A snippet:

Parents pinched by the recession are flooding courts across the state with requests for reductions in child support payments.

In Wayne County, requests for payment adjustments have doubled. Courts there and across southeast Michigan are prioritizing such cases to expedite relief to strapped payers, officials said. These requests, called modification motions, illustrate the ripple effect of the state’s economic contraction that reaches across multiple households and reduces the dollars available for children.

“I feel sick,” said Terry McCleery. The 48-year-old dad said he would like to pay more child support but sought a reduction in Wayne County after he was laid off from an auto supplier in May. “That’s less money going to my daughter. I ran out of money. I had no choice.”

The article, and the situations it brings to light, has resulted in some chatter on the MonroeTalks forums.

I have no experience with the Michigan Friend of the Court System. The child support for my daughter was handled through the Ohio Job and Family Services. The last check came in 2007 as she turned 18.

I did, however, have to deal with occasional situations over the years when my ex-husband was between jobs and the child support was late or on hold until his next paycheck arrived. In the meantime, I still had bills to pay. So I can speak from experience to the parents who are waiting for child support and either don’t see it coming, or it’s late, or it’s a partial check …

In a perfect world, such a thing would never happen. The full child support payments would always arrive on time. The child’s needs, after all, do not go away just because a parent is unemployed.

The reality is: split parents where one or both is unemployed have to work around money issues for the kids. It’s no different than if someone in the household became unemployed. And I’ve been in THAT situation too.

If you are the parent who is receiving money, here are some practical tips to deal with late or non-existent child support relating to joblessness:

• Stay in close contact with your case worker on details such as whether a revision of the court order is likely and what to expect in the long run. This is not a new situation for the agencies – they’ve been dealing with jobless parent matters all along. The difference now is in the number of revision requests they are handling.
• Find every means possible to cut back on household expenses so you have the flexibility to handle a late, shorted or nonexistent child support payment. Use my Downsized Budget series as a guide of where to look for cash flow savings.
• Seek out and use discount and money-saving programs and services that rely more on special circumstances or your own efforts than strictly on household income. Reason: child support is often included as income on assistance applications. Whether or not you are getting that money right now may or may not be relevant.
• All parents and children involved in these situations need to discuss — or at least be aware of — the priorities for any money that is available. It is likely that the family will have to cut back on student activities such as music lessons, sports involvement, Christmas gift budgets and summer camp until the situation improves. Another idea that worked at one point for my family: Can the children by cared for by the unemployed parent on at least a part-time basis so the working parent doesn’t have to spend as much money on day care?
• If the affected child is college age or soon-to-be, make sure you understand the rules that apply at the federal level, in your state, and at your college, for divorced parents and their household income. Check out the Divorce and Financial Aid section at FinAid.com.

Milan Free Methodist Church, 950 Arkona Rd., Milan, Mich., will host a Single Moms Pampering Day from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday Oct. 24.

This is a free event but registration is required in advance at the church office, (734) 439-2414.

Moms will be invited to brunch, facials, manicures, pedicures and free oil changes. Child care will be available on site.

The Sisters Acquiring Financial Empowerment Health and Wealth Expo will be held from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday October 24 at the Northwest Activities Center, 18100 Meyers St., Detroit, Michigan 48235.

Admission is free and open to the public. Lunch also will be provided at no charge.

There will be speakers and information tables on topics such as ‘How to find great jobs in a tough economy,’ ‘Learn to Budget and Enjoy it,’ and ‘How Domestic Violence Affects Our Community.’

A primary goal of The SAFE Health and Wealth Expo is to raise the metro Detroit community’s awareness of how domestic violence affects women on an economic level. Domestic abusers are known to restrict access to financial resources, which can limit the options for victims to leave their situations.

The expo is also intended to help area women stabilize their finances at a time when job losses and foreclosures are affecting the region.

For information about the expo, call (888) 757-6880 or go to www.safehealthwealth.org.

My two-person tricks include:

• Buy meat in portions that can be split easily in individual or two-person size. The Angel Food Ministries meat packages are pretty easy to split up when you get home – and so are many of the “family pack” meats at the grocery store. I’ll also buy hamburger in the 3 or 5-pound rolls and separate those up before freezing.
• Buy appropriate-sized kitchen appliances. I have a 4-cup coffee maker, not a 12-cup coffee maker. I also have George Foreman grills and Crock-Pot slow cookers in both “small” and “family” sizes. I’m not getting rid of my bigger grill or slow cooker because I do need them when the daughter is home or we have company.
• Freeze or can your produce in smaller jars. Get the pint-sized jars, not the quart-sized jars, for the salsa, applesauce, pickles and jams you make at home.
• Get some freezer-quality leftover tubs and baggies. I might not use refrigerated leftovers during the next day or two, so the freezer is a big help. I’ve been saving and freezing what’s left of the spaghetti sauce when we have pasta. And when I make bread in the breadmaker, I’m slicing and freezing the results immediately so that it stays fresh as long as possible.

