Understanding Child Support

If you have children together, your Marital Settlement Agreement must contain a provision regarding child support.:

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lf you agree that neither parent will be paying child support then your agreement will set that forth.

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The standard issues we will address in mediation will be:

• support amount (per each child)
• commencing date
• termination events/time
• any amounts that will be paid by either party in addition or separate from the monthly support (such as child care expenses, certain educational expenses, uncovered health care expenses. ..)
• providing health insurance for the children
• dependency exemptions for income taxes

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The two of you can agree to any amount of child support which you believe will meet the needs of your children during the period of time that they are with each of you; however, you must be aware that if you were to go to court and have a judge decide that appropriate mount of support the judge would have to use a computer generated formula for determining the correct amount of support (this is called "guideline support'').

When you enter into your agreement regarding child support, if it is different from the"guideline" amount, you must set forth that you have been made aware of the "guideline" and have decided to use the agreed upon amount despite the "guideline."

Therefore, we will be working together to produce a set of "guideline" calculations. You may wish to use the amount which is generated as the amount of support in your agreement, but you do not have to do so.

The two of you will decide the appropriate numbers to be inputted into the formula, and your mediator will then generate the calculations. If you would like, your mediator will draft several sets of calculations to give you an idea of possible "guideline" ranges or how an idea of how guideline child support would vary in a different scenario. After you have been made aware of the guideline amount(s), you will decide what will work best for the two of you and your children.

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