Sharing your story

Everyone is welcome to share their story with us. We each learn from each other, which is the beauty of this journey.

Hi,
i wanted to talk about my journey with child suport. But Australia is different so not sure this is going to help anyone. In Australia we don't have spousal support, but we do have child support. I had to pay my ex husband child support due to the fact on paper I earned more. (even though I had care of the kids 50%). What my ex did was leave his job, get his own business going and ran it as a loss and on paper his taxable income started off as $0 the the following years he kept it pretty low on paper. This meant my taxable income on paper was much higher, even though in reality he was earning a very good income. He has a defacto but her income was not taken into consideration. I had to fight several reviews to get his income up, by getting child support to look into his weekly expenses and pitting that against what he would have to earn as a minimum to be able to pay his living expenses. Took awhile to get my child support down because the first twit that reviewed my case could not add up and did not notice that the income she worked my ex to be earning, didn't cover his living expenses. Eventually in the divorce settlement I was able to negotiate no child support what so ever because he was so darn keen to buy me out of the marital home so we were able to legally get into contract a binding child support agreement where neither can seek child support from the other. There are ways to reduce one's child support liability in Australia but one has to be careful. One can reduce their income by salary sacrifice as long as the other spouse does not object. One can adopt step children, thus reducing their liability to their former spouse. One can reduce their income by a business, but again it depends on how much the other spouse objects. Also you can have taken into consideration other liabilities you might have that if you were to pay too much support, would disadvantage you. A friend's husband was able to not pay her money by putting in an estimate of his income which child support can accept until the next tax period. If one goes over seas they don't have to pay child support but Australia has just brought in that if one has a debt, they may be denied a passport until the debt is cleared. They can also garnish one's wages which they did in my case, and I was only behind by a few hundred dollars, and then one year they took took out the remaining debt of $250 from my tax return. I know others who have put their business in a new spouses name, and also have put their new spouse on the books if they have a business, as they can then reduce their income by apparently paying the other spouse a wage. I didn't mind paying child support if my kids needed it, but what I objected to was the fact my ex was not poor and was simply hiding his income and dodging the tax office. My ex due to him being on a low income (on paper) was able to pick up more social security payments so I asked child support to take into consideration that income because otherwise they would have overlooked it. I think the best ways that I can see that have worked out for people is if the parties can come to a private agreement and get it put in writing. I know a few people that can get any expenses on top of what they pay for the children taken into consideration and if a non custodial spouse has to travel to see their kids then they can have that expense taken out of the money they pay in support. The review of the Australia Family Law Act didn't help me much but it does help those who don't have full custody. Now days that a non custodial parent has the children are taken into consideration. Also the Australia Family Law system is looking at children spending more time with the non custodial parent, so it is easier for the non custodial parent to seek more custody of the child(children) and thus child support to the ex is reduced.

Hi Aquarius, thank you for sharing your story also.

I have had to pay child support, i did this for about a year. My ex and i both had a child each living with us and the higher income earner had to pay the lower income earn. The difference in our income was only slight but it was deemed i had to pay, so i went from recieving over $400.00 a month to now paying $50.00 a month, which meant i was out of pocket $450.00 a month and yet circumstances wise nothing had changed.

Initially they did not send out the request for me to make payments or notification for it so i no idea, i ended up running up a bill, which once they realised i was payng they started contacting me for money. Finally it was sorted.

Now i recieve child support and even that is not straight forward with me having to provide regular updates of my income etc.

These systems i have found are so open to human understanding which is not always the correct way. I have noticed though that here in Australia anytime that the paying person is not working the payments stop as soon as the agency is notified of the change of circumstances, in other countries that does not seem to be the case.

Either way this so called system is not fair or even and at the end of the day it is about the children not the other adult.

The world changes when others wake up, it also starts from within yourself.
So much potential.