Paging Martha and any other lawyer types...

[SecondCor521]

For those of you keeping score at home, I am a 38 year old divorced father of three kids, 12/7/5.

And I know I should ask my real attorney this, but she charges $210 an hour and you folks are free.

The single largest line item in my budget is my child support payment, at $1400. Ethically I believe in supporting my kids and have thus far made all my payments on time and will continue to do so. This payment is calculated based on several things: the total of my ex's and my income (it is assumed that a certain amount of a family's income goes to support the kids; a larger percentage of the first X dollars, and lesser percentages of additional levels of income), the ratio of my income to hers (we contribute to the children's expenses in proportion to our income), and the percentage of custody we each have (we each are assumed to spend on the children in proportion to the time we have them).

Finally, there is this thing called imputed income, which is where a CEO who voluntarily quits his CEO job to work at Walmart to try to spite his ex-wife will still be assumed to earn a CEO salary and will be assigned a child support amount based on the CEO salary instead of the Walmart salary.

The rules are silent as to retirement. My questions:

1. Do you think a request to lower child support based on retirement would work? In my particular case, I might go from a salaried position earning $100K to living off dividends and 72T payments totaling $30K. (I could easily see the court using the imputed income clause as an argument against this.)

2. Do you think it would be ethical to even try to reduce child support payments in conjunction with retirement as described in question 1?

3. This one is way out there and probably would get the standard "It depends", but anyway: How do you think the court would look on increasing my custody based on retirement - I'd be able to be around more, pick them up from school, etc.

2Cor521