Men who quit their jobs to avoid CM payments...

[Dweetfidilove]

How do they afford to live? I often read about exes that have quit their jobs to avoid paying CM. Are there that many self-employed/cash in hand/family support set ups that enable them to not work?

How do they pay their other bills? Where do they live? Presumably they're not all on benefits, as if they are, the DWP requires them to find employment at some point and sanctions them if they don't.

Surely you wouldn't just choose a life of struggle, just to spite your ex and children?

If your ex has given up his job to avoid CM payments, how does he support himself?

I also agree that if they can't afford it now, the liability doesn't go away but continues to accrue. There should also be custodial sentences for avoiding payment- it should be like tax avoidance. And in prison they have to work and earn money for their kids so they don't avoid it that way either.

Ouch! I don't believe a step-parent should be liable for maintenance payments, but that might address the issue of dad becoming a SAHD who's no longer able to support his children.

This is what my ex did. Went on to have 3 dc and never had my dc or payed for them.
Csa (or what ever it was before) shut the case because 'he claimed no benefits'. When dc was about 15 I came across him working as a cleaner I didn't bother claiming at this point as I didn't want him back in dc life as he obviously wasn't going to be a good role model. I don't know for how long he'd been working at this point.

Hope she leaves him and takes the lot! Would be no more than he deserves.

My daughter's father is self-employed in a trade. He has his payments made into his wife's account, so the CMS can't track his payments.

It is a woman who is enabling his audacious behaviour.

Absolutely this! I work with a woman who’s husband has children with his ex, he pays £86 a month for those 2 children, every single year at Christmas, birthdays, school uniform time etc his wife who I work with comes in slating his ex to the high heavens for asking him for more money to put towards these things “because we already pay child maintenance, that’s all she’s getting she can take it out of that”🥲 because of course children only cost £43 a month each to feed, clothe, house, heat, breakfast & after school clubs and so she should have plenty left over from that amount to also then buy uniform, presents etc. It’s baffling but I have heard it a lot from women at work who’s partners have children with an ex, dad never see’s the kids and pays the bare minimum yet it’s the ex in the wrong!

That's really interesting, can you give some examples please? Or point me towards some information sources?

I couldn't look at him or respect him enough to have three children with him without thinking about him doing the same to mine.

A man who can not have care or regard for how his children eat, sleep, wear or live is not one I could be in a relationship with. As a woman I imagine that requires a lot of dissociation

Friends ex declared one business bankrupt and put the other in his mum’s name… his ‘declared’ income is so low he’s liable to pay £100 a month which he has never paid.
He works for his ‘mum’s business’ now and has various machinations in place to make it all work.
Must be exhausting for him. Particularly as my friend has a good income so actually, he wouldn’t have had to pay much toward his child and they had 2 flats between the. To live in.

The more money he pays out, the less there is for their household.

Lots of people can get past that, fairly easily.

Friends EXH did this.
Another friends ex stayed in the same job role but changed to self employed.
Weasels like this will always find a way to wriggle out if responsibility.

He won’t pay anything towards school uniform or clothes or extra curriculars or ANYTHING. Thing is the kids are now mid teens and beginning to realise all this. Their mum has never bad mouthed him or discussed any of this. but they’re working out for themselves what kind of man he really is.

Getting caught doesn’t happen to then often though . Sadly

My ex does the same thing with his latest girlfriend

She does it as she has such low self esteem and has swallowed the whole 'she'd only spend it in herself anyway'

The csa once rang him to say he owed something daft like £10 a week (for 2 kids) and he told them he couldn't afford to pay that

While sat sunning himself on a 5* holiday and his brand new sports car was sat on the drive,waiting for him to come home

They seemed to accept this and stopped bothering him

I got a letter saying that his debt had been wiped-its not their debt to write off-its my dc's but they just shrugged and said there is nothing they could do

Like others exes new woman paid her tax man to set him up SE, he declared he earned minimum wage (while living in Richmond, flying all over the world and having articles posted about him being a specialist) and CMS did nothing. I tried with their system to show (he was posting about gifts on fb that would have been at least £2k) gathered all the evidence and nothing happened. It was far more stressful for me than him and I literally can't see the point in CMS. He just ignored their calls. Then I got a letter saying if I wanted my measly monthly amount they had decided I need to have mediation with him...in London! Yeah OK, I'll pay for childcare as a single parent to meet up with an absolutely nasty arse once a week to discuss why he should be paying more than the bare minimum shall I? I dropped asking for payments as the whole thing was causing more stress. I was getting more from CB than him anyway.

It is a complete joke and one of the reasons so few people decide to have kids IME.

Initially he would change jobs every few months to dodge the collect from pay order so racked up thousands in owed cms. Then quit working to stay at home with his new girlfriends kids, not even ones he fathered. When she caught on and left him, he did cash in hand at bars. Now he sporadically claims UC, i get £29 a few months a year, the thousands owed doesnt ever get touched. Its been 10 years, ive received less than £200 in total for our 3 children.

He Would be getting a baseball bat through his windscreen every week until he paid.

My ex stole thousands of pounds off his mates then moved abroad. He'd told everyone that money was for me, that I was demanding I pay child support; so they all came after me for repayment. It was a very bad time in my life.

Apparently they can. Disgusting reprobates that they are ☹️.

My oldest DC is now 25 so I dealt with the CSA. When I opened a case with them to try to get maintenance from my x they set a regular payment of £250 a month while they investigated. It took them a year to investigate and find that he didn’t, in fact, have enough income to pay maintenance (self employed, cash in hand, same story). The CSA then demand that I pay him back all the maintenance that he had paid that year that they investigated. I refused point blank. They hounded me for three years demanding the return of the money.
years later they wrote and apologised for their error and confirmed that I did not have to return the money. I still have that letter, just in case!

I know it’s rough but surely if we advocate for men having to pay the right amount, then returning a wrongly paid amount is also fair?

Think this is brilliant. It is outrageous that families face such jeopardy when absent fathers do not pay.

I’ve read a few on here eg changing jobs every time CMS catch up with them. It takes a few months each time so employer can say that he doesn’t work there any more.

The shocking ones are the ones who use the system to claim that they earn like £150pw but somehow raised a mortgage for hundreds of thousands 🤔 , car finance for tens of thousands 🤔 or go on holidays costing thousands 🤔 Why on earth doesn’t CMS use the same data as private companies like banks ?

This is what I am hoping comes out of the banks updating the personal information at the moment on income. It should be used to catch the guys making women and children reliant on the state in so many cases. It will be interesting to see if they do anything with their information that can actually help society.

Bit late for us - he has since split with ex (sorry love but you should have seen that coming) and is off abroad with the savings he got tax free from fiddling the books to avoid childcare here. HMRC should start by looking at all the SE fathers IMO.

I’ll try and find a document later, there is a really good one out there.

The two I queried were that no mention was made that they can take payments from their bank account without a court order. Either a one off or a regular payment.
And the other was having a charge put on their house so that if they came to sell they’d have to deal with the debt - that’s what happened to my ex and he was livid. The trainer had never heard of it, and was adamant a court order was necessary for bank account “raids” (I always found that word very telling”.

The other thing that infuriates me about them is that people have the right not to have the debt wiped (unless it’s under £10 or something small). Legally you can insist it stays there. I dealt with two cases where historic debt was being paid (by very angry men) from inheritances they’d received (technically from selling houses they’d inherited). And one case where the man who owed thousands had died and made a will leaving everything to his new-ish girlfriend (nothing for his children) and the debt meant his ex got a substantial sum from his estate before it was paid out to the GF. Meaning her children at least got something.