What if She Quits (or Threatens to Quit) her Job?

Yeah, unfortunately, we’ve been there, too…

From our 2007 Sequence of Events: [The Devil]’s Angry, Threatening Voice Message. 7:40 p.m.: “[Angel], this is [the devil]. Um, I wanna know why I got a check for 10 dollars [instead of the $20 she unreasonably demanded]. … I w-[ant] I need a call back and I need you to tell me why you’re not paying me what I n-[eed] deserve to be paid. Um … if I hafta quit my job and take you back to court so you can pay me 23 hundred a month then maybe that’s what I hafta do.”

At that time, between child support and earnings, the devil’s monthly income was at least $4,237.50, so we didn’t take her threat seriously. But if she had quit her job, the court would have “imputed” her income to calculate child support, spousal support, and/or attorney fees being as she would have been purposefully unemployed or underemployed.

Here’s how it works:

If the Court believes that a parent has voluntarily reduced his or her wages, no matter how justified, it may compute child support based on that parent’s “imputed income”—or the amount they could be earning.

Minimum wage is $1,300 a month, and the court assumes that everyone can work at a minimum wage job. To impute more than minimum wage, you would need to plan on a vocational examination of your ex to have the admissible evidence needed to impute her higher income.

Imputed income can also be used when an individual is self-employed and her earnings would be greater if she were not. But to be able to impute her income, there needs to be opportunity as well as ability, which means that not only does your ex need to be qualified to do a job, employers also need to be hiring for that job.

So as far as we were concerned, the devil’s threat was a non-threat.

But if she had quit her job, she would’ve been jeopardizing the children’s wellbeing simply because she was pissed off. If that had happened, we would’ve asked the judge for sole physical custody until the devil was able to secure steady, full-time employment sufficient to once again support herself and the children (in combination with my child support). In the meantime, our child support obligation to her would’ve been reduced to zero.

End of problem.