Don't give up work to be a SAHM unless

[akaemmafrost]

You have a HEFTY private income or can work from home.

I gave up work, usual reasons, wages would barely cover childcare, WE wanted kids to be at home with a parent.

Fast forward. I now have two dc, the father of my dc cheated on me, physically, emotionally and financially abused me.

One of my dc has SN and cannot attend school for the moment.

I've been out of work for 10 years now, I have no profession. In 6 years time our child support will stop as will most of our benefits. I will near fifty having not worked at all for 18 years.

My future is shit. Utterly grey and bleak. All I have to look forward to is a state pension. While my ex earns a fortune, travels the world and has new relationships.

This is reality for me. So think long and hard about giving up work to stay at home because no matter how shit your job is it's preferable to my future don't you think?

And it was all decided for me by a man who decided he hated me and didn't want to be married anymore and a child being diagnosed with significant SN.

It's that simple.

To never rely on someone financially and be independent in that respect was one of the probably most valuable lessons instilled to me by my mom. And im very grateful for that!

There are really worthless men who will say they are happy to have a baby with someone if it means they can have condom free sex and that is actually their priority.

They are feeding the partner the baby line because she wants to hear words that signify commitment and that is what a baby means to her -- this is something that happens a lot in cultures that sell the 'happy ever after' myth to girls along with the myth that nice girls don't insist on contraception, only calculating hussies who want sex and not motherhood, and the 'real men go bareback' myth to boys along with the idea that a boy can legitimately require a girl to prove she loves him (by believing whatever he chooses to tell her about impossibility of getting pregnant the first time, when she has her period, or that he will love you and stand by you no matter what).

This happens in cultures where feminism is considered a dirty word and where status is conferred on women through relationships to men and motherhood, not earning power or degrees to your name. When the (pretty inevitable) pregnancy happens it is of course a different matter for some men. Not for all but for enough to make it something parents try to warn children about.

< Do you have to have status and respect conferred on you for any reason - through your relationships with men and through motherhood, or through your work and qualifications ? Can we not just respect one another for our common humanity, and possibly for people's personalities and individual qualities ?

Fades into "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one ...." >

I'm v naive and confused about how well-paid men can avoid paying maintenance etc. A senior (and well-paid) colleague of DH's is getting divorced (his SAHM DW of 15 years - at home for about 6 years of that - had an affair and decided to end the marriage for the OM) and he, after legal advice, is and will always be paying quite a lot of money, future pension etc.

Thought that divorce laws protect the lower or unpaid partner in the event of divorce, whereas those who are unmarried get nothing. Yet on MN it often seems like men aren't paying up after divorce. Is there not proper enforcement?

Sorry for being so thick. Myself, am in the "never give up earning" camp: my mum's earnings kept the family afloat many times.

No imo there is no proper enforcement,
If a man decides to conceal income or assets it seems very easy to do judging by the divorces I have seen

They could have had 20 affais each and this doesn't have any bearing in the separation of assets, if one was left unanle to work as s result of the other's affair, it possibly do. But chances are slim.

The problem with people with high salaries is that they can have access to the wonderful resources that creative accountancy and tax avoidance are.

Think about starbucks tax scandal last week? Well, it is not only Starbucks. This is done at large, medium and small scale. Ie my ex calculates maintenance on the salary he had in 1999. His lifestyle suggests he is earning 3 times the reported salary (and into 6 figure numbers), yet he claimed in court that once my tax credits were considered, my income was higher than his. The judge said he didn't believe his claim of such low income but also said that he had to make a decision in the paperwork presented to him. Queue yet another mother and child screwed up financially but no rules were broken by the court.

Assuming your Ex isn't paying maintenance voluntarily...

• If you aren't married, your only route to maintenance is through the CSA.
• If you are married, you have a choice of going through the courts to get a maintenance order, or going through the CSA.

