My DSD has recently started boarding 2/3 nights a week which my DH is paying for. DSD was desperate to do it; her school offers flex-boarding and lots of her friends do a few nights a week. She loves it and DH is happy for her to do it.
My DH sees a quite a bit of my DSD and she spends around 125 nights a year with him at the moment. There is a contact order in place and an SRO but she's getting to an age where she's old enough to decide for herself what she wants to do with her weekends so I guess that will become an increasingly 'rough' estimate.
DH has always paid the CSA required maintenance as a minimum. We pay for DSD's school fees, uniform, activities and any other school-related expenses out of our joint income. He pays the maintenance. He also picks up the bill for DSD's birthday parties, mobile phone, haircuts etc.
We're OK financially at the moment but I think we're going to struggle in the future. We have younger children who are all starting school, come September we'll have three sets of school fees and one set of nursery fees to contend with.
We're not certain DH should really be paying maintenance at all. My understanding is that the boarding element of school fees gets deducted from maintenance? Also, if you add up the nights DSD is boarding and the nights she spends with DH, it means DH is financially responsible for her over 50% of the nights per annum but while I can see on the CMS website that if she was spending 50% of the nights per annum with him, no maintenance would be due, I can't see if boarding nights would for maintenance purposes, count as his?
He's not paying via CSA and he wasn't married to Mum. He just transfers an agreed sum to Mum's bank account each month and picks up everything else directly. I'm struggling to find much info on the web. The CMS section on direct.gov seems quite thin..