Kate Gosselin recently admitted her marriage to Jon has hit a rough patch and that the two of them could be living apart, so, it begs the question - how would child support work for so many children, if they were to split?
A reader wrote in to E!'s Ask the Answer B!tch, wondering how child support would work if Jon and Kate were to divorce. Here's how it would possibly break-down:
If you're asking whether a parent can get a discount of eight for the price of six, the answer is, technically, yeah.
If the two "stars" of Jon & Kate Plus 8 decide that the best way to go is a divorce, then child support for eight kids growing up on basic cable gets really interesting.
For the sake of explanation, let's just suppose that Kate gets custody of all the kids. In most states, the law puts a cap on the percentage of Jon's wages—around 40 to 50 percent—that he must pay in child support. The percentage for the first kid is usually 20 percent, and then it goes down from there with each subsequent spawn.
"It's a sliding scale, the more children you have," family law attorney Jennifer C. Smetters explains.
In the case of Jon and Kate, the percentage would probably cap off before we got down to kid number six.
"There's only so much support that someone can give," divorce attorney Joshua Forman tells me. "The law has to give him the incentive to work. Otherwise he might think, 'You're taking 90 percent of my salary? Forget this.' "
However, things might change if Jon, say, got a seven-figure deal to pen a tell-all book. In that case, his income would be so high that a good family lawyer would argue that—at least temporarily—he pay a lower percentage of his income in support.
That is, of course, assuming Kate would be given primary custody of the children. But Kate is the one on the road, away from the kids, while Jon is home (I don't watch the show - does Jon work outside the home anymore?) and Kate earns a reported $50,000-$75,000 per episode, so maybe Jon would be given custody of the kids and she'd have to pay - could happen, right?
Looks like one of them will be forking out child support... Jon and Kate have reportedly SPLIT!
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