In this video, New Jersey divorce attorney Jordan Rickards discusses the major factors and variables that go into calculating a child support obligation in a New Jersey divorce.

The following is a transcript of the above-video:

Hi everybody. I wanted to do a quick video here on the basics of calculating child support in New Jersey, and this is going to be true whether we’re talking about a divorce in New Jersey or whether the parties were never married in the first place. This is just going to be a very basic overview. I can do a video later on about more advanced topics and child support, but this will give you a general understanding.

Now, if you’ve watched the video on spousal support, you’ll understand that there are all these different factors that go into what’s a very imprecise calculation. Child support’s a little bit different. Yes, there are a lot of factors, but there’s actually a computer program that determines what the actual output is. It’s actually this calculator basically, that lawyers and judges and law clerks have, and we input certain factors and we hit the enter button and it just gives us a result. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t ways that that result can be more favorable or less favorable to you, depending on how we move some things around, but the bottom line is it’s a pretty cut and dried application. You input certain things, you hit the button and it gives you a result.

The first thing you’re going to input, in case you haven’t figured this out, is going to be your income and the income of the other parties. For this example, let’s just pretend that you are going to be the payer spouse, that you’re going to be the one who has parenting time less, therefore, you’re going to be the one that’s obligated to pay child support. First, you’re going to input your income and it’s your gross income. People tell me all the time, well, this is my take-home. Well, I don’t care what your take-home is. We enter your gross income. Or they’ll try to present their income minus their bonus. Well, no, the bonus counts too. We try to figure out what your expected bonus would be, or we average it out or something like that and we assign you an income.

We assign an income to the other party, as well. Even if they’re not working sometimes, we will impute an income to them, which is to say, this is somebody who maybe hasn’t worked, but they could work. The number that usually you hear is $30,000 or $35,000 a year, they should be able to earn. Because if you go get a job as a cashier at Walmart, you can earn that much money. So, a lot of times they’ll impute that income to the other party. But then again, if the other party is being tasked with raising very small children who, for example, aren’t even old enough to go to school yet, well maybe it’s not reasonable to impute an income to that person yet. Anyway, step number one is figuring out what income is going to be imputed and to which person. That part should be pretty obvious.

What is surprisingly less obvious to people are the other two really important factors. The first one is the number of children. You’d be surprised, I get people all the time where they’ll have three kids and we’ll run the child support numbers and they’ll say, I don’t understand this. A friend of mine makes about the same amount as me and his child support is half what mine is. Well, how many kids does he have? One. Okay, well, you have three. Three is more than one, so you can’t compare the two. There are certain fixed costs that don’t increase as much depending on the number of children, but as a general rule, supporting more children is going to be more expensive than supporting less children, and supporting older children, by the way, is going to be more expensive generally than supporting younger children. There’s something called a teenage adjustment. We don’t really have to get into it, but if you factor in the number of teenagers you have, it does make a slight difference in your child support exposure.

Number one, you’re going to be looking at your income, and number two, you’re looking at the number of children you have. To a lesser extent, though still somewhat, the ages of those children. Then number three, and this is a huge one, is parenting time. If you’re spending zero parenting time with your children, then you’re going to have a much bigger [child] support obligation than somebody who’s spending a lot of parenting time with their children. By parenting time, let me be clear, we’re speaking specifically of overnight visitation. It doesn’t matter how many dinners you have with the kids during the week or that sort of thing, it’s how many overnights they’re actually spending with you.

The problem is you have a lot of parents who get these minimal parenting time schedules and a very popular one is dad gets the kids every other weekend, Friday overnight, Saturday overnight, back at the mom’s house by Sunday. Well, that’s two overnights every two weeks, that comes out to one out of seven. If you’re only doing one overnight out of every seven, you’re going to have a very significant child support obligation. If you get to two out of seven, now we’re talking about a shared parenting arrangement. Believe it or not, it’s a pretty big jump between one out of seven to two out of seven in terms of how much less child support you’re going to pay. It’s kind of a weird thing, but it’s not linear. You would think that if you increase your parenting time by X percentage, it would decrease your child support obligation by that percentage. That’s not really the case because of how the numbers are calculated.

There are certain, like I said, fixed costs and other things, but once you get from one overnight, every seven to two overnights every seven, there’s a pretty substantial jump. Then of course, also to three out of every seven. When you get to a 50/50 schedule, it gets a little bit strange because sometimes there are certain things that you can do, and certainly if both parents have an equal amount of income and equal parenting time, you can make the argument there shouldn’t be any child support obligation.

One of the other things that gets factored in, by the way, is your spousal support. People forget about this, but actually spousal support is going to impact the child support you pay, because the more you’re going to pay in spousal support, the more you’re going to equal out the incomes. Now, it’s not going to be a dollar-for-dollar benefit to you in terms of your child support reduction, so if you’re paying a thousand dollars a month in spousal support, it’s not necessarily going to reduce your child support by a thousand dollars a month, but it is going to reduce it somewhat so there is some offsetting benefit to it.

But these are the major factors, your income, the number of children and their ages, and of course, your parenting time. There are other variables we’re going to input, which don’t make as big a difference, but you should know about them. If you are in a union and you pay mandatory union dues, that goes in. If you have daycare expenses, that’s going to go in, as well. If you have health insurance for the children and you can identify how much the child’s portion of that health insurance is, that gets factored in. We also factor in who’s getting the child tax credits. I did a video on that, which you can watch as well. Those are the major contributing factors.

Also, by the way, if you have another child support obligation, or even if you don’t have a formal child support obligation, if nevertheless you have a child by another relationship that gets factored in too, that’s called an other dependent deduction. That’s a little bit too complicated to explain on video. I mean, if that’s what you’re talking about, you really need a lawyer to help you with that. But that’s the basic overview. You take your income and the other side’s income or an imputed income, and by the way, you can’t voluntarily reduce your own income to reduce your child support obligation because you’ll just have an income imputed to you, as well. I mean, they’ll say you’re voluntarily underemployed or something like that.

You take the two incomes, you measure that against the number of children that there are, and the parenting time for everybody. You input a few other factors, you turn the crank and it spits out a result, and that’s how you calculate child support. Now, here’s the thing. I have noticed that there are a few online calculators that you can use. Do not waste your time because just for fun, I’ve tried using them to see the results they get and they’re never right, so don’t even waste your time.

If you’ve got a child support issue, you really need to speak with an experienced attorney who knows how to use this system. Like I said, you can’t, I don’t want to use the word manipulate, you can’t manipulate the outcome, but there are certain ways that you and a knowledgeable attorney can work the numbers more in your favor than not sometimes. I would say more often than not. I mean, even though you would think the inputs are pretty static, there are still better ways than others to make those inputs work for you. If you have any questions about that, I’m happy to help. Just give me a call and thanks for watching the video. Take care guys.