I recognize this is an old topic, but this can be a nerve-racking question, and the replies on this page (after coming up with the same unhelpful answers repeated elsewhere) are mildly offensive. They seem to default to condemning anyone considering reporting the lower earning spouse.
For the record, some people are interested in this question for the purpose of being sure they are not acting fraudulently while still being unwilling to saddle their children with additional debt by following knee-jerk advice blindly insisting on the more expensive option, thereby needlessly burdening their children.
First off, if the government wanted to the rule to be that the provider is the parent who pays more, then that’s the rule they could have made… but they didn’t. Yet, they took a rather simple matter to calculate and made it much harder. These people had valid questions and introduced valid hypotheticals.
Time is an easily identifiable unit. Support is a nebulous concept which can’t even be pinned down to a single dictionary definition. Obviously, the idea is monetary and money can be broken into countable units just like time but valuation is not simple and may be impossible to pin down in some cases.
For instance, could somebody please explain how to answer this one in a situation where the parents have otherwise made a point of contributing as equally as possible? A lower earning parent lives in an expensive apartment rented across the street from a special needs child’s school for which the parent pays a premium over what they would otherwise pay and has the child over during school breaks, for and while waiting for pickup by the wealthier parent. The lower income parent also picks the child up for school everyday to bring the child to school regardless of whether it’s their day in a half-time split.
The higher earning parent lives in a much nicer house bought with appreciation earned due to having rolled the value of a previously owned home though a later jointly owned home and back separately held profit post-divorce, thus leaving that parent with more equity which was used to buy a home and avoid living in an apartment.
Which parent is providing more support? Is the nicer house more supporting than the nice, but less nice, apartment purposely rented at a premium to be across the street from the special needs child’s school (when the child’s circumstances make it far more likely the child will attend school more regularly with the apartment in that location?)
Honestly, one shouldn’t have to hire the equivalent of a tax attorney to value these kinds of things, but in the end, I imagine sources like the tax code actually do become controlling. This new rule is probably making more than one person worry unnecessarily trying to decide between unknowingly perjuring oneself and unknowingly and mistakenly saddling a child with additional debt.
Who exactly, is this rule change designed to be benefit? My only guess is more slightly poorer children from intact families will qualify for aid than before… meaning less children from broken homes will qualify. Which is of greater advantage to the children? A wealthier but broken family or a poorer intact family with two parents to share the job of loving and supporting the children in cooperative manner?
Changing the rule at the time they did which was already a time of uncertainty and loss for the children seems unfortunate. The nebulous nature of the new rule is equally unfortunate, causing stress to the parents and potentially leading to an unenviable choice between protecting one’s own future or their children’s future. Any change leading to a result of that nature represents a prima facie failure.
