What is Child Maintenance?
Child maintenance or better known as child support is regular, reliable financial support that aims to help satisfy a child’s everyday living costs. Those parents who do not hold custody, meaning those parents who are not responsible for day-to-day care of the child will pay child maintenance to the other parent.
Child maintenance cases, their amounts and the determination of who is the obligor (parent who pays the other parent) and the oblige (parent who receives child maintenance) are handled by a local court system’s family law department. Each child maintenance case is different and will necessitate some form of legal guidance; all child maintenance cases and their intricate regulations will differentiate based on locality.
What is a Child Maintenance Calculator?
A Child Maintenance Calculator is a free resource (typically found online) that will provide a rough estimate regarding how much child maintenance you may be asked to pay or might expect to receive based on the rules in your current state.
The Child Maintenance Calculator is simply a tool that enables you to see how much money you will be receiving or required to pay based on your child support case,. The Child Maintenance Calculator will not affect legal status of your case; it is only a free resource that a parent can use to help him or her budget their payments received or owed.
What does the Child Maintenance Calculator Require?
The Child Maintenance Calculator is an extremely easy resource to use and observe; the tool simply asks for personal information, tied-into income, regarding you and your spouse. The idea of the Child Maintenance calculator is to evaluate the variables that a state uses to generate a child maintenance rate.
As stated before, the product yielded is simply a rough estimate; the child support payment rate is up to the discretion of the presiding court. That being said, although there is room for subjectivity and variance in regards to particular cases, all child support payment rates are established based on a few universal variables, including both parents’ salaries or monthly gross income, the age of the child, the number of children, the monthly expenses of the children and any other forms or sources of revenue that the individual parents may enjoy.
How do I use a Child Maintenance Calculator?
The majority of websites that promote family health and planning, as well as the majority of social and health services websites, will offer a child maintenance calculator. When you have located the resource, you will be required to enter personal information for both you and your former spouse or loved on.
The calculator will utilize your salary and your spouse’s salary, as well as your child’s age, to calculate expected payments. You will be required to enter all income information into the Child Maintenance Calculator; when inputting, be sure to include income sources that include pensions, traditional wages and any other source of revenue or monthly income.
In addition to income, the Child Maintenance Calculator requires you to estimate the cost of providing for the child or children. To accurately determine this estimation you must include the cost of health insurance, food, daycare, entertainment and other child rearing related costs. Once this information has been inputted, the Child Maintenance Calculator will ask for any other outstanding information specific to your child support case. Examples of such variances may include assets of the parents, income of a new spouse, insurance costs, profits generated from investments and other children that a parent is paying child support towards.
When you have entered the above information into the Child Maintenance calculator click the “submit” button and analyze the results. The figures will be generated differently based on which calculator you use, but the majority of these tools will divide the payments in a periodic or monthly fashion. This distribution enables you to appropriately budget for you and your child.
