Ask Jonathan Anything: Part 3

Raena: [00:00:00] how does child support work? How is it calculated?

Jonathan Breeden: How does child support work and how is it calculated?

Well, child support practically works by if you know, there’s different ways to get child support. There is, you can just verbally agree. to get child support. And a lot of parents go to the NCChildSupport.com website and they put in their income information. And there’s a calculator there and it sort of spits it out.

There’s a link to that website on my website, breedenfirm.com And they come up with a number and They just voluntarily pay it. You know what I’m saying? Other times it’s not quite that easy. And people have to go to court. And so if you want a court order that is, you know, punishable by the contempt powers of the court, i.

e. go to jail, and is enforceable then you would need to go to court and have a judge enter a child support order at whatever amount. That the judge determines the [00:01:00] child support should be so, you know, and you can do that through the child support agency. Every county has a child support agency.

You can find their contact information and see child support dot com or you can hire your own attorney to help you attempt to get whatever the child support would be. So how it sort of works. Of course, child support is to help care for the needs of the child. It is calculated. In some ways you can say it’s in some ways not.

Narrator: Welcome to another episode of Best of Johnston County, brought to you by Breeden Law Office. Our host, Jonathan Breeden, an experienced family lawyer with a deep connection to the community, is ready to take you on a journey through the area that he has called home for over 20 years. Whether it’s a deep dive into the love locals have for the county or unraveling the complexities of family law, Best of Johnston County presents an authentic slice of this unique community.

Jonathan Breeden: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Best of Johnston County podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Breeden, and I have my [00:02:00] social media coordinator with me today, Raena Burch, and we’re going to do a special episode of the podcast where we call it Ask Jonathan Breeden Anything.

So we have two different types of episodes on this podcast. We have it where I Jonathan Breeden interview community members, community leaders local politicians small business owners about why they love Johnston County. And then we do these episodes every once in a while. Where I just ask, answer questions that come to me from Raena about family law and the things that we see and the things that we do every day representing families in Johnson, Harnett, Wake Counties, and North Carolina with all their family at all needs, whether it be divorce, custody, property distribution, alimony, adoptions, guardianships we do a little bit of all of that so.

I don’t know what the questions are going to be. Hopefully I will know what the answers are and hopefully y’all will enjoy this episode. You ready, Raena? I am ready. Are you ready? I’m ready. Let’s go.

Raena:Number one, how does child support work? How is it calculated? [00:03:00]

Jonathan Breeden: How does child support work and how is it calculated?

Well, child support practically works by if you know, there’s different ways to get child support. There is, you can just verbally agree. to get child support. And a lot of parents go to the NCChildSupport.com website and they put in their income information. And there’s a calculator there and it sort of spits it out.

There’s a link to that website on my website, breedenfirm.com And they come up with a number and They just voluntarily pay it. You know what I’m saying? Other times it’s not quite that easy. And people have to go to court. And so if you want a court order that is, you know, punishable by the contempt powers of the court, i.

e. go to jail, and is enforceable then you would need to go to court and have a judge enter a child support order at whatever amount. That the judge determines the child support should be [00:04:00] so, you know, and you can do that through the child support agency. Every county has a child support agency.

You can find their contact information and see child support dot com or you can hire your own attorney to help you attempt to get whatever the child support would be. So how it sort of works. Of course, child support is to help care for the needs of the child. It is calculated. In some ways you can say it’s in some ways not.

It is an actual chart in a formula in North Carolina, and the law is fairly clear as to what goes into the formula, and then the formula spits out a number. And I’m not going to say I’m a math petitionist as to how it ends up coming out of a number, but it’s all based on a chart, and the charts are created by The conference of chief district court judges and they need every three years.

And what they do is they look at actuarial tables of what it actually costs. To raise a child in North Carolina from housing to water to power To food to health insurance. They look at [00:05:00] all of these things based and they study The inflationary tables and you know, we’ve had a lot of inflation here in the last two or three years in the united states You know nine ten fifty percent depending on when you want to look and when you want to start And so they look at all of that And they come up with these actuarial tables where they determine what they believe the reasonable child support for one child, two child, three children is based on what they determined it would cost to raise them.

Now that number changes based on the combined income. Of the parents because the lifestyle that a child would be expected to have and the things they would expect it to be able to do are different if your parents both make 60, 000 a year and they have a combined income of 120 versus if the child’s parents both make 30, 000 a year with a combined income of 60, [00:06:00] 000, if they were together, that child would have a different lifestyle.

