Recap: we "won" the appeal (meaning, we successfully defended the appeal, and also won our cross appeal). We suggested a $200 per month break in child support so that we wouldn't have to deal w/ the abatement process by which his child support obligation gets credited back to him when he visits here. It's a good deal for him because he's getting a $1200 per year break on child support. It's a good deal for us because so far, he has done the abatement incorrectly 100% of the time. Our recourse is to a) ignore it and let him claim ridiculous expenses - like mini bar in the hotel room, b) object to the abatement, and eventually pay a lawyer at $200 per hour to present to the court why we objected (a $50 error on the ex's part).
We gave them until Friday to give us an answer.
Last Thursday, the ex took my daughter out of state for the day. "What's the problem with that?" you might ask. Well...Thursday was the day we were supposed to bring Scooter home. So...she missed her flight. Even though he was back in Omaha 2 hours before her flight actually took off. He just ignored us completely. We couldn't easily re-arrange our schedule. It was a mess. We have a good case for a civil contempt of court, but again, we're left deciding if we want to spend a bunch of money for the sake of being right. I would have to fly back for that hearing, since it's a new lawsuit, so we'd have another flight to Omaha - the city I've been trying to leave for 2 years, now. Ugh. Tough decisions. Especially when we'd rather be spending our money on other stuff. $51,000 is enough to spend on anything.
So anyway, we didn't get an answer on Friday.
I flew back to Omaha and picked up Scooter on Saturday.
Today (Monday), we closed on our house. Hooray!!! It was supposed to happen on Friday, but things came up (see Thursday, above). Then, I get an email from the ol' lawyer. Instead of a $200 per month break on child support, they want $320. Yeah. They want their total child support payment to be 49% of their total child support obligation for the year. Um, no. The judge granted him 4 visits per year that he'd be allowed to get reimbursed for (I say reimbursed b/c technically, he's supposed to actually pay the child support that's due). So, no. I guess we're back to using the abatement process, paying the lawyer $400 to get back $100. At least with doing it this way, he actually has to do the visit to get any break on child support. The other way, he would have gotten the break either way.
I think we all could use a little distance from this. It's been heated. It's getting worse. I know I'll get slammed for this, but I think we should just back off (and document the crap out of our lives) for a while, and then in a year or so, really nail him. It's kind of how we won this thing in the first place. We just sat back and let him do his thing for years. Then, when we wanted to do something, all we had to do was point out his past actions, and we got what we wanted...
No comments:
Post a Comment