One Weird New Trick to End Child Support Fights Forever

OK, sorry, I hate clickbait titles, but I tried like a dozen other ones and this one just felt the most accurate. Let me tell you what this post is actually about: it’s about a relatively obscure but pretty amazing app for Apple and Android called SupportPay.

SupportPay has a few basic functions:

• It works with PayPal (you each have to have a PayPal account) to quickly transfer money from you to your spouse from inside the app at no charge.
• It provides you with a reminder of upcoming payments-due and payments past-due.
• It allows you to input your childcare expenses and tracks them over weeks, months, and years, including creating cute little charts and graphs to help you (and your spouse!) understand what is happening in the big-picture.
• It allows you to snap a picture of a receipt (or anything else, really), attach information to it (like which child the expense was for, how much of that bill was paid by the other parent, and so on), and then save it either privately or in a shared folder where your ex- can see it.

There are also premium features that make a variety of information from the program available online to your lawyers for some number of years — which honestly is incredibly valuable if there is ever a conflict about child support. (Note: this whole thing works just as well for spousal support or any other forms of legally mandated payment as well.) The premium features cost $10/month, but if you’re the kind of ex-couple that gets into a lot of nit-picky spats, it’s well worth it.

The Real Advantage
Realistically, though, for the vast majority of couples, the fights that occur around child support aren’t actually about the money. The fights occur because of a lack of transparency. Allow me to explain.

Even without paying for the premium service, though, there’s a very distinct legal advantage to SupportPay. It comes from the fact that most child support agreements include a clause that says, in essence, that in addition to this pre-arranged regular monthly payment, the paying spouse must also pay half of any “extra expenses.” These can include things like extracurricular activities, medical expenses, and so on.

Those extra expenses are the source of a huge amount of angst, because unlike the monthly pre-set payments, they require exes to communicate, and most exes would rather not. For many custodial parents, it’s easier to just pay all of the kids’ summer camp fee  (or not send the kid to summer camp!) than it is to get on the phone and hash it out with the ex. That desire to avoid communication means that often, a custodial parent will essentially send the paying parent a bill without any warning, prior discussion, or evidence that the money is actually being spent on the thing claimed.

Enter SupportPay: instead of sucking up the bill for summer camp, you can snap a picture of the filled-out application form, your half of the fee, and a hopeful-looking kid all dressed up for a week in the woods, and upload it all attached to the request for money. Instantly, instead of getting a bill out of the blue for no easily-discernable reason, your spouse can see not only that you’re paying your part, but that your kid wants this and will presumably benefit from it. That makes sending $350 off into the ether a heck of a lot easier.

In the end, yes, this could be accomplished without SupportPay — but the app makes it all so much easier, faster, and more organized (and it’s free!) that we think it’s kind of a no-brainer for anyone who can open a PayPal account and convince their ex to download an app.