So you have a court order which obligates you to pay alimony to your former spouse and you are approaching retirement age and you are unsure if you can retire or how retirement will affect your obligation. The Supreme Court of Florida has addressed the impact of retirement on support obligations, and has set forth the following criteria for modification in cases of voluntary retirement:

Americans under the age of 45 have found a novel way to rebel against their elders: They’re staying married. New data show younger couples are approaching relationships very differently from baby boomers, who married young, divorced, remarried and so on. Generation X and especially millennials are being pickier about who they marry, tying the knot at older ages when education, careers and finances are on track. The result is a U.S. divorce rate that dropped 18 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to an analysis by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen.

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How is child support calculated? Most often parties to a divorce haven’t the foggiest idea as to how child support is calculated. Quite often parties believe they can just arrive at a “fair number” and that will then be the ongoing child support obligation. Unfortunately, that is not how child support works.

I see this common mistake occur in the divorce process all too often. A husband and wife decide to handle their divorce without the assistance of an attorney. One party offers the marital home to the other party as a condition of the divorce. Sometimes the parties will even execute a quit claim deed accordingly, and go their separate ways thinking everything was done properly.

DISESTABLISHMENT OF PATERNITY

So you suspect that you might not be the baby’s father after all, what do you do???  Fla. Stat. § 742.18 establishes the circumstances under which a man may disestablish paternity or terminate a child support obligation when he is not biological father of the child.

What happens when one party who is responsible for paying child support is either unemployed or underemployed? Are they still responsible for making payments? The short answer is always YES, when the parent is either voluntarily unemployed or underemployed.

In my practice, one of the biggest mistakes I see parents make most often is relocating their child without permission from the other parent or the courts. This can cause parents to temporarily or permanently lose majority timesharing of their children and can create a nightmare for their personal and professional lives. So the best advice I can give anyone with children is do not relocate your child without first consulting with a qualified family law attorney.