Child Support Has Six Factors That Go into It
Video Transcribed: Hello, my name is Jason Lile, and I am a Tulsa Dads Rights Lawyer. And I wanted to cover a topic that a lot of men ask me when I represent them in family law cases, and that’s child support.
Oftentimes they ask in terms of wanting to know how it will be paid, who’s going to pay it, and what they’re going to pay. Or sometimes they come in and feel like their child support should be lower.
Or I often get told or asked whether they have to pay child support because they’re not getting visitation. So I want to go over some of those things. The first thing is, how do you decide what’s being paid in child support?
Well, the state of Oklahoma puts out a spreadsheet, and inside that spreadsheet are a bunch of what we call macros, I believe. And there are formulas inside that spreadsheet, and you put in your income, the other parent’s income, the number of overnights that you have, the amount of health insurance premium one or both parents are paying, the number of ongoing daycare costs that you have.
And when you’ve put all this information in, it spits out a number on the bottom. You do have to put in that spreadsheet who’s the obligor as to who’s going to pay it. So now that I’ve listed those factors for you, how might you lower your child support or make sure that it is accurately reflected?
Well, every year, you should know that you have a right to ask the other partner, your ex for their tax information, to look and see if their income has changed and that would affect your child support calculator.
Something else you should know is that the most important factor in that calculator, as in the thing that will change child support the most is overnights. There’s a magic number in Oklahoma, it’s 121. If you, on paper, have 121 overnights, you get something called a shared time credit, a shared parenting time credit, which means your child support goes down fairly as substantially as it will be based on anything else. So you need to make sure that you have accurately reflected the amount of number of overnights you’re actually doing.
Oftentimes my male clients will come to me and say, “Well, I only had 90 on paper. But in reality, I’m doing 150 because my ex doesn’t take the children on her nights,” et cetera. And the last thing is if your income goes up or it goes down, the latter being the most common issue, then that might need to be reflected on your child support, if there’s a change in who’s paying for the insurance or you have new expenses, things like that.
So child support has five or six factors that go into it. And it may be that you’re eligible for a change in the child support to go down. And obviously, that will be helpful to your financial situation. So for help with this or if you have any other questions about what it’s like to be in a custody case, please feel free to contact the Oklahoma father’s rights attorney or the Tulsa Child Support Attorney For Guys at Dads.Law.
