Should Cm increase?

[Bemyclementine]

I have 2 dc, 6 and 7, sperated over 5 yrs from their dad. He suggested an amount if CM when he left,which I was happy with. I was on mat leave, essentially 2 babies.

But, the amount hasn't increased, yet my costs have, massively. Cost of living - food, bills, fuel, etc. Also, 2 babies used to go to a baby group for £2 a week and swimming for £4. School uniform, shoes, trainers, wellies- all needed for school . Pe kits, forest school kits, swimming stuff.

Now, I have to pay for after school childcare, (he never, ever does a school tun, never sees thdm in the week) swimming lessons (essential imo) other clubs such as Beavers (not essential but very good to do) football - youngest is obsessed with.

My question is, should I expect cm to go up? His income has very def gone up, as have my child related outgoings.

This is why it's better to go through CMS and request reviews when they get a pay rise.

Also CMS is the legal MINIMUM to cover towards the cost of the primary parent housing/feeding/basic clothing etc. school trips and activities/hobbies are very reasonable to be in addition to the CMS amount.

@RandomMess hes self employed , so that's a whole different question.

Have you asked him for an increase? What’s his response?
its also difficult as we don’t know what he’s currently paying. If he’s paying 100 then it probably should go up. If he’s already paying over whatt cms states than it will be hard to argue for an increase

It depends on how generous the amount he already gives you is.

Either ask him do he can say yes or no, or go through CMS.

depends what he is giving you, it may be a generous settlement or a stingy one, we cant tell, can we!

I haven't asked, no. I have no idea what normally happens in these situations, abd it has occurred to me that over the years my costs have increased dramatically while he pays the same.Again, CMS would be a pointless exercise as I'm fairly sure that on paper he earns much less than he does in reality.

I suppose it all depends on
How you much you get?
How much he earns?
How much you'd like in cm?
How often he has the kids?

My question is, should it go up each year/few years? Regardless of whether he pays £50 a month or £500.

Fwiw - I will never have a clear answer of what he earns. He has no overnights, sees them one day a week. No school drop off/pick up, no clubs, no school holidays etc.

It would only go up if he earns more that year but he's self employed so you could to to cms and get less off him.

How much do you get? That will give an idea on if it's worth going to cms or not

Yeah it probably should go up. My ex (also self employed) has paid £150 a month for over £10 years. I doubt I'll ever ask for more as don't want to rock the boat. There was a large period when he didn't pay anything at all.

It depends how much he pays but no, you shouldn't get an annual increase.

As ridiculous as it is, CM isn't done on the costs of your children, it's worked out on the non resident parents income.

If his income has increased, CM Should increase but you have a fine line to walk here if he's self employed and you think you'll get less if you go to CMA. Sorry the system is so shit

Thank you @PIPamountconfusion . I know people who get nothing, so can't complain as such, but I would say his income has at least doubled in 5yrs

Erm, you absolutely should if his income does.

CMS re-evaluate every year, could be tricky in OP's case as her ex is self-employed. I'm prepared to bet he's not paying anywhere close to CMS amount even on his declared income though...

It does depend on what he pays today to a degree. If based on earrings and income ( real not declared) he should pay you 500 but he’s already paying 1000 then arguably no.

if he’s paying in line with minimum and I’m his income increase then yes he should increase that in line

I think there are a lot of variables that you would need to consider, some of which have already been raised here. If he paid you in excess of the CMS calculation 5 years ago and is still doing so then no, you wouldn't be successful in asking for an increase and going to the CMS might actually result in a decrease. I can't really comment on self employment and how this affects CMS because I pay CM on a salary with an employer but I guess you could suppress income which could mean what you receive is even smaller.

Another factor to consider is whether his income has actually gone up much in the last five years. A lot of people have seen barely any increase in their incomes since the financial crisis in 2008, let alone since the Brexit vote in 2016, the pandemic in 2020-21 or the Truss crash of 2022. A lot of self employed people are probably feeling the pinch right now and his income might even have fallen. My own salary has barely risen in the past 6 years except for a move to London that came with a weighting (I was silly for taking the job because although the weighting barely covered my new commute, my ex-wife still gets 25% of the net so I'm actually out of pocket! Needless to say I won't be in this job for very long).

Another factor is pensions. If there were pensions in divorce and you took a large share of his, he might be contributing more to build his pot back up. I used to pay in 8% of my income into a pension but now I pay 20% because my ex-wife took a significant chunk of my pension. CMS is calculated after pension contributions and I - quite reasonably - feel my ex-wife got her CM up front when she took a large percentage of my pension and significantly more than half of the assets.

There's also the factor of contribution. I still pay my ex-wife around £1.1k a month in child maintenance after pension contributions which is more than she earns herself (although I think with universal credit she gets to a total net income including CM of around £2.8k or something). If my wife was slogging her guts out to earn her wages I would feel differently about the situation but the reality is we share care something like 60/40 but she refuses to work more than about 20 hours a week in an unskilled job (she is a graduate having retrained at my expense during and immediately after divorce) and won't work in school holidays (even though the children spend half of the school holidays with me). So I don't pay her extra for anything whatsoever because it is my opinion that she could double her own income if she maximised her earnings and I feel that whilst I work hard for my children, she does not and therefore it is quite fair that she has no money left for herself after their needs are met.

I think you make some very fair and well explained points here. Whilst I think dads should pay for their kids, I think receiving parents often forget that costs have gone up for everyone and not just their household.

As kids dad appears self employed here he can probably manipulate his top line somewhat. Whether he still pays a "fair amount" is unknown as OP hasn't disclosed how much she receives.

