Ex Trying To Pay Less

My ex husband and I have been separated since July 2013, divorced since August 2014, and have both since remarried.

We revisit child support each January and adjust based upon his income for the year prior (as was recommended for us to do). We have never had an issue until this year.

This year, my ex husband stated he switched positions at his job, which lower the amount of income he receives, and also bought a new house, and so he needs to lessen the amount of time he sees his children so that he pays less in child support.

He wanted to go from seeing his kids roughly 70ish days out of the year (he’s a truck driver so having an EOWE visitation schedule is basically impossible) to 35 days, effectively making me the primary parent AND cutting child support in half.

His job has changed to where he’s now home every Tuesday and every weekend, not the once every 6-8 weeks he was home before switching positions.

Is there any legal recourse here? I would think that changing a job where your income drops by almost 50% and admitting to taking your children less for the sole purpose of not paying out as much in child support is enough to have it brought up in court because he wasn’t forced to make the job change - he did it solely for the child support aspect.

His child support obligation should not decrease based on him enjoying less custodial time. The guidelines work so that the more custodial time a parent has, the less the obligation. Have you used our child support calculator? You can create a login and save various worksheets based on changing the values.

His lower income will serve to lower the obligation, if a judge feels as though he deliberately changed jobs so as to decrease his child support obligation, the judge has the ability to impute income to him for purposes of the child support calculation.