Custody Crap

Well, interesting-I did­n’t see this from until after court:

The Five of Hearts speaks of changes and rest­less­ness in your heart which can man­i­fest in many ways. At the deep­est lev­el, you will prob­a­bly be feel­ing dis­sat­is­fac­tion with your cur­rent rela­tion­ship or home sit­u­a­tion and desire some sort of change.

When this card appears there is always the chance of a sep­a­ra­tion or divorce with some­one you love, but there is an equal pos­si­bil­i­ty that you will be tak­ing a trip or mov­ing to a new home. The high­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of this card is that of going out and meet­ing new peo­ple, telling oth­ers about what you are doing and who you are. You can make impor­tant con­tacts when this card is around.

As those of you who have seen sam­bear’s post know, R&G will be going to live with their moth­er on the West coast. They’ll be with us for a vis­it through August 13.

This is real­ly turn­ing out to be a case of “be care­ful what you ask for” as far as Sam’s ex-wife goes. 

She’s get­ting both kids to live with her, but the child sup­port that (I believe) she was count­ing on liv­ing off of is 1) far less than she expect­ed; and 2) won’t actu­al­ly start for almost a year.

Our records show that the ex-wife owed over $10k in child sup­port and med­ical expens­es. The judge gave Sam cred­it for $5k, and he does­n’t have to pay out a dime until that’s paid off, which will be in almost 12 months.

Hap­pi­ly, the amount of child sup­port was based on Sam’s cur­rent, rather than his his­tor­i­cal, income. While the ex-wife tried to claim that Sam had delib­er­ate­ly left his pre­vi­ous job for one mak­ing less mon­ey to reduce child sup­port, the Guardian ad Litem imme­di­ate­ly refut­ed that claim and the judge went with the GaL. The judge set the sup­port at 25% of Sam’s cur­rent gross income—legal guide­lines are between 23 and 28%, GaL had sug­gest­ed 26%.

The ex-wife had want­ed 28% of what Sam used to make at his old job—more than twice what he was ordered to pay.

The sup­port is to be paid via Pay­Pal, which is how the ex has been pay­ing sup­port to Sam for the last cou­ple of years. She want­ed it paid through the child sup­port enforce­ment office, but the judge said that 1) it’s too com­plex with an inter­state case; 2) it’s stu­pid of her to want that since they run 1–2 years behind all the time. And she actu­al­ly tried to get the judge to have Sam pay extra to cov­er the less than 2% fee Pay­Pal will charge her! He’s always absorbed that him­self, nev­er a squeak about ask­ing her for it. The judge said, “Nope, even with a fee it’s still with­in the guide­lines.” Now THAT is mon­ey-grub­bing (and the judge was SO not impressed with her on that count).

The ex-wife was try­ing to claim that she did­n’t owe a dime, Sam owed her mon­ey, etc.—except that, oh my, she could­n’t actu­al­ly pro­vide any RECORDS, and it was all her ex-employ­er’s fault, or the old day­care’s fault, etc. Then she said, “Oh, I have records stored at my father’s house and I could get to them now, but I could­n’t before.” (Her father was present in court with her.) The judge said, “Nope, we’re going on what we have here today.”

She has to pro­vide health insur­ance for the kids, and she and Sam split what isn’t cov­ered by the insur­ance 50/50 (Sam paid 75, her 25, before). If she lets the cov­er­age lapse, she’s liable for what­ev­er amount SHOULD have been cov­ered by the insurance.

And she’s to do all this when she’s been unem­ployed for two years. (I still don’t under­stand how the court could give her the kids with no vis­i­ble source of income, but hey, it was­n’t my call.) She’s liv­ing in a two-bed­room, one-bath apart­ment off her boyfriend, who is an only child who has nev­er been around kids before. She claims that rent out there (Bay area) runs $1k a bedroom—I know some of you are there, is that about right? Any­way, the place was quite crowd­ed just for a two-month vis­it. With no child sup­port for almost a year, I can’t help but won­der how the boyfriend is going to feel about fund­ing a big­ger place—and I rather doubt the ex-wife is going to be try­ing very hard to find a job (still). We fig­ure that if the boyfriend leaves, she’ll try to get more mon­ey or send the kids back.

Sam pays for trav­el and she reim­burs­es him 50%. Since she’s been using a friend’s fre­quent fly­er miles, and he’s like­ly to want to keep “pay­ing” her for the “work” she does for him in FF miles, we fig­ure she’ll try to do some hag­gling over that when it comes down to actu­al­ly giv­ing Sam cash.

I’m still wor­ried about the kids, but if that’s where the uni­verse wants them at the moment, that’s where they need to be. I’m relieved that the bat­tle is over. All that remains is the rest of their vis­it and get­ting their stuff out there (she has­n’t made any arrange­ments for that, either).

Thank you for all the love and sup­port. *hugs* to all of you!