How does child support in Wisconsin work?
Parents are financially obligated to support their children rather they are together or divorced. Wisconsin child support ensures that parents take care of their children financially through monthly payments.
Wisconsin child support is most often paid by the parent with 50% or less of the physical custody of the child. The parent which makes payments is known as the non-custodial parent. The individual that receives payments is knowns as the custodial parent.
The custodial parent is expected to use child support payments to help in the raising of their child. Payments are meant to cover shelter, food, clothing, and all other necessities. Custodial parents are not supposed to use the funds to cover their own personal expenses.
Wisconsin child support calculation
To determine the amount of money a parent must pay in Wisconsin child support, the parents will need to work together. Parents can use the state’s child support guidelines to determine the amount that is to be paid. However, a judge must confirm the amount before it is official. The judge could alter the final financial figure before payments begin.
Overnights, or where the child sleeps, is what is used to determine the amount of child support that is paid by the non-custodial parent. For sole custody, Wisconsin courts uses a standard percentage model based on the number of children involved in the case.
The starting point to calculate child support is to therefore ask two questions. One, what is the placement schedule look like between for the kids, between the two households? How many overnights is the general rule that each kid or the kids spend at each house and then how much each parent makes in cases where one parent has more than seventy five percent of the overnights in a given year? The other parent is going to be paying a set percentage of their gross income from all sources, so for one kid, that would be 17 percent, two kids. Twenty five percent. And it goes up depending on how many kids there are.
If there’s more of a shared placement schedule, each parent has more than twenty five percent of the overnights in a given year. At that point, the courts employ what’s called a shared placement calculator.
Wisconsin child support calculation is based on Gross Income
Gross income not what you see in your bank account. That’s what you see on your paycheck that you say, I wish I would have made. that would even even though I only got to see this.
Many people in Wisconsin feel that that’s not a fair way to calculate it. But there’s so many different ways to manipulate how much you withhold what you contribute to retirement plans. And the courts are simply of the opinion that it cuts out game playing if the child support calculation in WI is based on gross income before tax and contributions.