And if they’re apart, that child would have a different lifestyle because there’s just more disposable income. So the more you make, the more the child support is, but that is for the child to be able to maintain a similar lifestyle as if the parents had been together and you had. both of those combined incomes in a single house.

So that is a long winded thing as to how they actually come up with it. There are charts and formulas and then it gives you a base amount. And then you add in daycare, health insurance, any extraordinary expenses for the children. And then that gets divided. There’s two different types of child support worksheets.

There is, well, there’s three different types of child support worksheets. There’s everybody here schedule A, which is primary custody, which means parent does not have. 124 overnights with a child. Yeah. And they count [00:07:00] overnights. We’re not talking about days. The kid gets off at your bus stop.

Yeah. Whatever it is. Actual overnights. So 1 24 or last for one parent would be schedule A. Anything over 1 24. For one parent would be Schedule B. And if the children are split, and we rarely see this, where one parent has one child and one parent has another. It’s schedule C, which is a split where the formula figures out what the cost for the primary custodian for each child is, looks at what that primary custodian’s gross income is, and it spits out a number.

So those are the sort of the worksheets, sort of how they’re calculated. They start with gross income, not net grosses, your total paycheck before anything comes out before tax, before health insurance, before your car payment. All of that stuff. It starts with the gross. And then you can get, you know, there’s offsets for other children in your home that are not part of this marriage, there’s a offsets for.

If you pay child support for [00:08:00] another child, that one part of this relationship. So all of this stuff gets put into a formula and a number comes out. That is an amount that is owed every month, regardless of whether the children were with you for two months of the summer, you still owe the child support because the number is divided out over 12 months of what it would cost to raise a child.

Okay,

Raena: Just a quick question that so because you said that they can either, you know, like agree on it themselves or go through the court and have a court ordered child support, whatnot. Could they actually agree on it and also get a court order so that it’s. Enforceable and just like maybe a

Jonathan Breeden: consent order.

Yes. Yes, they absolutely could do that. And they could do that with a private attorney, like the attorneys that work here at the law office. They can also try to do that through the child support agency. So, yeah they can do that. I would say the vast majority of them, they may start out contentious, but most child support cases end up in some sort of consent order.

Once, once we kind of know what the numbers are, once we, you know, it, [00:09:00] the hardest ones are the self employed, right? I mean, those are the hardest. What is their income? You know, they got these deductions, like business expenses. A lot of people are paying personal expenses to their business accounts. Do you add that back in?

But most of the time, once you can get the information, You put it in the form of the formula, spits it out. Most child support cases are

Raena: consent orders. Okay, cool. So next question, do you collaborate on

Jonathan Breeden: cases collaborate? I guess they’ve got to define collaborate.

Raena: How about like with other. Either other attorneys and other law firms, maybe if they pass along a case or something like that.

Do you collaborate

Jonathan Breeden: right? Well, we do work. I mean, we do work, you know, we do get calls from other law firms that know what our expertise is and they will ask us if we’re willing to assist them on a case give them advice, give them a different set of eyes. So we do that. Sometimes.

The case starts out one thing and it gets to be too much [00:10:00] for another law firm and they will refer it to us and we’ll just sort of take it over for them where we may have some more resources and some more expertise than they do. So we do work on those kinds of stuff. Sometimes they have, there are 2 law firms representing different parts of the case.

You know, you got somebody doing 1 side and we do the other. So we do work together. You know, when I first heard the question, I was thinking. Law, you know what I mean? Because that is a thing that is out there and under the collaborative law process, the parties and the attorneys all agree that if they’re unable to reach a separation agreement, Through the collaborative law process, which is basically the negotiation of a separation agreement that the attorneys are barred from taking the case to litigation.

Yes, everybody

Raena: has to go

Jonathan Breeden: find a new attorney, right? Everybody has to go find a new attorney, which creates a lot of which helps create a lot of, impetus for [00:11:00] everybody involved to get this case worked out. And if, you know, if you do the collaborative process, it is often cheaper than doing the litigation process.

And but everybody’s gotta be really balled in for it. Right. You know, because there’s no lawsuit, there’s no subpoena power. So each side has to voluntarily turn over their financial documents and their credit card statements and their bank statements and their 401k statements and all of that.

And while you think that’s easy and if a lawsuit gets filed, they’re going to have to do it. People often don’t want to do that. And so that’s where we see the collaborative part sometimes break down because one side just doesn’t want to share. And so then all of a sudden you’ve got to go, you know, I was in a collaborative law training one time and they called all of us to do the litigation.

