Transcript
Susan Reff: Are you not getting your child support? On today’s episode of The Lady Lawyer League Podcast, we will talk about how child support is calculated, who pays child support and who gets it, and what to do if you aren’t getting your child support. And how much does Nick Cannon actually pay for child support?
Announcer: This is the Lady Lawyer League podcast. Omaha’s Leading Lady Lawyers Empowering Women to Be Legal Savvy. Hosted by Susan Raff and Tracy Hightower. Honey of Hightower Rough Law.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Welcome to the Lady Lawyer League podcast. We’re back again and we’re talking about child support this time.
Susan Reff: The nuts and.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Bolts. Yes.
Susan Reff: How to deal with child support.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah. So child support, this really interesting thing that like, has a lot of math and algorithms and we don’t math very well, so we’re going to do our best.
Susan Reff: I also feel like when you’re talking about numbers. It’s easy to write them down, but to, like, just talk. Yeah. And like, get a concept across is hard.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So we might have to write while we’re talking on the podcast or.
Susan Reff: Make hand gestures. Yeah, well.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: We’re not actually going to do any child support calculators.
Susan Reff: For.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: The.
Susan Reff: Show, thank God.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So maybe we don’t have to say a single number. If you have to say a number you drink, which by the way, this is the first podcast.
Susan Reff: Oh.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: This is the first pod. Yours is a prop.
Susan Reff: Mine is mine is mine. Mine is empty.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Obviously, you just poured it out like Dairy Queen Blizzard.
Susan Reff: Yeah, if they. Have you ever gotten a free one?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: No. How do you get a free one.
Susan Reff: If they don’t tip it over and before they hand it to you, you’re supposed to get it for free.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Oh, I thought you were going to say. If it falls out, then it’s free. What happens if it goes out?
Susan Reff: Well, And the other thing is, I just thought of this. You’ve already paid for it. Maybe you get a coupon for a free one next time.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah. They want you to come back. Do you always get the same flavor? You always put gummy bears and shit?
Susan Reff: No, no, no. Not in my blizzards. Oh, blizzards. I tend to go for, like, Snickers, Reese’s peanut butter cup.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: He no.
Susan Reff: Nerds. No, I don’t like fruity blizzards, But you.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Put fruit on all of the fruity sugary stuff on everything else.
Susan Reff: At the do it yourself ice cream places see? Yes, I do, I do. But on the blizzards I go in a different direction.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: When it’s the ice cream topping buffets.
Susan Reff: Yeah. Have you been to one lately? With you?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: With anyone? No.
Susan Reff: They don’t let you scoop your own stuff anymore.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: But, man, it was on when you were there. You were like.
Susan Reff: Woosh, gummy.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Bears.
Susan Reff: Woosh nerds.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: All of it.
Susan Reff: I had a Rice Krispie treat with nerds in it. Oh, my.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: God. Life changing.
Susan Reff: Life changing. I mean.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: You wouldn’t see. I like Rice Krispie treats with peanut butter. Not the butterscotch shit on the top. Like, that’s too. I want the peanut butter inside. And I, you know, like, mixed in with the marshmallow.
Susan Reff: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: And then, like, I could eat a whole pan of those, but you wouldn’t do that with the nerds.
Susan Reff: Well, clearly, someone made a whole pan and then cut them up, and I had one.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: You know, you wouldn’t eat nerds with peanut butter in there.
Susan Reff: Oh, right, right. Yeah. That’s a cross of sweet treats that I would never do.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Got it?
Susan Reff: Yeah, I’m not that.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: No. So now we know you have a prop cup.
Susan Reff: I do have a prop cup.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Nothing in it.
Susan Reff: Yeah.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: All right. All right. So I’ll take a drink if we say a number.
Susan Reff: Okay.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: All right. That’s our rule. No, not ours. So we’re not getting drunk today.
