The duty to support your child begins with conception, including the child’s prenatal care and delivery. In divorce cases, the duty to support begins with separation or filing. Failure to pay support voluntarily will be considered against you by a Judge. While you may not immediately know what the exact child support amount is supposed to be, Ms. Brodzki can certainly give you a rough estimate so that you will be paying something close to what you should be paying. Otherwise, you could end up in the unenviable position of owing back child support, and have to come up with a large sum of money in a very short amount of time.  

Calculating Child Support in Florida was made easy to perform (if not easy to understand in all its logic) by the Florida Legislature. We have a statute (§61.30) that outlines child support for us. Child support is determined by adding together your net income and your spouse’s net income, and depending on how many children you have, the legislature has already figured out for you how much you should spend to raise your children, given your net available income. Each spouse contributes a certain percentage to that “income pie”. Multiply your percentage by the amount the legislature has set as child support, and that tells you how much child support will be. Note: in alimony cases, alimony must be figured before child support, since the alimony affects both parties’ incomes, which must be determined before calculating child support.

In addition to baseline child support, there are calculations for health insurance and day care expense, if applicable. Those amounts are added to the base child support obligation or allocated between the parties. Each party is credited with the amounts that they pay on behalf of the other party, since only one parent pays the health insurance premium, and only one parent pays the day care center, although both are responsible for their percentage. Uncovered medical, dental, psychological and orthodontic bills and co-pays are also paid on some percentage basis (whether 50/50 or proportionate to your incomes). Special needs children are subject to additional consideration.

Child Support is paid until a child turns 18, or 19 if the child is enrolled in high school with a reasonable expectation of graduation, or until the child otherwise becomes emancipated. However, as of right now, child support does not automatically terminate upon the child’s emancipation. Currently, the paying parent must file a Petition to Modify Child Support if there are multiple children and support will continue to be paid for the remaining minor children. If the child support was being deducted from the paying parent’s paycheck by his employer, and being sent to the State Disbursement Unit (which is the case for the majority of parents receiving support), that will NOT, in most cases, automatically terminate upon your child reaching 18 or graduating from high school. This often causes unanticipated aggravation for paying parents. (Note: The legislative committee of the Family Law Section of the Florida Bar is proposing a new statute that would mandate automatic reductions in child support upon emancipation, with calculations required to be written into the Final Judgment or Settlement Agreement to account for the emancipation of the children and the corresponding reduction or termination of child support.)