Author Topic: Complicated Situation - 4 kids  (Read 6167 times)

HeligKo

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Complicated Situation - 4 kids
« on: January 07, 2014, 06:16:13 PM »
How would the guidelines be applied when 3 kids are on a shared parenting plan, and 1 kid is not residing at my house at all.  I need help. I am pretty sure the lawyers are going to confuse the crap out of this, and I need to understand how this should be applied.

Guru

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Re: Complicated Situation - 4 kids
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2014, 07:05:39 PM »
I think if I were in your shoes I would request the use of the 4 child table and use 2 separate worksheets.  One worksheet considers the 3 children with shared residency, and the other considers the other child.  While I'm not sure the calculator here directly considers this adjustment, one way to fool it into giving your the right calculation is to enter 1 child as Multiple Family Adjustment (MFA) on the shared residency worksheet, and enter 3 children as MFA on the other single child.  You should be able to see from the worksheet that both will use the 4-child table.

That's just me, but maybe there's some other ways to do it.  I think the above plan would be better simply because shared and no parenting time plans use such drastically different approaches to account for parenting time.

HeligKo

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Re: Complicated Situation - 4 kids
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2014, 09:23:34 PM »
I have been doing that.

I run it once with the 3 kids first, and then run it with the one kid entering the child support calculated in the first into the court ordered child support section.

I then do the same thing but calculate the one kid then the three kids with the child support calculated entered into the court ordered child support section.

This gives me two different totals. I figured I was then negotiating between those two posts.  I just want to be sure that I am doing it right.

Guru

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Re: Complicated Situation - 4 kids
« Reply #3 on: January 07, 2014, 11:07:28 PM »
No, I don't think we're talking about the same thing.  You wouldn't be putting anything into line C2 under child support paid because that is support paid in a separate order.  This hasn't been ordered yet.  You would get different numbers using the approach I described.  Look into the Multiple Family Adjustment.  The only thing this adjusts is the table used to look up child support.

However, I'm not sure which approach the court would use in such a case.  Every judge does it differently it seems.