Susan Reff: No numbers. All right, child sport. So what. What what is child support?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay, so in Nebraska, of course, that’s what we’re talking about. We have the Nebraska child support guidelines. It comes from all of our statutes. And at some point, the legislators decided they could figure out a way to make it fair for parents to share expenses and pay each other child support. So it’s a calculator that we use both parents income. And then there’s other deductions and things that go in there like cost of health insurance, whether someone’s contributing to a retirement account and you plug the numbers in, don’t know what the numbers.
Susan Reff: Don’t say that number.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Don’t see the numbers. You plug the numbers in and plug.
Susan Reff: Yeah, there’s a lot of plugs around here. You really are. There’s some under the table. Even like. Like a plug. I know, right? Like.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Like where you type the numbers in. Okay.
Susan Reff: No plugging.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So it’s, it’s a nice software program that.
Susan Reff: It’s nice.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: It is. It is really.
Susan Reff: Nice. It’s helpful. It is amazing.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: I have heard of the days where people had to handwrite with pencil like CPA’s do in a old book and figure out the calculation themselves.
Susan Reff: Spoiler alert there are still old lawyers that do that.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So the software is very nice.
Susan Reff: Right?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: All right. Back to.
Susan Reff: That handy.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Nice software program that most lawyers have access to in Nebraska. We type the numbers in and basically it spits out who’s going to pay who, child support and the amount.
Susan Reff: Right.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: And a lot of it’s based on how many kids you have. And then also a factor is how much parenting time each parent has. So I’m drinking. We didn’t say a number, but I can still drink.
Susan Reff: But you’re thirsty, Parched. And there’s like, this misnomer. It’s not misnomer. I said that every myth. Myth.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: I think they’re both pretty synonymous.
Susan Reff: There’s a myth that only moms can get child support.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: That is a.
Susan Reff: Myth.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: I think that’s a misnomer.
Susan Reff: Misnomer. I thought misnomer was when you said the wrong name.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: That’s misnomer. Okay.
Susan Reff: I’m saying a Canadian. All right.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: We’re going to have to look up misnomer and myth.
Susan Reff: But so can only moms get child support? No doubt Get child support.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yes.
Susan Reff: How’s that.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Work? Well, sometimes we have two moms and sometimes we have two dads. Oh, my.
Susan Reff: Gosh. It’s getting complicated.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: It’s really not conflicting.
Susan Reff: So how do you really.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah, you really plug this information into the child support calculator, and it’s like, here’s who pays, who? What?
Susan Reff: So who pays who what.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: In child support.
Susan Reff: Right?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So we get a figure child support if the parents are sharing joint custody. So if they have 5050 custody, it really is sort of an income equaliser. Yes. So the parent that makes more money is going to be paying the parent who makes less money in income if they share 5050 custody. But there’s a couple of different factors that play into that, too. They’re also going to share out-of-pocket medical expenses incurred on behalf of the children. So those doctor visits write any bills that you get from medical providers. They’re also going to share daycare expenses on a percentage that may or may not be 5050. So that nice software tells you what the percentage oh, and.
Susan Reff: Then how much each parent’s going to pay.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Right.
Susan Reff: Okay.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So if you have 5050 parenting time, that doesn’t mean you’re sharing in those expenses. 5050.
Susan Reff: Okay.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So you know all of this, you’re acting like you don’t.
Susan Reff: I’m acting like the client. Like, Oh, okay.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah.
Susan Reff: That’s how it works.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Tracy Yeah.
Susan Reff: Telling me so.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Child support is a pretty simple thing. Sometimes we get into interesting conversations or factors that we have to figure out when, for example, one parent isn’t working. So how do we figure out what their earning capacity is or one parent is self employed? How do we figure out what their income is? What if a parent has different income over the last three years? Oh yeah, averaging and all of that.
Susan Reff: So one of the things that I think more people are thinking about now is people who aren’t married to each other and they have a child together, you know, and I tell everyone child support works the same. It doesn’t matter if you were married or you’re unmarried, the calculator still factors the same things, right? Income deductions. And then it gives a number based on how much time the child is going to be with each parent.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: And in those situations, that’s called a paternity action. And then if you’re married and you’re looking at a child’s calculator, you’re going through a.
