The new, 2017, Michigan Child Support Formula is out. With a few tweaks along the way, we’ll have this general formula for the next four years. There are some significant changes:
- You can’t deduct your 401K or retirement contributions any more. Well, that was fun while it (briefly) lasted.
- You can deduct your out of pocket expenses for your own, personal Affordable Care Act expenses, from your income. This is determined on a per capita basis: (total # on plan ➗ total cost = individual cost).
- We’re not calling it extra-ordinary medical now. It’s additional medical. Also, there is an obscure reference to orthodontia that might serve as the beginning to the end of the great, ongoing should-orthodontia-be-ordered debate. (See section 3.04)(B)(2).)
- Speaking of medical, in cases of equal or near-equal parenting time, the court may decline to order ordinary medical expenses at all, and treat all medical expenses as additional medical expenses. This should help prevent situations where the parents have equal parenting time and ordinary medical creates a windfall of money to a parent that does not spend it.
- Most significantly, the parenting time offset multiplier was reduced from three to 2.5. What does this mean in English? It means that if a parent exercises slightly less than 50-50 parenting time, the formula isn’t quite as quick to jump on that parent to hand over the bulk of their base support to the other parent.
The formula is starting to realize what these parents already know – that a parent exercising 150, 160 or 170 overnights still pays for a large amount of extras as well as basics for a child, and that to fully provide for the needs of a child, a child must be cared for in both houses. This change also diminishes the incentives that parents have to fight over the handful of overnights at the margins of either side of 182.5, because these marginal overnights are not the windfall of money that they were under the 2013 formula.