Saint Lucie County Legal Issues Blog

It seems that every person ordered to pay or receive child support has their own interpretation of the rules and penalties that govern those payments. Here, we discuss some of the most common myths of child support in relation to Florida guidelines.

One common myth is if the parents have joint custody, neither of them have to pay child support. This is false. The goal of child support is to ensure that both parents share equally in the expenses of raising the children.

There is no question that ending a marriage is stressful on parents as well as on kids. In Florida, parents may take excruciating pains to protect their children from their relationship stresses and to preserve as much normalcy as they can in the lives of their kids. A new trend in caring for children during and after a divorce is nesting, and experts believe that it may be a good way to transition children into their new, post-divorce lives.

Nesting, also called birdnesting, involves keeping the family home for the kids. That means that the parents take turns living in the home with their children but also share a second residential space - such as an apartment or second home - where the other stays when they are not with their children. Nesting only works when parents can work together. Some believe that its benefits may only endure for short-term stretches.

Parents know that children can be very different. Even parents who have multiple children may have observed the very different personalities and needs that their offspring exhibit even though they were raised by the same people and in the same environment. It is because children can have very different requirements for fulfilling their daily needs that courts must examine what will serve their best interests when matters of child custody are being worked out.

To understand this important legal concept, readers are asked to consider two very different children. First, consider a child who is 5 years old and who has a close relationship with their father but not their mother due to a separation that happened shortly after the child's birth. Second, consider a 15 year old child who has grown up in a loving two-parent home and who has a special relationship with each of their parents.

A Florida resident may be pleased to find that a long-lost relative left them a small fortune as an inheritance. This unexpected windfall may enable the recipient to improve their lifestyle, make desired investments, or simply build up their own portfolio of assets for the future benefit of themselves and their relatives.

However, if after receiving an inheritance, the recipient decides to end their marriage, they could run into challenges from their spouse. These challenges may be primarily based on how the recipient decided to use the inheritance and whether that inheritance may remain the separate property of the spouse who inherited it.