[Solved] Using Gov Child Maintenance Calculator- is it right?

i have been in that situation. tried to reach own arrangement using that calculator. but was dealing with unreasonable dumbos, expecting a million pounds from me or something.

so i paid £20 to register with cms. it seems they worked out the exact same amount, that the calculator worked out. if you can beat your ex to it, you sign up first and say you want to do the direct pay option, where you dont pay any extra fees to pay maintenance. its a weak system, as still they can not stop your ex from demanding that CMS do collection payments, then you end up paying 20% on top of each payment!

my experience is that there has to be a reason for moving to collect arrangements where you pay 20% more. There has to be examples of where you have not paid in the past or you have refused, rather than at first application the RP just says they want collect.

In my case I had actually made a couple of errors, due to some frequent changes and the ex complained, CMS contacted me and said ex has asked to move to collect arrangements. I called them and they said they were not intending to enforce it, but for me to make sure I make the correct payments moving forward.

So dont panic I suggest

Unfortunately, if she insists you have them overnight for less, they are more likely to go with her version, they may even take a fall back position of 52 nights a year.

She’s wrong about not being charged for using the collect and pay service, the current charge is 20% for the paying parent and 4% for the receiving parent.

Generally the only way to avoid this would be if you had a court order that stated the number of nights the children stayed with you, without that it’s pretty hard to prove.

The calculator is only an rough estimate, I don’t think it takes into account any pension being paid into for example. You could increase the payments to your pension pot, that would reduce the amount of income the CMS use to calculate the payments.

All the best

Thanks guys.

I don’t intend nor want to f**k her over and end up paying less. I’m ok to pay what I have been paying which is usually around 250-270 a month for the 2 boys.

My argument with her was that she was telling me weeks ago that I only had them for an X amount of days and so I said ok that puts me in this bracket for child maint so I’m paying that. That’s when she started saying she will get them to just take it straight out my wages and I would have to pay more due to the fee I would have to pay.

Now she’s telling me I can’t have them for certain days just so it falls into a lower bracket so she gets more money!!

... it’s a difficult one, it might be that if this situation can’t be sorted out, and she keeps reducing your contact time, you’re going to have to take court action to cement the time spent with your kids. It’s about what’s best for them, and continually chopping and changing and reducing their time with you just isn’t in their best interests.

Perhaps you could try mediation to get some agreement in place, it might make her realise that you take your responsibilities seriously and it might make her think twice about her behaviour recently.

We desperately need someone stand up for the non-resident parent and removes the connection between contact with your kids and child maintenance.

There should be a fixed maintenance fee regardless how often or not you see the kids that way there is one less leverage to be used by the ex's over how much contact you have with the kids.

The whole system is massively flawed and against non-resident parents!

this is why i started that other thread about CMS survival for dads lol.

I absolutely agree Dad-i-d... such an ill thought out service, linking the amount paid to duration of contact time is ripe for abuse by some parents.