In these tough financial times, support is becoming even more important. Courts are facing tough challenges with parties losing their jobs. In my experience, the courts have been cutting parents who lose jobs some slack to give them time to find another job. And that only seems fair. The larger problems are the cases where the supporting parent stops working the overtime that you were accustomed to, or even worse, is simply working less hours per week. The biggest problem is the perpetually unemployed parent who had no problem supporting the family before the parties separated. In some cases, the adult working spouse actually moves back in with his parents. This happens more than you might think. There are some tools that the skilled family law attorney can employ to obtain an order for more support. One way of doing this is to request that the court “impute income” to the supporting spouse. Child support awards are required to be commensurate with each parent’s ability to pay. This is ordinarily a reflection of all income available to the parents “from whatever source.” This determination must be made on the basis of the parties current circumstances. With the foregoing in mind, the key to imputed income is that a party’s actual earnings are not necessarily determinative. Under certain circumstances, the ability to pay may be judged by a parent’s earning capacity. In the past, this required a bad faith avoidance of support obligations, such as when a parent was intentionally suppressing income or refusing to accept or seek gainful employment. But now, there is a more liberal approach for the judges to use in their own discretion. There is an overriding policy interest to ensure adequate child support, which can be used to have income imputed. In fact, public policy supports imputing income based on earning capacity without regard to the parent’s motivation for reducing available income. Thus, if your spouse was making more money and now he (or she) is making less, imputing income may be the way to go.
For all of your family law needs, call the Law Offices of Richard A. Marcus at 661-257-8877.