Hello Beachello
Thank you for your post. The information I am going to provide is based on when both parents live in the UK.
If you and your ex-husband are able to set up
child maintenance privately via what we call a family-based arrangement, there are no strict rules that both of you need to stick to. Therefore, you and your ex-husband have the freedom to decide the terms of your agreement between yourselves, such as the factors that you will include in your calculation, how much child maintenance that will be paid and the form it will be paid in. Even though family-based arrangements are not legally-binding, they give parents the freedom to decide when their child maintenance will be reviewed.
Under the statutory rules, child maintenance is worked out using the amount of gross income given to HMRC by a paying parent, their employer or their accountant to work out the average amount of earnings, or, where the paying parent is self-employed, their taxable profits. Other factors that are taken into account include the number of nights per year the paying parent has the children that maintenance is to be paid for. Any payments that are made through a family-based arrangement can be taken into account when a statutory child maintenance amount is calculated. You can find more information on how the Child Maintenance Service work out child maintenance on Gov.uk at
www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-w...ut-child-maintenance
If you and your ex-husband are unable to come to an agreement privately via a family-based arrangement and you would like an official assessment, you can make an application to the Child Maintenance Service, the Government''s new statutory service. Any child maintenance that is managed by them is legally-binding and enforceable. The Child Maintenance Service will work out child maintenance and then either, leave it to you and your ex-husband to arrange payments between yourselves or where applicable, they can collect payments on a parent''s behalf. Your ex-husband''s responsibility to pay will begin from around the point when the Child Maintenance Service contacts him.
An alternative to statutory child maintenance is for you and your ex-husband to set up child maintenance via the courts in the form of a
Consent Order or Minute of Agreement (for people that live in Scotland).
To gain a further understanding on the ways that you can put a child maintenance arrangement in place, you may wish to contact Child Maintenance Options directly. Their contact details can be found on their website at
www.cmoptions.org
The DWP have a sorting out separation web-app that you may find useful. It offers help and support to separating and separated families. The link is:
www.wikivorce.com/divorce/Sorting-Out-Separation.html
Kind regards
William
