What You Need To Know About Child Support Red Flags

Thank you for joining me my name is LaSheena Williams and I am a Maryland family law attorney, my firm helps our clients take control of out of control domestic situations. Today we will be discussing child support and child support red flags.

Self Employment: What to Look Out For And How to Use It

If your co-parent is self-employed, they may have income coming from a lot of different sources. They may have income coming from certain types of cash apps, like cash app, like PayPal, like other sources and it may not necessarily be easy to pinpoint all of their information just by going with their word alone. It’s important to let your attorney know that your co-parent is self-employed so that your attorney can seek the records they need. So, if you know your co-parents bank accounts and your attorney subpoenas those records your attorney can review those records and find out oh yes they have memo accounts oh yes they have cash app and then we can subpoena those records. This way you will get as much information about their current financial situation as possible so that the court can make an accurate child support determination.

Undocumented Income: What to Look Out For and How to Address It.

Some coparents have income from sources that may not necessarily be taxable. They may be completing domestic work such as landscaping or housekeeping services and they may be getting paid by cash or checks or like I’ve said already through cash services like CashApp or Venmo. It’s important to let your attorney know that that’s the situation so that your attorney can subpoena the records that they need. For example, if your co-parent is getting a lot of checks when you subpoena the records your attorney May specifically request copies of checks so that you can see how often they’re receiving checks and the amounts and quantities of those checks. It’s very important that you speak with a lawyer about these types of sources of income because it’s difficult for regular people to subpoena. Only attorneys really have subpoena powers.

Multiple Co-Parents: What to Look Out For and How to Address It

Sometimes you may not necessarily be your co-parents first co-parent and what that means is they may have children from former relationships that they have child support obligations for, and those child support obligations take precedent over any potential child support obligations for you and your co-parent’s child. It’s important to know that so that when coming up with an appropriate child support figure, your attorney can input the right information any prior or current child support obligations and make sure that your child support is calculated correctly.

If you have any questions about child support and other child support related red flags, please also feel free contact my firm a call at (301) 778-9950 to speak with an attorney today.