Legal Question in Family Law in California

Visitation time is determined in one of two ways. Either by agreement with the other party, or by court order. If by court order, the court looks at what will be in the child's best interest. Depending on what the time-share turns out to be, the amount of child support will be determined. It is based on time-share and your respective incomes. Getting a good attorney is always advised.

BARRY BESSER

www.besserlaw.com

These are two TOTALLY different questions, though the answer to the second is crucial to the first. Visit time is presumed to be best at 50/50 joint legal and physical custody, and then is adjusted from there based on the realities of the situation (do the parents live next door or 100 miles apart, where the child goes to school/day-care, issues or problems the parents may have (drugs, domestic violence), and hundreds of other details and factors) with the ultimate rule being the court must find out and then order what is "in the best interests of the minor child." Once the percentage of time with each parent is determined, then those numbers along with a lot of other financial and tax data is fed into a mandatory formula, that must be run on court approved software, which calculates the child support. The basic premise of the formula is it determines "spendable income" of each parent, and allocates a mandatory portion of that to the child. It then adds the parents' support amounts together, and divides by the percentage time in each home. Essentially it makes sure that each day the child has the same amount of money allocated to his/her support. At that point, the amount one of the parents is supposed to pay per month is more than the total amount the child is supposed to have available for the time in their care, and the other parent's total monthly contribution to the child is less than the total daily amounts that the child is supposed to have while in their care. That difference then becomes the support payment.