The trouble is that the CSA are totally fecking useless not entirely effective. It seems to me that they focus all their efforts on recovering maintenance when the resident parent is in receipt of state benefits - i.e. if the parent with care is on the dole, the CSA will act promptly to recover money from a working non-resident parent, because that saves the state money. If the resident parent is working, then the CSA is unbelievably slow to act, and it is my my opinion that this is because it does not save the state anything. In my case, they took no effective action for a decade, and have failed to recover a single penny on my behalf in 14.5 years.

Non-resident parents don't have to pay maintenance unless there is a court order or CSA assessment in place... So if there is no court order, and the CSA doesn't get its act together, irresponsible parents can get away with not paying anything.

Snog and Athendof, what about your financial papers?

ie tax returns, etc? Can money squirrelled away NOT be declared to Inland Revenue? I thought they were the people you do not mess with.

I also thought that not declaring all your assets to court was a criminal offense?

Would appreciate the information.

I think men on PAYE are easier to get money from if they stay on PAYE. I know it seems hard to believe but many men change employment or give up/become 'self-employed' etc to evade CM

My secretary's current DH gave up a full time position to work part-time with another company. The other company offer him permanent part-time hours but increase his hours every single week with overtime. This was done with the express intention of avoiding CM. If reassessed he will quit the overtime for long enough to request a reassessment himself.... then resume over time again. Ex wife can request a reassessment but CSA will refuse if it's too frequent. The man can request it to suit his 'circumstance' i.e. when he's quit the overtime.

My own exH gave up full time employment and became part-time. I know he has other income (kids have told me) but I cannot prove it. He's evading both tax man and CSA

The exH above, pays all his tax. What isn't linked full time is a CSA assessment. That is a one off and examines a short period of pay. Reduce pay for that period of time and get a low maintenance calculation.

Tax is on-going. If they calculated tax based on 3 pay packets everyone might feel inclined to restrict their hours. Tax is an ongoing calculation based on a total earning. CSA (in my experience) is a short temporary snapshot of income - can be manipuated easily

Non-resident parents don't have to pay maintenance unless there is a court order or CSA assessment in place... So if there is no court order, and the CSA doesn't get its act together, irresponsible parents can get away with not paying anything.
Court orders count don't count for much either. My ex has a court order to pay maintenance and just didn't pay it. The courts aren't interested

I'm afraid it is really easy to avoid paying maintenance if you are minded to do so. I realise it's incredibly hard to believe if you are a decent and moral person but there are men who will give up their jobs rather than pay - that's what happened in my case.

Mine delayed and delayed payment, so I involved the CSA. And guess what happened.

I'll never, ever forget him phoning me up...giggling as he did so....to advise that he wouldn't be paying me anything because he had left his job.

He set up on his own and is now doing very nicely, thank you. CSA (eventually, after I got my MP involved) assessed him as being on such a low income he only had to pay £5 per week. He said if I came out of the CSA he would pay me what is a piddling amount of money each month but is still more than I would get if I went through them. So basically he has me over a barrel and can pay what he likes.

I should clarify it was child maintenance.

Yup. My DS's dad quit work 3 times over a decade to avoid maintenance, before he finally left the country.

I am at how easy it is to fiddle your income for the CSA's benefit. What with that and the large-scale tax avoidance companies are indulging in, the rest of us must be shelling out hand over fist to make up the shortfall from these maintenance-dodging shysters. But never mind that, let's crack down on single mothers claiming benefits or who can't work through disabilities

Can anyone think of a better way to run the system? At least then we would petition for it, ask MPs about it etc. I'm not optimistic with this government but at least it would be a goal.

Quite snazzy!

