What is child maintenence supposed to cover?

Fiona wrote:

Just for fun can anyone guess the average weekly expenditure per person in a single parent household, excluding mortgage and council tax?

£80.00 per person

£65 per person

Any more guesses?

I can tell you how much the spend is on two children, per week...

Food: £50
School Lunches: £10
Nanny/Childcare £250
Bus to school £150
Clothes/Shoes: £20
Holidays: £60
Utilities (proportionate): £75
Activities: £40
Consumables: £15
School Fees: £60

= £720 per week.

My ex2b who earns £98,000 per annum basic (£30K) bonus and is still (no surprises there!) single and with no debt, contributes £235 per week. What should I do? I earn £65K p.a. but mortgages and council tax, running a car and paying for a health related problem mean I'm out of money before I even start the month.

We have final ancilliary relief hearing in November and he is now suing for shared residence (hearing interim in May, Final in August)as he would like value out of the porperty I bought before we ever met, never lived in, he never contributed to any tenant finding or painting/cleaning, he has kept the deposits from the tenants who have already left so I had to pay this out of household expenses and.... god, I could go on.... Counting on Rossi v Rossi as non-marital asset as any value he gets out of it will only have to come back to me as maintenance so I can service the mortgage I will need to take out to pay him the value. I vcan't get my head around the fact he has an IQ of 125 and yet is that stooopid.

In all fairness canary there are plenty of us single parents on here that get next to nothing from our ex's due to the fact they know how to work the CSA , we have less than 12k per yr to bring a family up so £720 is not the norm for most single parents if only we could have that amount.

exactly. I asked the CSA exactly what their maintenance covers and was told just general upbringing. It does not allow for extras, such as school trips, school uniforms etc. Apparantly, you are supposed to make private arrangements for that sort of thing, which means that my ex only has to pay £28 a week each for 2 kids, when he earns 25k and his fiancee earns 30k and rents out her house. He just lost an appeal, after taking the CSA to tribunal for making him pay an extra £5 a week for both kids, as he said he has them more than 104 nights annually, when in reality he wasn't doing. As it is done on net pay, he pays more into his pension, shares, NI contributions etc to make his pay look less than it is. Although the rules are changing and it will be done on gross pay, it will drop from 15% to 12%, so the difference in money is hardly worth bothering about.
Puffa

Perhaps I lost some clarity in my answer - £720 PW is what they cost. £1,000 per month is what he pays.