Susan Reff: Divorce, Right.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Or legal separation.
Susan Reff: Right. And some people get worried, you know, like, oh, what if, you know, I just found out I have a child and the child is 15 years old. Am I going to be stuck with a child support bill that goes way back to the day the kid was born? You know? Right. And I think the attorney answer is it depends like on a lot of things.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah.
Susan Reff: You know, in Nebraska. The parent who wants to claim or get child support from the other parent. There’s a they have to prove who the. Usually it’s the mom. The mom would have to prove who the dad is first. And the dad, the purported dad could fight that. And then they have to show what their income is, what the father’s income is, put it in the calculator and see what it is. But I mean, I haven’t had a case ever where that’s happened, where they’ve come back and been like, Oh, yeah, I’m going to make you pay from birth.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Sometimes we look at paying back to the birth of the child and birthing expenses if it’s a fairly new newborn baby. Yeah. And so and sometimes we see parents that are not married. They’re together for a while after the baby is born, and then they break up. And so now they need a paternity action, child support. And then a judge will order back to the date of birth plus birthing expenses. And those can be some hefty bills.
Susan Reff: That’s why good insurance is invaluable. That was not a plug for an insurance company, but.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Right. Or is it.
Susan Reff: Valuable? Good insurance is in. Like the whole thing. Like, that’s priceless.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay.
Susan Reff: I don’t know. You knew what I meant, right?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: I did.
Susan Reff: Yeah.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay. But grammatically, I don’t know.
Susan Reff: Drink. I have nothing in my cup.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay, so I have a case right now that’s really interesting because one of the questions that we get asked a lot is the co parent is not working. How am I going to get child support calculated or how does that figure go into the child support calculator for income?
Susan Reff: Is it just zero then? Well, it depends.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah, it does depend. Right? It depends. If the co parent is in jail, then it will be zero. And that’s the case that I have right now. We’re trying to figure out how the dad is going to pay any child support if he’s in jail. And recently the law change that they’re not going to order child support to be paid while someone’s incarcerated.
Susan Reff: Yeah, so that’s new because they used to do just like a minimum, like a nominal amount to keep somebody on the hook, basically.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Right. But if someone’s not working and they’re not incarcerated, what we look at is earning capacity and that’s what is this person capable of? Do they have a college degree? What is their work history? Can we look at sometimes we look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and say, okay, they were a massage therapist. They aren’t doing that anymore. There’s no reason they can’t do that. Here’s what someone that does that job should make.
Susan Reff: Yeah, I. I recently saw someone. Put into evidence a job posting for a. I don’t know what it was. I can’t remember the field, but it was like a job posting that this person had done in the past to say if you had gone out and applied for jobs in our area, here’s what a like that job pays. And the judge accepted that. Yeah.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So I go straight to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and I’m like, Judge, here’s what they should be making.
Susan Reff: Do you ever plug it in?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Lawyer No. What does it say we should be?
Susan Reff: I have never used this website, so I’m curious.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: I think it’s just the BLS dot org, so use it.
Susan Reff: We’ll do that that next. But don’t.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Abuse it.
Susan Reff: Don’t abuse. Okay.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So then what happens when child sports not getting paid.
Susan Reff: Like someone’s supposed to pay it and they don’t pay.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: It, right? There’s a court.
Susan Reff: Order. Well, any time there’s a court order and someone doesn’t follow it, it can be considered contempt of court. Right. Even child support. So the judges or an attorney can file a motion for contempt of court and put on enough evidence that the persons that there is a valid court order they’re paying, that they’re not paying. And then the judge says, you’re in contempt and you better start paying. And they usually say, you better start paying. And if you don’t start paying, I’m going to throw you in jail in 90 days. Yeah.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Sometimes to get to that point, the balance has to be pretty high. And unfortunately, let’s say a child support order is $100 a month.