If CM was done on the costs of the children, then it would be based on the receiving parent being honest. That would be an extremely foolish and extremely litigious way of doing things that would clog up the courts. Either that, or there would be a boom in the need for family accountants to check and question every receipt which would be totally impractical.

Also, if costs exceeded the payers' ability to pay (likely, as there will be some receivers who will inflate costs in order to try to have the same lifestyle as before divorce) this will further exacerbate litigation.

The system generally works as well as it can. It actually works (and doesn't work) in very similar ways to the tax system. Dodging CMS is very similar to dodging tax. Actually, I suspect that often the self employed are dodging CMS only as a by-product of dodging tax (I also suspect a lot of receiver parents were more than happy with this tax dodging behaviour when they were together). For both tax and CMS, there are legitimate and illegitimate ways to reduce income and therefore the payment burden. (Also, when things happen outside the UK's jurisdiction, things become very complicated indeed).

If you can think of a way to make CMS better, you will probably receive a call from 11 Downing Street! Until then, we have to make do with what we have.

@amiold Thank you. Yes, I don't think CMS is as black and white as it is often made out to be on Mumsnet. It's formula driven which makes it an unusual part of the divorce process but in practice it has often been considered within the broader divorce settlement and is intertwined with everything else.

For example, paying CM reduces my mortgage capacity. So it was a relevant consideration in how much of the home equity I needed. Her getting a large chunk of the pension already saved meant I had to increase my contributions and that reduces CM payable. She was estimated to have an earning capacity of double what she claimed and with CM she could get a mortgage on her own place so she was denied a mesher order etc.

What makes CM so odd is that although it gets so entrenched in all those decisions, it can vary wildly after divorce. I've not really seen my income increase since divorce so I've not done it yet, but if I got a big pay bump I would put it all in a pension because in my opinion the whole divorce settlement was based on my ex-wife getting a certain amount of CM. As she got more assets than me on the basis she would have this lower income and therefore need, her getting more as a consequence of my hard work would render the settlement unfair and double count in my opinion. I'll make sure she gets what was agreed but no more than that.

Totally agree. I thought any child maintenance that was agreed through divorce/court only stood for 12 months? So you are right to put it into pension as at the next evaluation it could go up and as you've explained she's already took a hefty amount to cover her expenses.

It's not unusual for mums not to want to work more hours and the Mumsnet take is always to blame the dad. Men get a bad press on here and a lot of the time women don't want their kids dad to be a dad but do want them to provide an income so they don't have to work. I often think alot of it is about control.

It’s fairly standard for child support to be based on % of income in most countries. Therefore it should rise with income.

In the uk, CMS is based on the income. Even with a court order you can revert to the CMS model at any time after a year. He can effectively do this as well.

If your question is whether you should ask for an increase then it really depends on what kind of person he is. If he is hot headed and easily triggered he could roll back to his CMS required payment. Or he could say no but carry as now. Or he could say yes.

You know him, and he is likely to do.

Yes, he should be showing you a copy of his P60 at the end of every financial year. You can then calculate how much he should be paying you with the .gov online calculator.

Just to clarify, we eventually at the last minute settled out of court and the CM I was paying was not in the consent order as I had already arranged it with CMS. I did not want to get stuck with one of those god awful global maintenance orders so I made sure I got assessed and paid in full on time regularly before it went to any court!

I agree with you though on the Mumsnet attitude that they seem to blame Dad for everything. It's why a lot of the divorce advice on this forum is so bad, and I have an axe to grind really because my divorce dragged on in no small part because of the rubbish posted here by people with entitlement issues (with some honourable exceptions of course). If someone wants an amicable divorce, the golden rule is to consider the needs of both parties. My ex, egged on by people on forums like this one, tried to demand a Mesher order until the children were 21 with me paying the mortgage, so much maintenance that I would be left with less than half my income and she had no plan to work whatsoever. I should point out I earn well but not six figures. I would have been expected to carry on in a job with brutal hours in return for the lifestyle of someone on a gross salary of about £20k which around here would have meant a room in a shared house. In the end her own solicitor had to set her straight on a few things (not least pointing out that I would be left with no incentive to work at all which would jeopardise the CM she was due; that SM would be extremely time limited because she was a recent graduate in her thirties and could work and that if she didn't plan to do these things she couldn't expect someone else to pay for her house).

I think part of the problem is that a lot of the posters on here exaggerate their contribution to the family. As both a hands on parent and someone who holds a professional job, I do not believe that there is a significant difference in the difficulty of full time professional employment and caring for children and I say this based on actual experience, as opposed to the views of people who have never worked in a job paying more than about £20k in their lives. I also know, again through experience rather than through some victim mentality, that it is possible to do both on an ongoing basis. After divorce, it's not just true that finances go down. Workload has to go up to balance childcare with an income and any parent who remains a SAHP refusing to also work after divorce is not pulling their weight in my opinion.

He doesn't have to do this. A P60 includes all kinds of personal data that is none of the OP's business. I would never share my P60 with my ex-wife because it's none of her business where I work or what my national insurance number is.

If my ex-wife wanted to know if she was getting paid enough, she can go to the CMS who can access HMRC data that is not shared with her.

@BetterFuture1985 yes this forum can be somewhat toxic. The mentality that dads should work more and provide lifestyle for mum and children is absurd. Shared custody would allow them to work but a lot have to fight for access as it's stopped to get full child maintenance. The age old argument that mums sacrifice earnings is only relevant in early years as they have the ability to get back into the workplace and progress, should they want to. Also, parents can excel in their careers before they have kids to offer some stability.