What happens to the child support he was ordered to pay based on his earlier earnings?
The court will "impute" his former income to him. In other words it will require him to continue paying support on the income he had been earning. So long as the court decides his new employment status and lower earnings are voluntary and that he could have continued earning what he had been earlier, then he will have to continue paying support on the earlier income level.
The result is the same whether he quits work entirely or just takes a job with a major cut in pay. If he simply no longer has the money to pay because he's not earning it, the court can jail him for contempt of court for his deliberate failure to pay child support.
Judges are reluctant to actually send someone to jail for failure to pay support, which is why the first time its brought to the court's attention the judge will generally merely order him to resume payment. Even if it is brought back to the court a second time, the judge will often be sympathetic to claims that the father has not been able to find a job paying as much as he used to earn, and will order him again to make the payments. By the third time the case goes back in front of a judge for failure to pay support, most judges will have lost their patience and will send him to jail.
Courts look at it this way regardless the reason a parent stops working. In a case in which a mother decided to stay home with the children of her second marriage and as a result could not pay child support for the children from her first marriage (when the father had custody), the court had no sympathy. [Roberts v. Roberts, 496 N.W. 210, WisApp 1992.] The mother told the court:
It's important for a mother to be home with her child. I was not able to be home with my other two children, and I feel I was deprived of that right. I want to stay home with this child, and my husband also wants me home.
The court said the obligation to the older children came first, and she still had to pay the child support based on what she could have been earning.
To give an example, suppose you have a non-custodial father who is ordered to pay child support on his income of $210,000 a year as a neurosurgeon. He doesn't like the idea of working his tail off to send a few thousand dollars a month to his ex-wife for their child because he thinks she's actually using the money to support her boyfriend (or to drink, or for her own retirement account, or whatever), so the father quits his job as a neurosurgeon and takes a minimum wage job bussing tables in a small restaurant. He then says he'll pay his child support based on his new income, and send the mother the appropriate percentage. The custodial parent, in this case, could go back to court and the court would order the father to continue paying child support at the old level, because he voluntarily took the lower paying job and could have continued earning the higher income. Courts will generally take this position of "imputing" income to a non- custodial parent even if the parent quit the high paying job because it was too stressful, or he wanted to stop working 70 hour weeks to spend some time with a new spouse and children, or if it was to allow a return to school to get a degree to change professions and earn more money later. The courts are generally unforgiving on this.
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