Sword waivers, you know, they saw the litigation attorneys as sword waivers, you know, cause they really, cause the people teaching this class only did collaborative law. So basically they end [00:12:00] up losing their. clients to litigators like us here at the Green Law Office if they couldn’t get the case settled.

So anyway, it’s uh, so that was pretty funny. I was, I did that training many years ago and I’ll never forget that guy using that term. It was a lot of fun. We’ll

Raena: have to use that later. All right.

Have family law questions? Need guidance to navigate legal challenges? The compassionate team at Breeden Law Office is here to help. Visit us at www. breedenfirm. com for practical advice, resources, or to book a consultation. Remember, when life gets messy, you don’t have to face it alone.

Raena: Okay. How do you primarily communicate

Jonathan Breeden: with your clients? We primarily communicate with our clients the way that they prefer to be communicated with.

But I think the most efficient way for my office to communicate with our clients is via email. You know, all of the attorneys here have lots of cases, as I have lots of cases. [00:13:00] And you know, they’re in court a fair amount, you know, more than one day a week often. And so they’re doing consults, working on all the cases.

And it is a lot quicker. To be able to answer an email for them and they can do it on their time when they have time versus trying to get you on the phone when you’ve got time or whatever. So, we will communicate with people however they want to be communicated. You know, any phone call of our office needs to be scheduled.

You can’t just call in and say, Hey, I need to talk about attorney right now. 99 percent of the time, they’re either going to be in a meeting with another client in a consult in court. Driving to a court, but, you know, we can schedule, you know, phone conversations. You want to have that, of course, we have in meeting in person meetings on a fairly regular basis, particularly when the litigation really gets going, you know, there’s trial prep exhibit, stuff like that, but the most efficient way, I believe, to communicate.

With my office and the attorneys here would be through email. We do a pretty good [00:14:00] job of making every effort to try to answer every email within 24 hours. And we try to call everybody back within 24 hours. We can or definitely if we can’t call you back within 24 hours, we will schedule you. I would schedule you a phone call with your attorney so that you can get your questions answered.

Raena: Gotcha. Okay. What does equitable distribution mean?

Jonathan Breeden: Equitable distribution means the equitable distribution of the marital assets when the marriage is headed for divorce. And so the court’s job per the statutes is to equitably divide the marital assets, which include the debts and the assets. I think a lot of people think that equitable distribution just is dividing the assets and they want to forget that it divides the debt as well.

And unfortunately there are cases [00:15:00] where the debt far exceeds the assets. And We have to tell people that all they’re going to get out of the distribution sometimes is a lot of debt because that’s what there is to divide. So, equitable does not mean 50 50 in North Carolina. There are reasons why the court could make it not 50 50.

And there’s not enough time to go into the, I think there’s 15 of them in the statute. And then it says. Any other reason the court would like to make it more equitable. Right. So what I tell people is 99 percent of the time, the George, the judge is going to try to make it 50 50 and every once in a while, if there’s a good reason, it won’t be 50 50.

So. What our job here at Breed Law Office is to guide people through that process because it’s not simple. You know what I mean? When you start thinking about, you know, like, you gotta figure out like, what is the net value of stuff? So, you know, it’s not, you know, we were just talking about child support a minute ago, it’s the gross on your [00:16:00] paycheck.

You know, equity distribution is the net value on stuff. So, you know, what is the house worth and what do you owe? You know, if the house is worth 400 and you owe 200, then the house is worth 200. You know, if your car is worth 10 and you owe 15 negative 5, 000 in the car. Well, that goes on the formula, you know, the 401k, a lot of people had a 401k before they got married.

Well, the part that before they got married is their separate property. So you have to figure out how much of the 401k is separate and how much of it actually belongs to the marriage. So it, you know, there’s a lot of work that goes into it to decide. Kind of what are the assets and the debts of the marriage, which ones belong to the marriage, which ones were separate for the marriage.

And then of course, some people, you know, sort of lay waste to marital assets and spend money on drugs. And alcohol and affairs and things that have nothing to do with the marriage and while it may be on the marital Credit card or on the person’s [00:17:00] credit card while they were married. You think that would be a marital debt It really isn’t because it didn’t advance the marriage.

