Certain mandatory shared children’s expenses are defined in the CA Income and Expense declaration which include: child care for job training and/or work, medical care, special educational needs, and travel related to visitation. But what about other expenses such as extracurricular sports, private school, orthodontia, tutors, birthday parties, even haircuts?
Remember that the right amount of child support, is not always what a computer program comes up with. The better description might be the amount that will meet the reasonable needs of your children without causing significant detriment to the person paying or receiving it.
I am often asked questions like “Do I have to go back to work after our divorce when we agreed I would I care for our children?”
We discussed using a Collaborative Divorce process where Julie is separately represented by a Collaboratively-trained attorney with prior experience on various spousal support outcomes. We could involve mutually agreed upon mental health coaches and/or neutral financial professionals to look at emotional concerns and property division settlement options. This would save them both the cost of hiring different experts to testify in court at $500 or more an hour, while also paying their litigation attorneys’ fees to cross-examine each expert, and waiting 90 days for the judge to make a ruling. And the ruling could be quite unfavorable.
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