Single Dads

Many moons ago when I first started the blog Single Dads, I wrote a post where I gave you a list that included a bunch of things that you could do immediately financially for your kids.  In the spirit of the immediate fix, I’ve decided to jot down a few things that you can do immediately if you are deciding about getting a divorce from the financial side.

Get a new checking account. Be honest and start thinking about your family’s shared cash. Is it possible that your soon to be ex will drain your joint accounts? If the answer is “maybe”, then you have a problem, especially if it’s a contentious situation. Get a new bank account.

Start looking at your credit card situation.  If you’re at all like me, you’ll find that you had a lot more than cash tied up in your ex - you’ve got credit tied up in them as well. Unfortunately, anyone will tell you that credit can be your death if things go sour.  Divorce is death on your credit.  I immediately stopped using my cards that I shared with the ex when I had that “feeling”. You should too, if you know what’s good for you.  You are going to need that money, probably to pay lawyers.

Closing vehicle loans.  Seriously, do you really want to haggle over who gets the SUV if the dreaded thing goes down?  How about do you want to haggle over the SUV loan?  Please.  Get rid of the payment if you can.

Those are just a few ideas.  You’ve got to consider wills, insurance, and other financial matters as well.  And most importantly, know where you are going to LIVE.  You need a place to hang your hat.

Scenario: You break up with your wife, who has your children. You see your kids and pay child support for years, then discover to your horror that one of the kids that you thought was yours in fact wasn’t yours at all. So, you seek to decrease child support payments. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Wrong. Not in New Jersey.

TRENTON, N.J. - Paternity doesn’t count when it comes to a Hunterdon County man’s bid to lower child support payments for a child that’s not his.

An appeals court upheld a lower court which denied the man’s request in 2006 after he said he discovered he was not the father of the 10-year-old girl.

The appeals panel found the judge put the best interest of the child first.

Via Newsday.

So, wait. Married couple has a kid then another. Couple gets divorced. Man pays child support, then finds out that one of the children isn’t his. He wants his child support reduced, and they rule against him? Really? I would think that the ex-wife committed a crime in lying to the ex-husband in the first place, then his acting on that crime would nullify the child support responsibility.

This story is filled with so much wrong. Women should hate it too. Doesn’t this one individual basically make a bunch of women who deserve child support for their children look bad?

I’m quite sure that I don’t have the whole story, but my, that sounds ridiculous. I can’t imagine how screwed up that poor child is going to be as well.

What’s the lesson to learn here?

With quite a bit of interest, I read the article Expert Says That Poll Results Show “Crack”In Court System in Divorce360.com today, expecting to see some more disparaging remarks about dads not paying support. I wasn’t shocked. According to the poll, 43% of custodial parents don’t receive a dime of child support.

Sadly, my anecdotal evidence probably bears this out. I meet quite a few dads and moms, with and without “custodial” care of their kids, and probably close to half the single parents that I know with kids get little or no child support at all. However, there is a lot more to this statistic than meets the eye.

The first item that leaps to mind is the thought of “custodial”. By definition the custodial parent is that parent that has the child or children half time or more. By tradition, this means “mother” in this country. Even though the number of fathers that have the custodial tag applied to them is surely on the rise (ask Kevin Federline), still, Mom still rules the roost, and the courts, when it comes to parenting. In fact, I’ve seen a case where a father actually HAD his son living with him full time was still paying child support to his ex - at the same level he was when his son was staying with his ex-wife.

Hopefully that was an extreme case, but somehow, I don’t think so.

The realization, however, that I finally came to over some time is that the statistics are not the complete story, and that these individual stories are the most important facts of all. No stat can give you enough information, for either divorced men or women. Before you jump to conclusions based on the raw facts presented here, think critically about circumstances as well.

Many, many years ago, my father used to take me to the window of a place that I lived to look out on the city below at night. He would gesture at and talk about the seemingly endless number of lights that we saw, flickering on and off and tell me something along the lines of “there are millions of stories in the naked city…you are just one of them.” Years later, I was told that he was referring to a classic radio program from his youth, and I realized exactly the lesson that he was trying to teach.

The world is a very big place, he was saying. All things in context.

I’m still no fan of deadbeat dads or moms.

But my father is a very smart man.

There is no doubt how I feel about deadbeat dads; in fact, I have made that quite clear, and recently, that as a single dad, deadbeat dads make my life more difficult. Even so, as a person that actually pays child support (and more than I’ve been asked, by the way), I admit to a touch of confusion on the subject of punishment for deadbeats.

Don’t be too confused at all. I do believe that men, or now increasingly, women, who don’t pay child support for their children when asked by either their significant other or the legal system, are a low class indeed. Truly, who but the most trifling of society wouldn’t want their children to be taken care of when they aren’t there? I know that I do.

However, I’m torn about the punishment for those neglectful people. In my state, the most popular punishment for failing to pay child support? Revoking their driver’s license.

Now, at first glance this seems ok. After all, driving is a privilege, not a right. Surely this would entice people to pay their child support, so that the state doesn’t have to take up the slack with welfare programs, right?

I say wrong. In this particular case, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, and I think that it’s easy to see why. A reasonable person can see that the people that most likely to pay their child support are the those that are most able to pay. Therefore, it’s easy to infer that those are least likely to pay their child support are those that are LEAST able to pay, meaning, the poor.

So, you’re a poor person who has been ordered to pay child support. What are your choices?

