How Do I Revise Child Support Orders?

As the best child support lawyers in Arizona we often get asked, “how do I revise child support orders?” The other day I had a client come to my office and we were talking about his divorce. We were going through the standard issues, we dealt with the child custody, the parenting schedule, we dealt with the division of property and debt and spousal support or alimony, and we got to child support and we put in the numbers and he asked me, he said, “Hey this is kind of a lot of money to pay in child support, what do I do if something happens? If I lose my job I can’t afford it anymore?” And this is a really great question probably one that I should have been describing right from the beginning. So let me go into that a little bit.

In Family Court we have what are called permanent orders. Permanent orders sound like they’re gonna last forever but in reality all that means is that it’s an order that will remain in place until further order of the court. A temporary order would be something different that would automatically end at some point, but a permanent order only means that it’s permanent until the court does something for it. So when I use these words with my clients and they think, “Oh permanent, I’m gonna be paying this much in child support for the next 15 years, that’s crazy…” But child support can be changed relatively easily. I know that sometimes people are concerned about the expense of dealing with the lawyer and a child custody battle, and in some cases they can be expensive, but not all cases. And then after a client has been through that, it’s not uncommon for them to want to avoid paying more money and so they hold off changing anything like child support.

But if you look at child support only, there’s a relatively simple process in Arizona where we can go and modify the child support and typically can be done within a single hearing. In fact, you go and you have a conference with the other party and the other attorney, try to resolve things, and if you can’t resolve it then, you go into to a hearing with the commissioner or judge and typically you get a ruling that same day. Because in child support, you’re only looking at a few different things. You’re looking at the income of each parent, you’re looking at the parenting schedule and you’re looking at some of the expenses that need to be addressed like health insurance expenses and daycare costs. And then you plug it into a calculator and we figure out what the amount is. Often times, we can resolve child support without even having a hearing because there is a great calculator in Arizona and we can discuss it with the other party and resolve it by stipulation without even having a hearing.

So if you have a current child support order that needs to be changed, whether that needs to be changed upwards because people are making more money or expenses have gotten higher or because it needs to be changed downward because perhaps a child has graduated or daycare costs are no longer applicable or somebody has lost their job, it may be worth coming and seeing us here because we’d be happy to sit down with you, look at it, make sure it makes sense to go file, and then we can get it filed. It’s not gonna be nearly as expensive as you might think and at the very least you’ll be able to have some clarity and certainty going forward. Please give us a call we’d be happy to help you out. Thank you.

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