Virtually. I'd be keen to know statistics. I think some level of evasion is common. The biggest problem is not the numbers though but the fact that in those cases the man gets away with it. Chasing a benefit claiming single mother fits in with society's need to blame a feckless woman. Chasing a father somehow has less backing. The individual struggling to keep a family going is forgotten

In my case I work and pretty successfully. Ex is part time in low paid job and thus has sympathy because I'm the evil ex who took the house, kids and left him penniless. Diddums

The truth is that I gave him 50% equity on our split, took on the mortgage in my name alone, finance the children entirely alone and he chose to leave a job earning 4/5 times what he does now. Because I'm 'ok' in everyone's eyes there doesn't appear to be any enthusiasm or expectation that their father should cough up any cash. No one knows what impact coping alone has on me or my DC. Without any expectation for violins...it's tough and I'm tired

Sorry appreciate this thread is mostly talking about maintenance now but to go back a bit earlier about what to worry about if you are in a happy relationship - if I became a SAHM now we could now manage on DH's income as a family, but if I died after being a SAHM or became ill and needed a carer, DH would end up giving up work or reducing hours significantly, and would need to sell the house which would mean moving away from DCs school, friends and family.

However, as I have a job with good benefits, if I died now my employer-provided insurance is generous and would mean DH would be able to continue working with current childcare, or reduce hours to spend more time with DC but not for childcare-related financial reasons and DCs would stay in their home and school. If I became very very ill now, my employer-provided insurance would keep paying me a wage (not my full wage) until I moved onto a pension. If I become ill only for a bit then I have sick pay for 6m so again no immediate need for DH to become carer, sell house etc.

Appreciate this is only helpful if people are thinking about whether to give up a good job, I have to say if I did not have much pay after childcare, did not have pension or insurance or career prospects or interesting work I would be a SAHM in a heartbeat and take my chances.

My XH pays the correct amount of maintenance.

During a heated discussion about finance he threatened he could go self employed if he wanted to shaft me

We agreed it between ourselves and he has always paid up and pays for other bits too if I ask

I am very grateful for this and realise I am in a fortunate position. He does like to refer to how "good" he is and has a knight in shining armour complex but I can live with that.

I should add he still enjoys a very good lifestyle himself and I sometimes wonder how decent he would be if it meant him going without anything

Previously pension was deducted before CSA payments, so all a high earning man needed to do was pay as much of his salary into pensions as he possibly could and that would reduce the maintenance his children got. Although they are stopping that.

My x chose to stop working, and seems to have self-styled himself as a reborn author and philosopher . But what irks me is that society and his family is ok with this, from a top 1% salary to basically living off his parents and benefits and not supporting his children at all in any way.

But society does love benefit bashing single mums on the other hand (just read any daily mail comments)

And I don't see how society could actually force him to work. It is win win for him, and his children suffer.

The CSA was a complete waste of money. Didn't it cost more to run than it retrieved for the treasury, which was what it was set up for under the last conservative government.

It probably also encouraged men to hide income for CM and therefore tax. It was a terrible set-up which actually encouraged men to run for the hills rather than face their responsibilities to nurture children when they weren't married to the mum. I eventually got them to collect for me, only when I was unemployed for a couple of months. I still got it when I returned to work. It wasn't much but it helped a little.

Nowadays they have scrapped taking the money for the state and actually give it to the resident parents even when full benefits are financing the family. This is why they are wanting to charge to use it.

My ExH deducts his tax, NI, pension contributions (the maximum), his mortgage and all bills, holidays, work expenses (clothes, car, motorbike, insurances, all food because that keeps him alive, haircuts, right down to toiletries) and then gives his DCs 'a fair % of what's left' - £150 a month in total between the two of them.

We think he earns about £40k. The DC's word for him is 'tight'.

I rather suspect he tells people that he gives a fair % of his income without telling them about his rather creative deductions.

Do people not think that both parents should be financially responsible for the financial support of their children. If I was a man I don't think I'd be happy if my wife left me for somebody else and still expected to be supported by me.

Yes, I do think that both parents should properly support their children. But without a presumption of shared care it's easier for the absent one both to hide their income and to do no parenting.