Your divorce is processed and you have a child expenses order or agreement. The hardest part of your divorce process is over and you are ready to move on with your life. Or so you think!
Managing your child support
The one thing that nobody talks about is managing child support after the order. Of course we hear a lot about the situations where parents are not paying it. But what do you do if you are part of the majority, or 298 million parents in the world, who do exchange child support?
We have talked to a lot of parents who state that they didn’t realize it would be so time-consuming, costly and stressful to manage the process with the other parent. Let’s face it, having financial discussions with your ex is hard. And when you have to do it on a regular basis, because living expenses are an ongoing occurrence, the entire process can become very overwhelming.
Typical Process
Up until now, a typical process to manage child support was……..
Well there wasn’t one. Each parent I talked to had a different way that they managed it. From emails, text messages, phone calls, conversations when they dropped off the kids, to completely forgetting to make a payment and hitting the ignore button on their phone. Other parents attempted to manage it through spreadsheets, checks and direct deposit from one account to another.
I guess you can say that everyone talks about the process of getting divorced, or calculating child support or getting a alimony agreement but there is little information on what to do once you have that agreement in place.
And that is why I started SupportPay. We aim to provide a standard process for managing child support and recommend best practices to parents when it comes to managing their own child support.