HOW A LITTLE CREATIVITY AND TECHNOLOGY CAN REDUCE STRESS IN DIVORCE

I represent a woman who is separated from her husband and going through a divorce. She recently filed a petition for child support in the Family Court, and she and her husband reached a preliminary settlement which required her husband to pay her a certain amount of money each week for their child.

For me and for the husband’s attorney, that was the hard part, or so we thought. We were wrong. For my client and her husband, that was the easy part. The real problem, and the cause of almost all of the stress in this portion of the case, was how to pay the agreed upon support.

It turned out in my client’s case that both she and her husband were very confused (and therefore stressed) over how exactly to move the money from him to her. Traditional mailing was not acceptable because the husband was not very good at record keeping and managing his finances. Using child support services was not a good option because the husband was self employed, and therefore we could only use child support services if he mailed his payment. A hand to hand exchange of money at the child’s visitation hand-off was not going to work because his visitation was sporadic at best according to both parties.

So, I suggested using a dedicated bank account. This is a technique I and other experienced divorce lawyers have used for years in certain cases. It works like this: the person receiving child support opens a checking account at a bank of her choice which has a branch convenient to her and to the other parent. The account number is exchanged, and the paying parent simply deposits the child support into the account. The paying parent has no access to the account other than to deposit, and the receiving spouse keeps the child support separate from his or her other financial accounts. Neither parent has any access to any personal account information about the other.

The benefits of this arrangement are: (1) the parties do not have to coordinate payments with each other, and therefore have one less point of contact and potential conflict, (2) there are no issues of lost mail, misdirected mail, or a failure to send mail, and (3) all payments are clearly and conclusively documented; the money was either deposited into this dedicated child support account or it was not.

As such, the chances of a dispute over non-payment becoming overheated and nasty are lessened considerably because almost all of the usual defenses to or excuses for non-payment have been eliminated in advance using a little creativity and some basic technology.