What do you think would be a reasonable amount of maintenance that an ex earning in excess of £70k per year should be paying for his child?

And is the income earned by the receiving parent taken into account?

Many thanks

Andi

The income by the mother or partner isnt taken into account and at 70k a year do you feel hard done by?

I have a disabled daughter and we have to pay £80 out of a wage of £260 i dont work because of her and we are in agony with these payments to his son who lives with his mom/stepdad that both work fulltime and she refused to give her hubbys details and so they were never taken into consideration!!

I cant say how bad our finances are they tapped into his wages and it got taken without his consent he's paying for a child of his (which he would anyway) but our daughter is suffering bad style when she needs us the most.
Its a very selfish system.

To be honest it's impossible to work out an acceptable average because you need to take account of expenses and outgoings on both sides. I've always taken the view that it's entirely unreasonable to take an ex-partner to the cleaners but equally, it's entirely unreasonable for anyone to side-step their financial responsibilities towards their children.

My girl

I'm the receiving parent and it's my ex who earns at least £70k.  He has paid £100 a month for the last 10 years for each of my two children.  He has stopped the payment for the elder one who is now over 18 but I wondered if perhaps £100 was on the light side. 

My youngest is 15 so he will have only 3 more years to pay anyway so don't know if it's worth all of the hassle of pursuing it if it's about the going rate anyway.

Thanks

Andi

Don't know about the 'going rate' but when maint' was finished with my kids, 3 years ago, it was £15 per week but that was because I was on benefit and £15 was all I was allowed before the benefit would have been altered. But when I was working part time it was £20 per week. Don't know about todays rate though.

my husband pay £200  for his son a month and only earns £27k a year so i would think you would be intilted to more

It does sound a little on the light side - looking back a few years I remember my OH paying £350 a month for 2 children from an income of £40K. The father of my two paid £100 for both of them from an income of £30K but towards the end of him paying maintenance I earnt more than he did anyway. However, I tended to the view that a lack of hassle was actually worth more than money given that it was going to be exceedingly difficult to get him to increase their maintenance. Oddly enough, after years of him complaining about supporting them, he was surprisingly generous with allowances when they were at uni.

Thanks all

It would be like blood out of a stone probably and he's such a pillock he would takeit out on the kids who he very rarely ever bothers with anyway.    Probably best to leave well alone.  It'll be his loss in the long term.

Thanks again

Andi

If he goes to live in Dubai he won't have to pay a penny!  There also won't be anything you can do to get money from him despite the fact he could £170K out there!

Joking apart it's a possibility.  At the moment he works in Croatia (so £70k is probably a light estimate of his salary) but he does come back to the UK but no idea how often. 

It's the principle more than the money.  He obviously thinks because they have everything they need from us he doesn't need to acknowledge any responsibility - either financially and even worse emotionally.  Good job my husband and I have been able to provide for them emotionally and financially otherwise I dread to think what would have happened.

Andi

Bl**dy tight ar*e i'd be fuming if i were you.

Sometimes it best to just let it go or it'd consume you (like it did us) :(

I know what you're saying my girl.  I think we've decided just to leave it because it'll be me who ends up chewed to bits about it. Just spent an hour trying to find out where he lives but haven't even managed to get that far so best just to forget about it otherwise I'll lose more sleep and he's not worth it.

Thanks again

Andi

I would expect it to be at least the amount that would be paid for a child if they were on Benefits.  Currently the amount for dependant children is £43.88 a week.

As that is considered the minimum amount to support a child I would expect that to be a starting point and then the Income/Outgoings/Disposable Income of the contributing parent should be taken into account.

Don't get me on this as my ex has stopped paying anything as he has 'semi retired' :rolleyes:

Ex forces and he thinks that it is ok to not work and pay nothing towards his daughters upbringing :rolleyes:

He has sent me an e-mail detailing he has done this as I hassled him to asking he was going to do when he got redundancy :rolleyes::rolleyes: He says he doesn't think he should have to work What sort of a message is this giving to his daughter :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Well mine never paid a penny since 1990, even though initialy there was just a nominal sum of £2.50 pr child set.

Kids are now 18 and 15.

