What cm covers

[rosepetalsoup]

I'm just interested how people do things. The cm your DH pays -- does it cover travel, holidays, clothes, school trips etc, or does he pay more for those things?

Purpleroses - It's a little bit different here I think? From Australia :) They have some ridiculous equation that I once tried to understand....

My flimsy understanding is they take into account age and number of children and how much they would "cost" all up to raise across a year. Then they put the percentages of visitation (which are organised into bands) and then based off the income of each parent, what percentage of the annual cost needs to be subsidised. I understood about half of it.

But they take the figures for income from each years' tax submission and recalculate as needed. E.g. my parents now have 50/50 of my younger siblings. Dad still had to pay child support because he earned more. When my mother got a good job, she didn't lodge her tax return for a few years. When it finally caught up with her, she was a) fined, and b) they re-calculated it so that dad ended up not having to pay child support for 9 months because she'd been "over-paid" according to their massive equation.

I think the logic is to make sure the child has a fairly stable quality of life across both houses. I actually think it's technically considered child support fraud when you don't accurately report your earnings for the calculation of child support over here.

Does sound quite different from the UK system. At least ours is reasonbly easy to understand, and there's no incentive on the RP to not earn money

DF pays around 241, a month maintenance. Plus money towards a dance class, and uniform.

H pays £400 per month for 2 DCs, though one of them isn't his biologically and I think the ex gets something through CSA for him from his real dad. Though I cant be sure on that 100%.

He also pays for clubs for both (around £100 per month), and all equipment for those clubs (dancing, rugby) he pays half towards trips, he pays half for school uniform every year plus a new pair of trainers up to twice a year for both (not including xmas and birthdays when they usually get some as well) we have them EOW (fri - sun, or mon on Bank hols) and his DD 3 nights per week (not overnight) and we tend to take them on holiday or for big trips (theme parks etc) too. We also have them whenever there is a family do, a wedding / party etc if its not 'our' weekend, for overnight or for the weekend. DH buys them clothes for these events and if we take them on holiday we buy all their bits.

The 'contact' arrangement is quite relaxed these days as they are pre-teen and teenaged, so want to see their friends etc. If they are going to a party or something DH gives them a bit of money too.

We currently are expecting a baby (9 weeks) and I don't know how it will work with that because we might need a bit of that money to help with baby stuff when I go on Mat Leave, but we will discuss that soon. At the moment, DH sees it that the money he pays in maintenance probably doesn't really go on the DCs so he does as much as he can in the way of clubs and clothes etc so he knows they are actually benefitting. He can afford it so he pays it.

However, if you were to ask the ex she would tell he doesn't pay enough and doesn't put any effort into them. Sigh.

I get a massive £5 per week for two dc and the bastard refuses to work because he thinks my dp should pay for them seeing as "he knew I had kids when he met me"

My lovely dc don't ever go without, I do overtime to ensure they have everything they need.