Get as Many Overnights With Your Child as You Can

Video Transcribed: You’ve heard of it. We all hate it. Child support in Tulsa. My name is Brian L. Jackson. I am a Tulsa fathers’ rights attorney here with Dads.law, where fathers are not disposable. And today I want to talk to you about how to mitigate your child support liability in Tulsa.

The first thing, the way the child support is calculated in Oklahoma, is there’s a set of guidelines. And the major factors that will control how much you pay are going to be your income, her income, and how many overnights each of you has.

If you have roughly 50/50, then if you earn approximately the same, the amount paid over is negligible. But if you earn more than her, even with 50/50 custody, you’re going to end up paying more, or you’re going to end up paying something. It may not be very much, but you’ll end up paying something.

Still, your first and best way to mitigate your child support liability is to get as many overnights with your child as you’re able to. The more you have, the less you pay. Because the presumption is you’re paying for your child while they’re in your care. So that’s one thing.

Another thing is if you do have other children by other relationships, then the cost of those children can be deducted out. Also, you want to make sure that when you’re calculating what your income is and her income is, it’s accurate.

I’ve seen situations, in fact, I’ve seen one recently, where you have women who have income that is what you could think of as off books. In other words, they’re not reporting it as income to the IRS. They’re not admitting its income, but it’s damn well income.

Things like if they’re being supported by their parents or if they get income under the table. Or another one, and this is something you can include, although proving it’s tricky, what about if their income is from criminal activity?

It is considered income under the guidelines. If you could, believe it or not, income from criminal activity is actually taxable. That how Al Capone got sent to prison was for tax evasion because he didn’t pay taxes on his ill-gotten gains.

But that is considered income for the purposes of child support, although the trick is proving it. But this is where your next best move on child support, besides getting as many overnights with your child as you can, is to make sure you get a good lawyer to do really detailed discovery and nail her down on how she’s paying her bills. Because if somebody’s giving her money to pay her bills, that should be considered a gift. It should be included in the calculation.

If she’s making a little bit of money on the side, cutting grass, or watching somebody’s kids or whatever it is she’s doing and getting money under the table, that should be included. And if she has a little criminal sideline, maybe she sells a little weed on the side or something, again, get that information together and make sure that’s included in her income.

Because the one thing a lot of attorneys representing women will try to do is they’ll say she has no job and no income, so let’s impute her at minimum wage. No, if she’s making money under the table, you want to know about it and get that included, because again, that will mitigate your liability.

Also, so make sure that whatever you are imputed at is fair. Because another trick I’ve seen from time to time, is you have guys where like say you work on commission, where your income is variable and there could be months where you make a lot of money and months where you barely make anything.

You don’t want to be imputed at that high number on the month you had really good sales. You want it averaged out over the year, and you need to make sure that whatever number goes into that calculation represents an average over a year.

And if you have a particularly rich year, you might even want to look at trying to get it averaged out over several years to make it fair, because what you don’t want is her trying to claim you’re making like $5,000 a month every month if you’re not.

If you had a good month and made $5,000. But then the prior month, maybe you made like $1,500, $2,000. Well, it should be averaged out, because that’s fair. And you don’t want to be put in the poor house by your own success.

So that’s something else to consider is how your income is being imputed. And again, you want to pay attention to exactly what’s being done. Make sure it’s a good number because you’ll get women’s lawyers who try to get cute with that. Also, make sure that if something is excluded, it’s really excluded.

I had a case a couple of years ago where my client had been working for the state of Oklahoma and the opposing counsel, and the state of Oklahoma pays an allowance and towards your healthcare. And it’s a use it or loses it benefit, either it goes into healthcare or you don’t get it. It’s not paid out as money to take home with you.

Well, the other attorney was trying to include that in the child support calculation. That amount doesn’t, I mean the statute’s specific, it is not included. And now, that’s another example of where you can get calculated high because of that.

So you need to make sure that your attorney is paying attention to stuff like that because that’s how you can get screwed. And if you are dealing with a child support situation, you need a good lawyer. So you should go to Dads.law, and we’ll help you out. At Dads.law, fathers are not disposable. Thanks, guys.