Susan Reff: Drink a good one. Diet Coke. Going down.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So let’s say the child support is X dollars 000 per month. Okay? And we may get a client say, hey, I haven’t got child support for two months and we’re going to say we need to you got to let it sit for maybe six months or more. Yeah. To make it really worth it, because sometimes the judge is not going to hold someone in contempt and give him a jail sentence for 600 bucks.
Susan Reff: Right. That was another number.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: But running out of debt.
Susan Reff: The other thing is, is. Because we’re not jerky attorneys.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Like, jerky.
Susan Reff: Like like we don’t we don’t act like jerks. The the cost benefit in that end. And why the cost benefit analysis of filing that case.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Right.
Susan Reff: Your legal fees may end up costing more than what you’d end up getting.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: The good thing, though, in Nebraska is there’s the child support enforcement team. Yeah. So you can go to them and they can try to help at no cost to. So then ultimately someone can go to jail. They can get their driver’s license taken away, all of that stuff. And really, I think talking to an attorney about what the benefits are for.
Susan Reff: Yeah. Support. And a lot of people think like, you know, you you you missed paying child support one month and you’re just going to end up in jail like magically, like if you get pulled over or something. That’s not how it works.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Child support police.
Susan Reff: Yeah.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: They roll up and the they have like.
Susan Reff: Blue lights on the top of their car and their car plays like somewhere between the ice cream man knowing.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Other things to.
Susan Reff: The cop siren.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: I once had a client and then I realized I think a lot of clients think this way, that we somehow get some sort of notice when our clients aren’t receiving their child support. Yeah, and like, I had this client say, Well, you should have known that I haven’t received child support for three months. And I thought, What? How would I know that? But I think it’s sort of reasonable that she might think.
Susan Reff: Yeah, but we don’t, we don’t get notices.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Like we get 100 emails a day.
Susan Reff: Bobby didn’t.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Get.
Susan Reff: His child’s worth this month. No, we don’t get any notices. So it’s on a client to come and hire an attorney and say, I want you to enforce this court order that they need to pay. And, you know, like I said before, a lot of the times, even if the judge finds the person in contempt, they’re going to give them an opportunity to pay.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: But.
Susan Reff: They don’t usually.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Give them a her daughter.
Susan Reff: Yeah. Purge.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So do you know that that’s actually like a religious thing? Because you get to purge yourself of the wrongdoing, so it’s like cleansing yourself.
Susan Reff: That’s where the term comes from.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Someone explained that to me one time, and I think I googled it.
Susan Reff: I. I think of Perge and I think of two things purgatory, which also religious. Yeah, but maybe doesn’t like mean get rid of or whatever. But then I think of like throwing up.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Oh, yeah. Purging.
Susan Reff: Yeah.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So in scuba diving, you, you can purge your regulator of water. Yeah. Yeah. Like every time you do that, I’m like, what’s coming out?
Susan Reff: You know, there’s nothing in here.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: All right, we’re going to some questions. We’re going to the Google questions.
Susan Reff: Our producers spent many hours trying to find some fun.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Google their entire weekend password. They’re all right. So what’s the first question? Yes. How much does Nick Cannon paying child support? All right. We do see these questions beforehand. And and I glanced at it and I thought, I think I should know who Nick Cannon is.
Susan Reff: Yeah, Who’s Nick Cannon?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: But then Susan.
Susan Reff: Brought. I have a charge, a research.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So at first glance, we don’t know the question or we don’t know the answer to this. But Susan did some research, and there’s graphs.
Susan Reff: So Google of the numerous, what are they called like? Magazine sites like celebrity websites.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Influencers.
Susan Reff: Yeah, I don’t know.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: So like people.
Susan Reff: Probably not even reputable as that. They all they all estimated Nick Cannon’s child support to be anywhere between $2,000,003 Million a month. A year. Oh.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: And they think.
