Understanding Your Child Support Obligations
You have to pay extracurricular expenses for your child as part of your child support obligation, right? Hi, I’m Tulsa child support attorney Clint Hastings. I practice here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I focus on father’s rights. The answer to that question is actually no, you don’t have to pay the extracurricular expenses as part of your child support obligation. Now, throughout the years, in my experience, you’ll see routinely a lot of decrees, state provisions for division of extracurricular expenses.
They often match the percent of contribution to the combined gross income of the parties, which is also used in other parts of the child support orders. However, extracurriculars do not have to be accounted for in a decree. It’s often just easier to do so so you don’t have arguments in the future. One thing that I try to get my fathers in their decrees, at least if it’s by agreement, and a lot of times I’ll get it with the court, is to go ahead and put in provisions so that there’s not later arguments.
Creating Clear Guidelines in Your Decree
In those provisions, I will put that it has to be agreed upon extracurricular expenses. And this is in place even if you don’t have joint custody, because what happens in a lot of cases is the wife or mother of the child enrolls them in some super expensive extracurriculars that the father just doesn’t agree with, and it’s put in there that he pays 50% or his combined income share, which is often larger than the female’s share, and then you’re stuck with that.
So I try to do an agreed-to provision. It has to be a prerequisite for you paying your share. And then often, sometimes, there’s a father that wants their child to do a particular sport that mom’s not okay with or has resistance to, or it may be because of the cost. And in that case, I have dads that say, hey, I’ll pay for the entire 100% of that extracurricular activity, whether it be football or baseball or driving to tournaments for either or any type of such sports, and they just agree to put the bill on all of it so that the child can participate without argument.
Seek Legal Advice on Your Child Support Matters
So I hope that helps. It’s something you definitely should discuss with your attorney and not just assume that it’s one way or the other because it is something that can be in your decree in several different optional ways. Look over our website and call the Tulsa Dads.Law attorney at 918-962-0900 if you would like a consultation on this or any other issues. Thanks.
