Changing Child Support By Agreement: Fill & Download for Free

Dude, if you’re not happy with how your child support is being spent, then step up and buy everything your child needs instead of leaving it all to Mum and thinking for a second that she can do all that for $740 a month!Keep the receipts for the $740 per month as proof that you’ve been meeting the requirements of your custody agreement. Get a lawyer and petition for custody.The truth is, if you have custody and you’re truly tending to all the needs of your child, that $740 a month is going to seem like chump change. You have no idea what it costs to raise a happy and healthy child. Not a clue.I’m divorced from my daughters’ mother. We co-parent. We made an amicable agreement, made with one another, without courts or mediators. On paper, I pay $725 a month. This is a small fraction of what I really spend on them. Clothes, accessories, school supplies, food, medication, their home, everything.I probably spend 95% of my pay cheque and my life seeing that my kids have a happy home and everything they need - and that includes ensuring they have a happy mother. She works just as hard. If that means she treats herself to nice things occasionally so she feels good about life and about herself, so be it. I don’t begrudge her that.If Mum is happy, the kids are happy.If my kids are happy, I’m happy.Is it hard? Fuck yes! It’s hard knowing that I work 55 hours a week and having to sacrifice everything for everyone but myself; barely having time to date, let alone find a girlfriend.But that was the deal I made when I chose to have children. And divorced or not that was my word. It was the word I gave my children, not their mother.

The fact an agreement is notarized doesn’t mean anything. All a notary does is provide evidence that the person you claim signed something actually signed it. If there was a dispute about whether one party signed the agreement, then sure, the fact it was notarized would be relevant.Child support agreements may or may not be valid. It really depends on what the agreement contains. Child support is meant to provide for the child. If an agreement would create a situation such that the custodial parent needs to go on welfare, then the agreement wouldn’t be allowed to stay in place. The government would insist on the other parent paying their share. Judges can change child support agreements if they do not believe they are appropriate. Appropriate generally means in the best interest of the child.

After eleven years (give or take) of marriage, my wife announced that she wanted to adopt.That’s the short version.I agreed.See? Super-secret ending and you didn’t have to wade through ten minutes of credits! Take that, Marvel…When we first got married, neither one of us wanted kids. She changed her mind. We went through the state, and took all the adoption classes… You know what? Watch Instant Family, only replace the happy ending with the mom getting overwhelmed with being a parent just two years into it and running off with a man old enough to be her father that looks like, if I’m being generous, Santa Claus in recovery from a meth habit.But I’m skipping ahead.We adopted a brother and sister, seven and eight years old at the time. They looked enough like me to actually be my biological kids. This was just a coincidence, of course, as I never cheated on my wife and I stopped masturbating in public swimming pools years before the kids were born.I was working in the next city over and driving a minimum of an hour each way every day. I left before anyone else in the house woke up in the morning and didn’t get home until a couple of hours before we put the kids to bed. My ex was an assistant dean (ha!) at the local university, supposedly working on her doctorate.After a year and a half of being a parent, she got on a “health kick” and joined CrossFit. The blog she started to document our new, expanded family became dominated by her fitness goals. A couple of months before she closed the blog, she complained about feeling “overwhelmed” and talked about how she just wanted to quit something.Most rational people would give up the insanely expensive CrossFit habit and just take up jogging…When she walked out, she proposed this crazy idea that her lawyer cooked up “so neither of us would have to pay child support” where we would each have the kids on alternating weeks. Think about that for a second. By the time we got them, our kids had spent half their lives with the instability of the foster care system. But to save a buck, she was willing to subject them to even more instability in perpetuity!I told her the kids needed more stability than that. She told me I couldn’t force her to take the kids. I’ll admit that her statement confused me a little. I couldn’t imagine why she would think that I thought that her having custody would provide more stability for the kids. So I explained that I was saying that the kids should live in our house with me.Oddly enough, I didn’t get any pushback on that idea…I don’t know how long she had been planning this, but she had privately accused me of rape so she would have an excuse to utilize the domestic violence law clinic at her university to get a cheap lawyer. She refused to pay child support, insisting that the stipend that the children received from the state to help with “special needs” adoptions should count as her portion of the expenses. I had already quit my job by this point to work from home as a contract employee, so I couldn’t afford a lawyer of my own. The stress of the whole situation meant that I wasn’t thinking clearly. If I had been, I would have realized that we had been receiving the stipend the whole time with both our salaries, so it shouldn’t have been factored into the support calculations at all, and certainly shouldn’t have been credited to her.I eventually convinced her to (reluctantly) agree to pay for up to $300 in extracurricular expenses for the kids, which she did for a while, but she never really helped get the kids to and from these activities and it eventually became impossible to keep them involved. Since the divorce agreement earmarked the funds for extracurricular activities, she figured she just didn’t have to pay anymore!This is more or less where Sketchy Claus enters the story.She moved several hundred miles away to shack up with a creepy old man who liked to keep spare rubber bands in his goatee. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the style of the day when he was her age, but I don’t think so because I remember the 90s… She hadn’t really spoken to the kids in a few months by the time she left, and she suggested I petition the judge to have her parental rights removed because she was leaving town for good. After she shacked up with Grandpa Jones, though, she changed her story.Suddenly, she wanted to bring the kids to show off her new home!She wanted to take the same kids she had barely spoken to in months, the kids she abandoned less than two years after signing the adoption papers, across state lines to a place where they didn’t know anybody but her!The day after the last night she spent alone with the kids, she tried to jump off a bridge. This was not a woman I trusted to take my kids on an interstate romp.She took me to court for permission to take the kids out of state. I countersued for support. She won the right to take the kids out of state, but only after showing up for state-ordered visitation for ten consecutive months in-state. I won a child support award……of $50 per month.That’s all. $50 for two kids. $25 per child, per month.The judge took pity on her because she had to pay all transportation costs (since she was the one that moved — by this time to a different state, hundreds of miles in another direction) and because she volunteered to pay $300 towards extracurricular expenses.She then spent the next couple of years debating what “extracurricular expenses” really meant.The $50, though, came directly out of her paycheck as an income withholding order. She wasn’t making “assistant dean” money anymore, though. She claimed she could only find work as an adjunct teacher.Adjunct teachers, for those not familiar with academia, are like the collegiate equivalent of the guy in the drive thru that says, “Would you like fries with that?” Only the guy in the drive thru probably makes more money…After she refused to pay for a valid extracurricular expense, I took her back to court to get things straightened out once and for all. That’s when I found out that she changed jobs at some point and missed several months worth of the $50 payments — while I was unemployed.That’s right. Her total contribution to the care and maintenance of our children was so irrelevant that I didn’t even notice it was missing when I had no other source of income.The story has a happy ending, though. The judge ruled that, shockingly, she was expected to pay child support after all, and eliminated the silly “extracurricular” wording that gave her a loophole. What’s more, she has to pay support backdated to the latest court filing date. She gets no credit for travel. She had to pay me back for all the valid expenses that I notified her about that she simply refused to pay before. And she has to pay for her own attorneys fees!And all the money owed to the children is now subject to an income withholding order.Don’t feel too bad for her, though. Now that she no longer has to keep herself underemployed, she’s running for office!