Many unmarried and divorced parents in Illinois pay child support. The monthly payments are meant to help evenly spread the cost of raising a child when parents are unmarried or divorced. In order to determine which parent will pay child support, the court chooses one parent to be the primary guardian. This parent has the majority of the parenting time and will therefore receive any child support which is ordered. The court then considers both parent’s income, assets, and life circumstances and uses that information to calculate a fair and reasonable child support payment amount.

However, we all know that life can be unpredictable. Sometimes unexpected life events like job loss, becoming hospitalized, or incurring significant medical bills leave parents unable to make their child support payments in full and on time. If you are struggling to pay your court-ordered child support, read on to learn how to handle the situation in a way that benefits both you and your child.

Never Skip Child Support Payments

One of the most critical errors any payer parent can make is to simply stop paying their child support. Skipping a payment or paying a lesser amount than is required by the court order will make the payer parent look irresponsible and can influence the court’s decisions regarding child support and child custody in the future. Parents who do not make child support payments can have their wages garnished or tax refund intercepted. Furthermore, extensive nonpayment of court-ordered child support can be punishable by jail time. Illinois law calls this “criminal nonsupport.” Instead of missing payments, notify the court immediately upon realizing you cannot make your payments.

In any proceeding for divorce, the spouses must reach an agreement regarding the division of their marital property. If they cannot, the court will equitably allocate the marital estate between the spouses, taking a number of statutory factors into account. During the process, either spouse may file a claim of dissipation, alleging that the other party has spent or “dissipated” marital assets inappropriately, and that the dissipated money should be repaid to the marital estate before proper allocation can be completed. When the spending occurred, however, is an important consideration, and one that may impact the court’s ultimate decision regarding the claim.

What Is Dissipation?

Under Illinois law, dissipation is a spouse’s use of marital for his or her own personal benefit and not for the benefit of the marriage. Dissipation is often alleged in cases where one party has spent a great deal of money on drugs, alcohol, gambling, bad investments, or extramarital affairs. In some cases, dissipation can also include the destruction of or failure to maintain an asset. Such actions are problematic because inappropriate spending or destruction can significantly reduce the value of the marital estate.

Dissipation Timing

If your spouse has never been very good with money, it is easy to think that years of apparently wasteful spending may constitute dissipation. In Illinois, however, both statutory law and court precedents have established that the inappropriate use of assets is only considered dissipation if it occurs while “the marriage was undergoing an irreconcilable breakdown.” While such a determination may seem subjective at best, it is intended to prevent the need for a full accounting of expenditures throughout the entire course of a marriage which may have lasted for decades. The law also provides that dissipation claims are limited to actions or spending that occurred within five years of the filing of the petition for divorce.

Under the law in Illinois, children have to right to expect financial support from both parents, regardless of the adults’ marital situation. The same is not true, however, for divorcing spouses. While there may be situations in which long-term spousal maintenance is appropriate, there is no inherent assumption that it will be granted. Instead, in the absence of an agreement either at the time of divorce or prior, such as a prenuptial agreement, the court will examine the applicable circumstances and decide if an order for spousal support is necessary.

Negotiated Maintenance and Prenuptial Agreements

Most aspects of divorce can be settled fairly amicably through the process of negotiation. You and your spouse may be able to reach an agreement regarding spousal support with an arrangement that works for your particular situation. Spousal maintenance provisions can also be included in a prenuptial agreement, created prior to your marriage. As long as such agreements are workable and relatively fair, they are likely to be accepted by the court.

Court-Ordered Maintenance

When you and your spouse cannot reach an agreement regarding support, the court will review the circumstances of your marriage and divorce. It will be up to the judge to decide whether or not to award spousal maintenance, and to determine the amount to be paid based upon provisions in the law. The court is expected to take into account:

The internet has revolutionized the way we communicate with each other. Social media has allowed us to send and receive information about each other in the blink of an eye. Nearly 70 percent of Americans have at least a Facebook account. Although websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can be wonderful tools to stay in touch with friends and family, they can also become a significant responsibility during tumultuous times such as a divorce. If you are considering ending your marriage, you should know that social media activity can come up during a divorce. It is critical for anyone getting divorced to be intentional about what they post online.

Social Media Mistake #1: Oversharing Personal Information

For many married individuals, separating from their spouse leaves them feeling alone and empty. In order to vent their frustrations or express their grief about the marriage, they take to social media. This is a major mistake. Unfortunately, careless comments made by people getting divorced can and have come back to haunt them.  In one such case, a wife’s Facebook activity was used as evidence during a formal custody case. The couple shared custody of a 4-year-old child together. The husband alleged that the wife took frequent vacations without their child while she had custody of him. The court ordered the wife to show her Facebook profile. It contained many pictures proving that she frequently spent time away from her child during her allotted parenting time.

Social Media Mistake #2: Letting Your Emotions Get the Better of You

Going through a divorce can be incredibly taxing emotionally and psychologically. However, serious problems can arise when spouses getting divorced express those emotions online. Another example of a divorce case that was affected by Facebook is one in which a woman complained online, “My children have a really, really bad father.” The court considered this and other statements evidence that she would not support her children’s relationship with their father. The court awarded the father more parental responsibility as a result.

While the divorce rate seems to be leveling out for most age groups—and possibly dropping for some demographics--there is one in particular in which divorce is more common than ever. Depending upon your perspective, it may come as a surprise to learn that the divorce rate among people age 50 and older today is twice what it was a quarter-century ago. For the 65 and older age group, the rate of divorce has more than doubled. During the same period, the divorce rate for virtually every other age group has remained the same or has fallen. So what is causing the increase in older divorce, or, as some call it, gray divorce? While the explanation is probably not to be found in just a single factor, there are a number of things that may be playing a role.

Not the First Time

One of the contributing factors to increase in gray divorce is the idea that second marriages among all age groups fail at a much higher rate than first marriages, and third or subsequent marriages even more so. Just based on pure probability, and with remarriage rates at record-highs, more and more older Americans are in the midst of a second or third marriages, making them at least two and a half times more likely to experience a divorce.

Being Happy for the Long Haul

The current life expectancy for a person born in the United States is around 80 years, depending on the methodology used. This means that when someone reaches age 50, he or she still has an average of about 30 years of life ahead. According to Professor Pepper Schwartz of the University of Washington in Seattle, “A lot of marriages are not horrible, but they’re no longer satisfying or loving. They may not be ugly, but your say, ‘Do I really want 30 more years of this?’” With divorce no longer carrying the social stigma once associated with it, more couples are willing to take the risk to put the shine back on their golden years, so to speak.