Susan Reff: And they thought his annual income was 5 million.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Wow. So that’s like, I really can’t do math. But two divided by five is like.
Susan Reff: Why are we dividing?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Oh, well, that’s like a high percentage of his income.
Susan Reff: It’s like 40 some. Yeah, very high.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: 30. Yeah, because it’s less than 50%. That would be 2.5.
Susan Reff: But Nick Cannon has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight children. He’s expecting two more. And he has a child who’s died. With one, two, three, four, five, six women.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: And then you told me when I said, I don’t really think I even know who Nick Cannon is. And I’m shocked that this person has that many kids with those different women. And then you said, but, you know, Mariah Carey. I mean, of course, everyone knows.
Susan Reff: Mariah Carey is the first. She’s the OG. They call her the OG mama. She she was the first mom. I don’t know if they were married, but I think they actually had a relationship. I can’t.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Everyone’s.
Susan Reff: Didn’t I can’t determine if Nick has had.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Relationships with some sort of relationship.
Susan Reff: Yes, but he’s expecting children with two women at the same time, and then other others have overlapped pretty close in time. He also has two sets of twins.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Is Nick Cannon part of the brother? Squad. Brother squad. Oh, that’s.
Susan Reff: I don’t even know what that means.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: The Jonas Brothers? No, obviously. No.
Susan Reff: No.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah. No. Okay, so this is how much? I don’t know.
Susan Reff: Nick Cannon was. I think he was. He’s. He’s always kind of like spokesperson ing for, like, talent reality shows.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Oh, that’s. I didn’t even know who that is.
Susan Reff: But then did he play basketball? Now we sure know we’re getting. How do you know? I don’t? Compared to.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Whom?
Susan Reff: I don’t know.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Let’s move on. We don’t know the answer.
Susan Reff: Although I want to say what some of these kids names are.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay, let’s do it.
Susan Reff: Which you want Mariah’s children first. Mariah’s children?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Wait, was this before or after? All I want for Christmas is you.
Susan Reff: I’m thinking.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: After. Yeah. Okay.
Susan Reff: So she didn’t want. She has twins. She has twins. A boy and a girl. Monroe is the girl. I like that. Named after Marilyn Monroe. And then Moroccan call.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: The country.
Susan Reff: Named after the decorating style.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay. Did you look that up? Yep. Oh, okay.
Susan Reff: They call him Rock. Yeah. And then we have the other twins. I think they’re both boys.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Zion with.
Susan Reff: Mariah. No, that’s it. Mariah has got the twins.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: He’s got the twins. Then in his genes.
Susan Reff: He’s got a lot in his genes. All right, I go there. Sorry. The twins Zion in Zillion, who goes by Zilli and then that mom’s pregnant, so we’ll probably get another Z baby. Z name baby. And then with one of the other moms, he has Golden, which they call Sagan or Sagan and then powerful queen. It’s her legal name, powerful queen. And that mom is also expecting. Wow. And then the newest baby is Onyx Ice.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Two different words. Yes.
Susan Reff: And then or maybe the newest baby is legendary or Onyx Ice. One of those two legendary or Onyx Ice is pretty new.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay.
Susan Reff: And then the child who passed away. His name was Zen. Do you think another.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Name gets a lot of input to the kids names or.
Susan Reff: I really don’t know. It does look like most of them have the mom’s last name.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay.
Susan Reff: So interesting.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: All right. Moving on.
Susan Reff: Moving on. Okay. That was enough with Nick Cannon. Yeah.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Do women pay child support? Yes. Yeah. Especially like the ones that kick ass and make more money than their husbands. Yeah, that’s the unfortunate part.
Susan Reff: You make more money, you pay more child support. Yeah, but you’re going to you’re going to pay to support your children whether they live in your house or they live in someone else’s house. Right. So I think we’re the icky feeling comes from when we talk about paying child support, is that it goes to the other parent and they get to decide how it’s spent.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Right. And in same sex marriages and relationships.