I know it doesn't help if you are living on the financial edge and the maintenance is what keeps the wolf from the door but I came to the conclusion that you can't change human nature. So if your ex is someone who uses the maintenance as a weapon and won't accept that they have a financial responsibility towards their children, they draw you into their game in order to manipulate the situation as it suits them. When this happens it's the children who suffer most and I decided I wasn't prepared to have distressed children let alone an ex-husband who thought he owned us all on the basis of his pathetic financial support! It came as a nasty shock to him when he realised I wasn't playing his games and an even nastier shock when he realised I didn't need to because he was far too self-centred to have noticed my career progression!

My mother always said that men weren't put on the earth to support me and I think I'm even more militant than she was in this respect because I'd always advise anyone to make their own way in the world if the alternative is to be the victim of the sort of control freak who uses their children as weapons.

Well done roz!! ;) I completely agree with your mother.....

On the other side of the coin my husband never missed a maintenance payment for his boy but was denied access visits by the mother.  He couldn't afford to pursue it through the courts so just had to accept the situation.
It was all a long time ago but I know hardly a day goes by when he doesn't wonder how his lad turned out .....

It certainly works both ways. The wife of one of my friends walked out on him and their two small children, leaving him to bring them up alone. Although a few years later she married an extremely wealthy man, she's never paid a penny in maintenance.

My mother did the dame to my Dad and she didn't pay anything either.

Hiya

I get 27.50 a week for each of my girls. My ex has always been very good and has never missed a payment. When I left originally he was earning just short of 30k a year, with no rent or council tax to pay. I was receiving more then.  Since meeting the new woman he has cut the amount the kids are getting. He used to help out with school clothes and new things for holidays and the like. I am not most impressed as I took nothing from the break up. He was left with everything. I have been to see a solicitor about a divorce and they told me I could get more if I pushed it in the settlement. Unfortunately my ex won't sign the divorce papers. I have one more year to wait so I can claim 'abandonment'? Think this is right then I don't need his signature. That being said he has always been very good with regards to his visits. He has the girls every fortnight for a weekend and they spend a fair bit of the summer, easter and christams holidays at his Mums as she stays a fair distance away. The only problem I have is that he refuses to see the girls if I move out of a 30 mile radius of him. Think this might well be an idle threat though.

Hi, I work in the family deparmtment of a solicitors office and the rules of the Child Support Agency state that the non-resident parent should pay 15% of their net salary for one child, 20% for two children and 25% for three or more children.  This can vary though depending on how many nights the non-resident parent has contact with the child/children.

Thank you all.  Sadly, despite me encouraging the kids to keep in touch with him he just doesn't bother.  He speaks to the elder one occasionally but the younger one hasn't seen him for eighteen months.  Luckily the kids  see his parents every week so they are close to their grandparents - he definitely didn't inherit his behaviour .

As an aside, we also have custody of my husbands two children (now 14 and 16 but they have lived with us since they were 1 and 3 ) and we have never had anything from his ex wife either - always something better to spend her money on.  She doesn't have anything to do with the youngest (and neither do her family ) either purely because she has Down's but she has intermittently seen the elder one every couple of weeks but has never contributed a thing.  She's more annoying because she occasionally thinks she has a say in their upbringing but only when it suits! 

Isn't it difficult to bite your tongue in front of the kids when you really want to let them all know what you think of them?  I'm sure my younger kids know I'm lying now when I trot out the 'it's just his/her way, you know he/she adores you really'.  The eldest two gave up trying some time ago.  Very sad people :rolleyes:

Andi

Thought this might be of some help,

https://secureonline.dwp.gov.uk/csa/v1/new/calc.asp

:)

  By that calculation Blue he should be paying £170 per week .  I have obviously had MUG written over my forehead for the last 14+ years!  Problem remains the fall out if I pursue so although makes me dislike him even more (didn't think that was possible!) I probably won't pursue.  Wait until I show my husband!

Andi

LOL i know, some of them get off light!

So I would stil point out that even Social security estimate it needs at least £43 plus per week to maintain a child.

Don't get me started with the CSA and maintanance  payments.  My ex has his own bus company, has rental units on a vary successful industrial estate that he gets at least £30,000 per year, sends his other two children to private school and still only gets assessed at having to pay £12.50 per week and is always in arrears.  It has taken me nearly four years to get to the stage where I have requested an appeal by the CSA and only yesterday told that this could take anywhere from 3 to 9 months more to start.  My son is now nearly fourteen and I have always had to fight to get every penny since he left me for his now wife when my son was only 6 months old.  I will never give up though and firmly believe that what comes around goes around. 

Thats right, was goes around does come around! :)