Aibu to start claiming maintenance through CMS

[NosyNeighbour22]

I separated form my dcs dad 2 years ago, he had always been difficult to deal with financially We have 3 dcs, he has them eow (his choice) and he is supposed to pay £80 a week maintenance which is the bare minimum calculated from the gov calculator. He is self employed and although I have never been entirely sure of his income the amount of earnings he declares now is considerably less than what he told me he was earning while we were together. I’m not sure if he was lying then or if he’s lying/ fixing his books now to avoid paying more maintenance.

Anyway he has become less and less regular at actually giving me the money, he is supposed to pay it weekly and it’s now been 5 weeks since he last gave me anything, he says he has no money although he takes the kids out and buys them toys every time he has them. When he does give me money because it’s so sporadic he will try to say is been less time than I think since he gave me money. I ask him to pay it by bank transfer but he will often give insist in giving it in cash and then it’s harder for me to prove whether he has ir hasn’t given it to me.

I think I should start a claim thorough cms, does anyone know if this would work in my favour or not? How long is it likely to take and would if be worth the hassle. One worry is that his books will actually say he earns less than he is admitting to me and I will end up with less money than I’m getting now.

@NosyNeighbour22 There's an art and a science to this. Technically there is a minimum amount he should pay based on his earnings, which is the science. But the art is the negotiation; an unwilling payer can always find loopholes, especially if they are self employed.

The question you need to ask is not therefore whether it is reasonable for you to take this action but rather whether it is tactically a good idea. You need to be certain that taking this action will pay off for you. At the moment you get maintenance late with the odd amount missed. Antagonising the situation might mean he becomes much more aggressive about hiding his income, which depending on what he does for a living could be easy to do (e.g. he could work cash in hand, or have international contracts where the money never comes into the UK or a bank account in his name).

The devil is often in the detail and you need to think hard about the situation. I never imagined I would be an "unwilling payer" myself until my ex-wife told a series of lies in an attempt to achieve an egregiously unfair divorce settlement for example, that would have left me far worse off than her for the rest of my life. She wanted a Mesher Order that would run so long that I'd be nearly retired before I received my share of the capital, which at 30% would have been an inadequate share to house myself; she wanted spousal maintenance for me to pay 100% of the mortgage; she demanded 70% of my pension savings and she refused to maximise her own earning capacity. Obviously she did not get all of this but she did get a Mesher for 3 years until the fix ended and half my pension. So having been treated unfairly by the courts, I started saving a full half of my income into a pension which drastically reduced the child maintenance and her ability to afford the mortgage. Tactically it was both to force her to sell up, get a job and to make up for the extent to which the courts had unfairly divided the assets, and it worked. She couldn't get a job more suitable to her skill level fast enough and she downsized to a perfectly good 3 bedroom house with a mortgage of her own, becoming independent in the process.

Now, you're obviously a lot more reasonable than my ex-wife but what I'm trying to point out is that if you take the most extreme course of action, you're likely to get a similar reaction. So you have to decide tactically whether it is worth it. Reasonable - yes you are. But strategic? You need to think about what he is likely to do and proceed with caution to get the best outcome for yourself and your children.

No idea why you have put up with this for so long tbh. Of course you should go through the CMS, you should have from the start.