income disparity, and fairness dictates that the affluent spouse pitch in some more. (Worry not, dear reader, alimony is the next topic to be covered in this temporary orders series. I only mention it here so you know there is a difference.)

What can they use it for? One of the biggest questions clients have is what the other parent is allowed to use child support for? Often, people new to the process will sorely resent having to fork over such a hefty sum of money to another parent who they may not particularly like. In many cases, there is a very real fear that the parent receiving the support will spend the money on selfish things, and not the needs of the child.

There is no laundry list of exactly what the other parent can spend the money for. The expectation is that some will go directly to the children benefits (buying them clothes or paying for school books) and that some things will be indirect benefits (such as helping with rent or paying utilities for the household, which benefit the whole household).

The hard truth is that this there’s no strict “pay for this but not that” set of rules. In the short term, it is something you will have to live with (although you should make note of any purchases which do not seem appropriate).

Long term, you should have your lawyer subpoena the other side’s bank records for after the child support starts. Any claims of insufficient amounts of money should rapidly dissolve if the bank records for the party receiving the support show extravagant selfish purchases, like designer clothes or high-end electronics totally unrelated to parenting. If the case gets to trial, these types of expenditures can be a really strong illustrator of a parent’s real priorities.

It is hard to claim that you are giving every penny to your children when you buy a Gucci bag or a sports car. This probably should go without saying, but judges really do not take kindly to tons of selfish spending in custody cases.

Calculation: The basic calculation process is not too hard to understand. You add the net monthly income (your actual take-home pay) for both parents, and compare this to a chart in the statutes. That chart gives you a raw child support amount (“basic child support obligation”).; You take that number and multiply it by a percentage. The percentage is that parent’s share of the total income.

This makes more sense with an example.

Say you had a situation where Mom’s take-home was $2,600 monthly, and Dad’s was $10,900. You’d add those two figures together to get the basic child support obligation from the table in the statute. In this case, that would be $2,380 (assuming 2 kids). Of the total income, Mom’s earnings represent 19.2% of the total, and Dad’s earnings represent 80.8%.

To calculate the support owed, you would figure out who had primary custody of the kids. That person gets the child support (called the “obligee”). The person with the kids less time pays the child support (called the “obligor”). You’d take that basic support obligation ($2,380) and multiply it by Dad’s share of the total income (80.8%) to get this obligation, which would amount to $1,923.04 per month.

There are some additional little tweaks. If the support paying parent also kicks in for things like health insurance or daycare, they might get some credit for that, but ultimately, this is pretty mechanical and is easy to figure out when you have pay stubs and tax returns from the parties.

You just plug in the numbers and calculate the amount due as support, and the obligor pays that amount every month. There’s actually some pretty great software that will do it for you.

Where it gets complicated is when you do not have two parents with steady paying jobs and good earning histories.

Varying Income: One thing that can make the calculation trickier is when one of the parties has fluctuating income. For example, let’s say Dad owned a business. Some months were great, and he brought home more than $20,000. Other months, he didn’t get a paycheck at all. In those cases, we would look at his historical yearly earnings to figure out, on average, what Dad earned and we would use that for a support calculation.

This can be one of the areas where people fight a lot, because people try to tamper with numbers to get one they like better. For example, let’s say our hypothetical business-owning dad claims that his business is going to have a terrible year, so we shouldn’t use his average earnings from the past few years because he will not make that. When things like that come up, that is when we have to get down in the weeds to figure out how likely it is (or isn’t), looking at the store’s history and any proof to back up his claim that he is going to have a bad year.

This type of thing can be a super-involved issue in trials, but for temporary orders, it is safe to assume the courts will rely on historical earning data unless they have a really good reason not to.

Sometimes, one parent does not work at all, like a stay-at-home dad. If this is the case, instead of his actual income, the court will use what is called “imputed income.” That is, they impute dad a certain amount of earning potential in order to make the child support math work. There is a chart in the statutes for imputing income, but the court an also use historical earning data to impute income.

Unemployment: Even unemployed parents have a legal obligation to pay child support if they are the obligor parent. The rationale is pretty straightforward – the other parent is still going out of pocket to take care of the kids, whether you are working or not. The understanding is that you will be looking for work, and will make up any back support owed over time when you start working.

This again can be a battleground in custody cases. Some parents will deliberately become unemployed in the hopes of “dodging” child support obligations. Fortunately, this does not work. Even if you are not working, the court will impute, just like they would for a non-working parent. (I am actually making some giant generalizations about imputing income, but for our purposes, this will give you a basic idea.)

Deviations: The mathematical formula for child support does not always work. For example, one of the parents might have a serious medical disability and cannot work at all. In these types of cases, the Court is allowed to deviate from statutory support amounts to something that the obligor parent can afford. This is called a “downward deviation.” They typically are involved where the obligor parent is somehow rendered unable to work through no fault of his own. (There are also "upward deviations" where one party can afford to pay more than the support amount, but those are pretty rare.)

There are a lot of potential deviation reasons – more than I can cover in an introduction article like this. One of the most common ones is worth mentioning, though.

Residential Credits: If a parenting spends a lot of time with a child, they start to get something called a “residential credit.” The basic rationale for child support is that the parent who spends less time with the child should pitch in for child expenses that will come out of the primary care provider’s pocket. That starts to unravel a bit the support-paying parent has something like 40 or 50% custody. They are presumably out of pocket almost as much as the other parent in terms of day to day child-rearing expenses. The statute accounts for that, and allows for a mathematical formula that reduces their child support to some extent based on how many overnights they have with the children.

Conclusion: Child support can be a very tricky topic. The concept is fairly simple, but the execution is anything but. The reality of child support is that it is extraordinarily hard to grasp all the nuances as a lay person. It is possible, but it requires a lot of work and self-education. This topic is a deep one, and one of the more technical ones in family law.

As you navigate this issue, make sure your lawyer sits down with you and explains child support issues until you really understand it. As technical as it may seem, put in the work to really get it. This is a common “flash point” in co-parenting, and an area where there is the potential for a lot of difficulty. Knowing how it works, what is allowed, and how it is adjusted over time will reduce conflict and make you a more effective parent (no matter which side of the support equation you fall on).

As always, good luck. Hopefully this has at least gotten you enough of the basics to have a good discussion with your lawyer about this subject.