1. Pay. Unfortunately, you’re poor, and can’t pay. Does this mean get another job in today’s economy?

2. Don’t pay, and lose your driver’s license, which for a lot of people, means either losing their job, or busing or cabbing to work. For many poor, especially in areas without mass transit, this is probably a poor option.

3. Don’t pay, and flee to stay ahead of the legal system, leaving behind at least one poor child without one parent.

There are the options, and that’s exactly why yanking the driver’s license doesn’t work; it leaves an already relatively poor person with an actual incentive to abandon their children. Hence, you get the permanent underclass of a poor child and single parent, and legal scofflaws. Surely that can’t be the intended impact of the law.

It’s a poor policy, especially in our vehicle-centric society.
Let’s look for other options for deadbeats, please. But deadbeat dads still drive me crazy.

Scenario: you are in a bad relationship that you’ve carefully considered and have determined that cannot be saved. Your problem is that you have children that you adore and don’t want to leave. It’s a quandary without a perfect resolution.

Let’s face facts. Long before you accept that you and the soon to be ex are not compatible under any conceivable circumstances, you know deep in your gut that the relationship between the two of you is going nowhere. This is the exact moment that planning should begin. Here’s your template.

Get A Lawyer.

This is the first step, and possibly the most important.  Having a competent attorney can determine the all important issues of alimony, property division, and parenting time.  Attorneys are your advocates in the court that YOU pay; consequently, one of their main jobs is to make you look good.  Not having one is almost undoubtedly something that you will regret.  This is where I personally made my first mistake.  Pay the money and get a lawyer.

Steady Yourself Financially.

Getting a grip on your finances is almost a factor of step 1.  Lawyers cost money, and you need to have it to pay for them.  In addition, all kinds of items are taken into account during a breakup, especially if you have children.  Economics plays its role as well.  Don’t quit your job, don’t stop paying credit card bills, and pay down some loan debt if you can.  You might need that credit later; in fact, the messier your breakup, the more likely you’ll need credit.  If you have shared accounts, you might have a whole new set of problems, but get a grip of the money that you personally earned.

Lose The Bad Habits.

Warren Buffet once said his father told him that you should never do anything in public that you don’t want to read about on the front page of your local newspaper, and by God, the man is right. We’re not talking about habits necessarily as much as things that might embarrass you.  In other words, falling off the barstool in the singles bar trying to pick up your ex-babysitter might not be the best idea.  Try not to do that.  Instead, consider positive activities that would probably be good for you anyway, especially considering the fact that you are soon to be single:

Taking a class with other similarly situated people (meaning single or that share your interests in some way)

Developing a hobby (reading, writing, and exercising are especially good for the brain and body)

Spending time with supportive friends and family is good, since you’ve probably spent a substantial amount of recent time avoiding them.  Reconnect.

Breaking up is hard enough to do; making it harder on yourself than it should be is ridiculous.  Do the above three things first and spare yourself unnecessary suffering down the road.

For your consideration:  a cautionary, personal tale about something that you shouldn’t hear about every day but possibly do, something that shouldn’t happen regularly but does, and something that that has a sad relationship to parents and adults in general. 

Earlier this week, I had the distinct pleasure (?) of being called for jury duty - something that I had put off in August thinking, “Maybe they won’t call me again.”  Of course that wasn’t true.  So you can imagine my shock when, after I was finally assigned to a courtroom, I was actually the first person selected to sit on the jury.  I believe that I actually had a public Homer Simpson moment and audibly said, “D’oh!” after my selection.

The case was a complicated one where the accused (a husband and father of one, soon to be two,) was being tried for assault on his pregnant wife.  Without boring you with an enormous amount of detail, the assault could have occurred, but there was little proof - no eyewitness testimony, no police report, no hospital reports, and no photographic or medical evidence whatsoever. 

There were other anomalies as well.  For instance, no one in the house full of people seemed to hear or see the assault take place.  The first officer on the scene of the alleged assault took place didn’t even appear in court.  Finally - and this seemed to be the kicker - the alleged assailant couldn’t even move his left hand, and this didn’t jibe with the vicious beating that the victim said she received.  In our 4 woman, 2 male jury panel, one of the women surmised in chambers, “You know, I think that she could take him in a fight.”

As the foreman, I ended up handing the judge our verdict of Not Guilty.  Justice seemed to be done.

But the down-shots?

- The husband, as a result of the accusation and subsequent police activity had lost any custody to both his unborn and two year old children,

- The marriage was almost certainly irrevocably shattered, and

- Immense amounts of money were spend and valuable time and freedoms were lost.

I’m sure that you can think of more.

Perhaps you are a single parent now who has problems with your ex, or perhaps you are a married or domestic couple who is presently having problems of some kind.  Think for a moment.  Do you really want to get to the point that I saw so painfully played out for me in court on Monday and Tuesday of this week?

Thus, I learned a couple of valuable lessons.  First, remember that post that I did a while back where one of the key learnings that I mentioned was trying to get along with your ex?  Turns out that I was completely correct.  Second, you do NOT want to ever go the legal route with family disputes - if you can avoid them.  Lives do get ruined.  Unless your case is concrete and reasonable people could not disagree with you - try to stop the problems before they get out of hand.

When you are a single parent, frustration is a constant companion, which is oddly enough why no single parent should be lonely for even a minute. Besides the usual complaints: (more…)