Susan Reff: Mom? Mom.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah. Yeah. All right. How to. Who? Who knows? We don’t know.
Susan Reff: How not to pay child support in Texas. Maybe go to jail.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Don’t have an abortion because you can’t do it there.
Susan Reff: Don’t have an abortion. Well, then you would.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: You know, there’s some negatives. Double negative, triple. Don’t move on.
Susan Reff: How many? Oh.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Oh, I don’t know. Test it out.
Susan Reff: It depends.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah. Well, you could miss all the payments before you go to jail. If no one’s going to file a.
Susan Reff: Contempt on you, no one is complaining.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah, but now, like, if Nick Cannon misses all those payments, I think he’s going to jail. No, that just liquidated some of his stuff.
Susan Reff: Well.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Now we’re moving on. Nick Cannon.
Susan Reff: Nick Cannon.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: If I do a DNA test and find out I have a child, would I owe back child support? Did you see that documentary? Our father.
Susan Reff: I heard about it. That was the like, the doctor of.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah. He should have had to owe back child support because they were all adults by the time.
Susan Reff: Well, how many kids were there? Like.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Like 100.
Susan Reff: And they were different models or. Right. More than 100.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah. Thousands? Me I don’t know. I mean, he was just inseminating all the women with his DNA.
Susan Reff: Yeah, I don’t. I don’t know if did they they didn’t talk about that in the documentary. No. If anybody filed.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: We need to Google that.
Susan Reff: That’ll be another episode down the road.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: But. Yeah, that it depends what happens to child supportive parents. Get back together.
Susan Reff: This actually happens, right? People split up, they get a child support order and then, you know, shortly after maybe years, they’re like, Oh, let’s be together.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah.
Susan Reff: And they’re like living under one roof and equally contributing to the child. So then what happens?
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Yeah, Yeah. So it depends on a couple different things. If the child is receiving any support, any sort of state aid, like Medicaid, title 20 day care benefits, you may not be able to end the child support. Right. If they aren’t, though, really just one parent needs to dismiss the action or keep it accruing and then you can receive it all day long.
Susan Reff: So in that sense, in that situation, if the parent who’s supposed to be receiving it doesn’t really care that they’re not getting it because they all live together and they’re one happy family, it doesn’t matter.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Well, so it will keep accruing. And then if they get a tax return refund, that refund will likely go to the payee.
Susan Reff: Which is. The parent who would have been receiving child support to begin with.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: That’s the definition of pay.
Susan Reff: Yeah, yeah, that’s a big term, though. I wanted to make sure everyone understood, including me.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: All right.
Susan Reff: So that’s a lot about child support. And Nick Cannon.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: That was a lot about Nick Cannon.
Susan Reff: Was he does he have like is he like a singer rapper? I don’t know.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: I don’t know. I clearly don’t.
Susan Reff: Know. We’re totally getting laughed at because we don’t know much about Nick Cannon.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: No. And you did some research. You didn’t figure out what he was.
Susan Reff: You know how long it took me to find all these kids? Yeah, moms.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: But hold on.
Susan Reff: And write down the names.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Because we got a link to the teaser of our podcast. And when we got here, he said, Did you see the teaser? And she said, No, I haven’t. I haven’t had a chance to sit at my computer for that long. And I said it was 90 seconds, but how long did this take you?
Susan Reff: So I did this right before we got here.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Okay. You could have watched the teaser.
Susan Reff: I could have watched the teaser. All right. I don’t like watching videos of myself feel weird.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Are you done talking about Nick Cannon?
Susan Reff: Mm hmm. Till next time.
Tracy Hightower-Henne: Thanks for listening to the Lady Laurie League podcast today. Please subscribe to our podcast Everywhere you listen to podcasts and we have more resources about child support in the show notes, so check those out.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the lady. Be sure to like and subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts if you would like to learn more about our. At H. Law Omaha.
We’ll see you next week.
