The whole crowd waits in a large room to be interviewed individually by a paralegal.  He tells me they won't go by my last salary of $24K and "gives" me minimum wage.  He doesn't take my word for how much visitation my ex is exercising. He walks me thru my memory of each month for the past year. He did the same with my ex. Actual visitation is used instead of the percentage according to the court order. My ex exercises 12% visitation.  They accept that he's making a lower salary.  In '95 child support included my ex's share of child support expenses of $100.  That's removed.  The paralegal is concerned child support is going to go way down, and is brainstorming ways he can help that not happen. Bottom line, child support went from $866 to $710.  He's surprised and I'm not disappointed. I can live with that.  The paralegal expected my ex to quickly stipulate to that.  It took awhile.

The paralegal did not have the copy of my response I had sent them.  I luckily had a copy with a court filed stamp on it.  The paralegal was very relaxed and helpful. He looked over my requests, and tells me they can only address the child support.  The rest has to be an OSC in the original court of divorce.  He says, "Surely he'll do the right thing and help pay for the kids thru college." I said no he won't.

I pointed out that the current wage assignment doesn't include the $30 arrears payment my ex stipulated to in '95. He suggests he'll just ask my ex about it. I said I did, and Phil didn't respond about fixing that. The paralegal says he'll ask Phil to agree to a payment for arrears. I said he won't do it. The paralegal looks at me, "Really? Well, we'll see." He didn't do it. 

My ex hasn't been willing to do the right thing for a long time.  Thinking back I remembered 5 years  before our divorce when our phone bill was showing pages and pages of phone calls, costing up to $500 a month. Phone company investigated and told us our 12yo son must have a computer we don't know about that was automatically making phone calls one right after the other.  We had to pay the phone bills.  A year later my ex was acting erratically, threatening to leave, packing, then fell to his knees sobbing out his confession of making the phone calls to strange women and letting our son take the blame.

You are soooo off the island!

Phil had given the paralegal a response to my response, but Phil hadn't filed it.  The paralegal realizes the kind of "trick" he's trying to pull and makes me a copy.  I learn that in '93 my ex almost didn't get his passport for England cuz NV had filed $17K in arrears. CA investigated and said arrears were only $1500.  He says they don't have the funds to help his wife's daughter and her boyfriend with college, but they can provide a roof and food while they're going to college (Ironically during the time he's not paying child support at all for his own minor children).  His wife was laid off 3/1/2001.

Paralegal said he'd put notes in to get the arrears resolved quickly and file to get an arrears payment. 

In court we heard over and over again people trying to get their driver's license back cuz of arrears owed.  The lady next to me in the waiting room was chatting so friendly with the guy in the next row, I thought surely that wasn't her ex. When she got the chance she nudged me and whispered, "He only had to pay $175 a month and didn't pay for 18 years!!!" We both LOL! I still didn't know if he was her ex.  He eventually moved to sit next to her, and they chatted like old friends catching up. Turned out he was her ex.  The lady received a notice from the DA that her ex owes her $70K. She'd given up on ever getting support and had forgotten all about it. He now pays $400 a month on arrears. He has a couple of other ex's he's paying for too.

04/03/2001, the day after court, my new NV caseworker, who's been wonderful, got a call from LA who told her NV never had a valid child support order. My NV attorney had never gone back in and made a child support order. He told me the referee's report would get me a child support order from local NV DA. They never got a child support order, they used the referee's notes as "the order" and accrued arrears all of these years. The new caseworker looks it over and agrees with CA that NV never had a valid child support order. I think that if I’d never moved out of Vegas, and my ex wasn’t living in another state, NV would just have continued to collect on the “order” it had.

So the $49K in arrears goes out the window.

Cheryl