Failing to invest the time necessary to understand the true costs of raising your children is likely to result in on-going conflict with your spouse. Our experience is that most people underestimate the true costs involved in raising children. This is partly due to the difficulty most of us have balancing our family budgets month to month. Trying to ferret out which expenses relate to children is an even tougher chore.
Many child-related expenses are obvious and relatively easy to budget; examples include clothing and groceries. Other expenses are more difficult to isolate. Consider the following expenses incurred by the parent with custody:
- Larger house or apartment including bedrooms, play area, and utilities and maintenance expenses.
- Larger car to transport kids and friends.
- Costs associated with time off from work for doctor appointments
- Reduction in potential income due to inability to work or study extra hours to improve employment situation.
Child support payments are rarely enough to cover the costs the custodial parent bears in raising the children.
When one parent has sole custody, expenses relating to children don’t rise, but they are hard to identify and agree upon. Parents with shared custody get stretched further, because they have to maintain two households where children can feel comfortable. Aside from the extra space needed to house them, there will be added costs due to the duplication of items like toys and clothes.
Regardless of the type of custody, families simply have fewer resources after divorce than they did before. Parents generally want to maintain the same standard of living for their children, and this concept is supported in the law. The only way to make this happen, though, is for both parents to understand the costs associated with raising their children, and to work together (or through attorneys) to create a budget that achieves their goals and is affordable.
Successfully negotiating child support has many advantages over resorting to a court order. Although child support court orders are not the wildcards they once were, they are usually based on arbitrary formulas that fail to take into account the unique needs of your family, and often result in one or both parents being dissatisfied.