Update: Sorry but I’m shutting down comments on this post. It’s turned into a spam target.

CreditCards.com has this report from Sally Herigstad: When your ex doesn’t pay on joint account.

One of the family law provisions I dislike in the Michigan court system is a clause in many divorce decrees specifying that custodial parents who move more than 100 miles away from the other parent – or depending on the wording, out of state – have to meet with the judge about that situation.

The expectation is that parents will continue to live within a reasonable distance to each other to help keep the child’s routines as normal as possible, and help the child maintain relationships with both parents.

But I am so glad I didn’t have to deal with that requirement. My divorce was settled in 1990 in Ohio, with a sole custody situation.

It was stressful enough for me to take a job in Monroe and to move with my husband and daughter from Ohio to Michigan in 2000.

I moved only 50 miles away from where I used to live, but since my ex-husband had previously moved out of town in the other direction, we now had a 90-minute drive between our homes.

My ex-husband was concerned about the move, and that was understandable. But I assured him we would keep up with weekends, holidays and summer visits. We did. However, over the years, he and I agreed to re-arrange the schedules during holidays so there wasn’t so much driving back and forth. We also had half-way meetings from time to time, or bunched up visitation dropoffs and pickups with other errands.

What if I had to explain to the judge who handled my divorce why I was moving out of state? Would he have granted my request?

Everyone would now agree that I made the right choice. My former workplace has downsized so much I would have certainly lost my job within a couple of years. But the situation was not so obvious in 2000. According to some, I was taking a gamble that Monroe was a better option.

These days, the recession is forcing a lot of Michigan families to deal with this situation on far more dire circumstances.

The Detroit Free Press has a report today on A divorced parents’ dilemma: leave kids to find work.

A snippet:

As more Michigan parents seek change of domicile orders — a court ruling that allows a custodial parent to move more than 100 miles with the child — judges are faced with difficult decisions. Bloomfield Hills family law attorney Henry Gornbein said when times were good, judges generally refused to allow such moves for solely financial reasons.

“Usually, it had to involve more, like a remarriage that required relocation,” he said.

But now, as courtrooms fill up with people desperate for jobs, judges are more sympathetic.

The Free Press report has a lot of useful information for split and divorced families in Michigan on issues such as child support from an out-of-work parent, and where to seek counseling and legal help for l0w-income families. In Monroe County, our local legal aid office is Legal Services of South Central Michigan, phone number (734) 241-8310.

By the way, about the time my daughter turned 18 and graduated from high school, her dad and stepmom moved to Texas for work reasons. Since she’s away to college most of the year, the timing of their move was not a big deal. She stays in contact with them via phone and computer – just as she does with us. And she flies down to Texas a couple times of year to visit her other family.

It can be just a complicated of a situation when the child is younger and a family needs to arrange for health insurance benefits, day care expenses and school activity fees … but a lot of families don’t run into a financial need situation until it’s time for college.

If your family circumstances are different than mine, and they will be for many Michigan families, please don’t use my family stories as an example of what to expect for college financing.

We have a pretty clear-cut case of who is financially responsible for my daughter: me and my current husband. My divorce took place in 1990 in Ohio. I have always had sole custody / guardianship with visitation rights to my ex-husband. Although he paid child support, that court order expired when she turned 18.

But the most common custody plan in Monroe County, Mich., based on the divorce decrees that have issued by our county court system and printed in The Monroe Evening News in recent years, is joint legal custody and often a joint physical custody arrangement.

So what can you expect, and what issues do you have to consider?

The FinAid site has an entire page on Divorce and Financial Aid.

The site explains such details as:

• Which household income is reportable for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
• When child support and alimony is reportable.
• When a stepparent’s income is reportable.
• Which parent gets to claim the education tax credit.
• Why the income of non-custodial parents is requested by many private colleges.
• The fact that Michigan is among several states that has provisions to allow the courts to order non-custodial parents to help pay for college. 

It really doesn’t matter whether a layoff happened because of the Chrysler factory shutdown, the Monroe or Toledo or Detroit city department budget cuts, any number of school districts in Michigan and Ohio that are announcing layoffs, or a small business going under that never made the headlines.

It also doesn’t matter whether your child support comes through the Michigan Friend of the Court system, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services system or an equivalent program sponsored by another state.

The bottom line is the same: the parent who receives child support needs to be prepared to deal with late, or temporarily no, payments for whatever reason that may come up.

