How to calculate child support after parents’ divorce? What expenses should you take into account? [WYWIAD]

The amount of alimony is influenced by both short-term expenses, i.e. food, clothing, travel to school or kindergarten, tuition fees for extracurricular activities, costs related to the child’s accommodation, telephone and internet charges, etc., and long-term expenses, i.e. travel costs during vacation and/or winter break, the cost of a trip to a green school, the cost of braces or corrective glasses.

A parent who has day-to-day custody of a child in the event of a divorce fulfills his or her child support obligation, in part or in full, through personal efforts to raise and care for the child. Therefore, such parental support obligation will not be material.

The other parent will be required to pay the agreed amount of child support to support the child.

What is the most common division of child support obligations between parents?

Most of the time, one of the parents takes care of the child on a daily basis, looks after him/her daily and the child stays with him/her. In this way, he/she fulfils his/her obligation to provide support to the child.

The other parent, with whom the children will not stay on a daily basis, will, in most cases, fulfill his or her maintenance obligation by paying a specific amount to the child.

What is taken into account when calculating the appropriate amount of alimony?

To calculate the appropriate amount of child support, on the one hand, it is necessary to take into account the justified and real costs of maintaining the child and, on the other hand, the income and financial possibilities of the obliged parent.

The obligation to pay maintenance to minor children takes precedence over all other obligations of the parents. Therefore, if the parent who is obliged to pay maintenance also has an obligation to the former spouse to settle the agreement resulting from the division of assets, he or she must first fulfill the maintenance obligation to the children.

How to calculate the appropriate amount for a child?

The parent who currently has custody of the child, in trying to support the child, should first pay attention to how much the child’s maintenance has cost up to now.You should take into account, among others: costs related to:

• meals,
• clothes,
• treatment,
• school-related costs, i.e. all costs related to preparing the school kit, travel costs to school, costs related to extracurricular activities, perhaps private lessons, additional costs of a foreign language, all activities outside of school, i.e. sports, recreational or artistic activities. If the child demonstrates any special abilities – the costs associated with their development,
• costs related to the property where the children live – costs calculated per month, i.e. calculated as an average annual value in a given month,
• long-term costs, i.e. related to holidays, school trips, winter holiday trips,
• costs related to, for example, orthodontic treatment or ophthalmological treatment, such as the purchase of corrective glasses – these are all long-term costs, they cannot be calculated and indicated in a given month, but must be calculated, for example, for two months or three years, because orthodontic treatment can last three years and then we divide the total cost of this treatment into months, assuming that this cost covers 3 years.

If, for example, the total cost of treatment is PLN 8,000, then we divide this amount by 36 months (i.e. 3 years) and then we get the average monthly amount, which should be added to the alimony, which is the cost established to improve the joint maintenance of the child.

What should you do if you discover over time that the costs of maintaining a child have increased and new expenses have arisen?

If there is a significant change in circumstances, such as the need for orthodontic treatment, e.g. the costs of maintaining the child increase, each time the father can file a lawsuit to increase the child support. Food issues can be resolved very successfully through an agreement before a judicial mediator.

A parent entitled to claim child support on behalf of a minor child is exempt from court costs, which makes this process more accessible.

If, in a given case, both parties to the proceedings, the parent entitled to maintenance and the obligated parent, see the possibility of amicably determining the amount of maintenance, they should endeavour to conclude an agreement. A court settlement, as well as an agreement concluded before a mediator and subsequently approved by a court, constitutes an order of enforcement on the same level as a judgment. And what does this matter? Both a court settlement, an agreement before a mediator and a court decision can be enforced compulsorily if the obligated parent does not wish to fulfil the established maintenance obligation.