So there’s a lot to it. We could do we’ll probably do A lot of podcasts over the next couple of years, all on equitable distribution. But in and of itself, it’s its core, is the court’s attempt to divide the marital assets in an equitable manner. Gotcha.

Raena: Okay. All right. Last one. You ready?

Okay. Do grandparents or other family members have visitation rights?

Jonathan Breeden: Oh boy. I never said they would be easy. Oh my goodness. They do and they don’t. And the people listening to this podcast are like, what? He just said they do and they don’t. So let’s see if we can explain this the best I can. All right.

Under North Carolina law. A grandparent can seek visitation with a child if there is an ongoing litigation between the child’s parents. The grandparent [00:18:00] cannot start litigation to gain visitation only. So if your, you know, if you were to go through a divorce and there was a active custody case between you and your husband during the active part before it is settled, your parents or his parents can file a motion to intervene in the case and ask the court to make them a party.

to grant them grandparent visitation. And if the court finds that it’s in the children’s best interest, they can grant those grandparents some visitation. What is confusing to people is, if the parents are still together, there is no case and the grandparent can’t ask for visitation. If the parents split up and they don’t file a lawsuit against each other, there’s no way for a grandparent to go ask for grandparent visitation because the grandparent [00:19:00] cannot initiate the litigation to obtain visitation.

Now, grandparents and third parties. Now there is no statute for third party visitation in North Carolina, but a grandparent or a third party, whether it be aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, neighbors, anybody can file for custody of a child in North Carolina. If they can show that the parents are unfit.

And acting contrary to their protected rights as a parent. And we represent a lot of grandparents, and siblings, and aunts and great aunts. I mean, these are all cases we have right now of people who are needing to get custody of children because the parents are unfit because the parents are acting contrary to their means.

The parents are on drugs. The parents have abandoned the children. The parents don’t have a home for the child. The parents in jail. I mean, we deal with this all day every day. It’s [00:20:00] not the happiest thing but so if you’re listening to this and you don’t have a child that is not in a good situation, whose parents are not doing right, or a child has come to live with you.

And you don’t know what to do, call us. We can help you get custody of that child if both its parents are acting, are unfit, and they’re acting contrary to their rights. And in several situations, we don’t know who the father is. And so then we end up having to try to find the father and run a, publish and run a newspaper ad to notify.

Somebody who could possibly be the father of this child that there’s a custody action pending. Nobody’s ever really answered one in the 23 years. I’ve been doing this, but you know what I mean? So, so that kind of stuff. So, so as far as the visitation itself, there’s gotta be an active case. In order for the grandparents to try to give visitation, but the grandparents absolutely can file for custody.

If the child’s not in a safe situation, and the grandparents believe it would be in their best interest for the child to primarily live with them and they [00:21:00] should do that and we help grandparents with that every single day. We never not have. Multiple grandparent cases in his office where we’re helping grandparents get kids out of really bad situations.

We had a case a couple of months ago where the mother was on drugs. The father was on drugs. The mother was literally, the father was literally torturing the mother and the children were there. And it was a really bad situation. And we were able to step in and help those grandparents get custody of that, of those children.

And those children are now safe and in a positive environment. With their grandparents. And that’s what needed to happen, right? That was absolutely the best possible outcome there. So another one of those questions that could probably be another two or three podcasts and we’ve over the years, we’re probably doing, but so that’s the most simple answer.

Over six minutes of me kind of rambling for people listening as to whether grandparents can get visitation in North Carolina. All right. Well, that’s all I have. All right. Well, good. That’ll be a wrap up this episode of the best of Johnson County special [00:22:00] edition. Ask Jonathan Breeden anything.

If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard today and found it helpful or interesting, feel free to like follow or subscribe. To this podcast, wherever you receive podcast, or if you’re watching it on YouTube or social media. So you don’t miss future episodes the best of Johnson County, where we’ll do future ask Jonathan Breeden anything episodes.

We’ll talk about family law and divorce, and we’ll most of the episodes will be where we interview interesting community members, elected officials, and local business owners about why they love Johnson County and what makes Johnson County such a great place to live. Thanks a lot for listening. And until next time I’m your host Jonathan Breeden.

That’s the end of today’s episode of Best of Johnston County, a show brought to you by the trusted team at Breeden Law Office. We thank you for joining us today and we look forward to sharing more interesting facets of this community next week. Every story, every viewpoint adds another thread to the rich [00:23:00] tapestry of Johnston County.

If the legal aspects highlighted raised some questions, help is just around the corner at www. breedenfirm. com.