The background: When a child support account is created, the court that handled the divorce or paternity case uses a formula to determine how much money should go from one parent to the other. There are state and local rules regarding how often that amount can be reviewed, and for what circumstances.

The usual procedure is that child support is automatically withheld from one parent’s paycheck, and within a couple of days money is automatically deposited to the other parent’s bank account. Every week or every month, the account is credited with the amount that is actually paid vs. what was due.

Be warned: I have little sympathy for parents who might want to jump into this thread and complain that the child support system isn’t fair. It is what it is.

The bureaucracy was created to prevent parents from failing to follow through with child support court orders. State governments are not interested in putting children on welfare and public assistance programs when the preferred alternative is to have both parents contributing financially to the upkeep of the children.

So while you can lobby your lawmakers and policy makers about the details of the child support program, such a system is absolutely necessary.

Now … what happens if the money is late or in limbo because of a layoff or a job change under more positive circumstances?

The account is updated with the amount in arrears, or the past due.

The state child support systems have procedures in place that can, depending on the circumstances, take measures such as to snag a federal tax refund, a state tax refund or a lawsuit settlement; or order that past due amounts be paid off with extra money taken out once the parent is employed again.

As long as you stay “within the system,” so to speak, someone is keeping track of that past due. Therefore, the parent who is supposed to receive the money, in theory, will eventually get all the money that was skipped.

That doesn’t solve the short-term problem of child support not arriving when it was “supposed to.”

If you receive child support, you need to arrange your financial matters so that you can handle a late or shorted check or a temporary stop to the payments.

I know, this is easier said than done. But I had to deal with that situation as my ex-husband transitioned from one job to the next, and from military payroll to a civilian payroll and back again, during the years he was paying child support for our daughter. While the account was actually paid in full shortly before our daughter turned 18, there were the occasions over the years when the check was late or when I received no child support for a few weeks. We also noticed overlapping payments from time to time. It can take a little bit of time for the system to catch up and the payment schedule to settle out when someone is changing jobs.

To help you improve your cash flow cushion, you will find practical money-saving tips at The Downsized Budget: How and Where to Cut Back; and tips of how to seek out financial help at Do you need assistance? Tips to read first.

Keep in mind that the details can be complicated as you seek out financial assistance on behalf of children of split families.

For some programs and services, you need to report the current income of the family. Therefore if child support is not being paid, it’s not part of your current income. There will be other programs and services where court-ordered child support will be counted as income whether you are receiving it or not – because, in theory, that money catches up eventually.

In the meantime, go on the state government web site for the state where your child support case is handled to look up the procedures and policies. You need to know what rules are currently in effect, and how they apply to your situation. Those details are constantly changing.

It would also be smart to keep the phone numbers handy of the lawyer who handled your legal action and the caseworker or office who handles your child support.

You also want to consider setting up an on-line account where you can monitor payments as they are made and the balance due. Michigan has just started such a system.

Any idea if there are similar blogs like this related to financial help for single moms?…

Well, yes and no.

There are many, many personal finance and frugal living sites, forums, blogs and twitters on the Internet. Some of them are specifically aimed at divorced or single parents. I’m also aware of a personal finance site that is aimed at gay and lesbian couples.

I was a single mom for a time, so I understand the special circumstances. You’ll find the posts I specifically aim for that audience in my archive under single parenting and split families.

But keep in mind that a lot of money-saving tips work no matter what your family dynamics are.

After all, I was shopping with coupons in my single parent days too.

A snippet:

Women who are married and lose their jobs may be able to drop out of the labor force and wait for the economy to improve, living on their husbands’ income. In that case, a woman is not considered unemployed.

A single woman likely cannot wait to look for a new job.

“If you’re a single wage earner, there is nothing to fall back on,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank.

I was once a single mom. My first husband and I split when our daughter was a baby; it was almost four years before I was remarried. Even though I was working full time in a professional college-degree career (newspaper reporter), I really had a hard time making financial ends meet.

One reason: Day care cost more than my rent.

Another reason: I had student loans to pay.

Another reason: Even though my parents lived nearby, it was not practical at the time for me and my daughter to move in with them.

How do you think my frugal lifestyle started?

Based on that experience, I do have some posts in my archives specifically dealing with single parenting and split families.

I also encourage single parents to apply for any and all available financial assistance for which you qualify. There are many programs, services and resources available for southeast Michigan residents whether or not you get government help such as food stamps.

Check out the links on my sidebars and blogrolls – especially the do you need assistance? sidebar and the grocery shopping on a budget sidebar. (I’ll be giving the grocery presentation to a divorced / widowed group later this month.)

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