With an income of $0 and 529 account, how much are you “comfortably” afford to contribute to your daughter’s annual educational cost? is it $37K ($62k-$25k)? I think you are overthinking this whole ordeal. The fact that you are not drawing any income from your business, two other children to consider, the fact that your business is in jeopardy of failing, where will the money come from to pay for your daughter’s $62K college education cost at an expensive private institution?
If I was in your position, I would remove myself from the process and let the chips fall where they may. There is no point to stressing over something that is obviously unaffordable. Your attorney and yourself should have never had agree on paying for 100% of college cost without the proper safeguards and/or preconditions (income base, state universities, max as a % of income, etc.). You ex is blindly assuming you can pay for whatever school she picked, knowing you will have to pay. Unlike most parents, the college COA was never a factor in her decision and you are left holding the bag. I would push the ball back into her court without any further discussion. You cannot pay what you don’t have!
And just adding…the cost of a private university has gone up substantially in the last 15 years. My son started college in 2003 and the cost was $38,000 a year…total…for an expensive private university that now costs almost $70,000 a year.
I agree with @austinmshauri ; I am really worried you’re going to let your ex destroy your life with your current family and kids.
My BIL is a family law attorney, and he is a huge buffer between two warring parties-I really think you need that for your sanity and your wife and children-this has to be a terrible source of stress for you and for them.
After reading all the details, I really think you need to take a big step back and separate what you want your daughter to be, and what your memories of her are, to what she is right now and who influences her. At some point she may grow up, become independent, and realize that you were the good guy in all of this awfulness, or she may grow up and become a carbon copy of her mother, and you’ve lost her for good.
Just don’t lose what you have now trying to save what you have no control over.
I’m sorry that you and your daughter, and your wife and subsequent children - are going through this OP. It has to be so painful. It’s one of the reasons that I could not practice family law for very long. Too close to my heart.
The thing that gets lost in some of these situations (besides the kids who are stuck in the middle which is horrible) is that - even if you and your former wife were still married - there’s a decent chance that you might disagree over how this college search and selection process would happen (or you might disagree on other parenting issues).
Even among married couples you see “magical thinking” about how, exactly, college is going to be paid for. On top of it all you have other children to consider, but saying that to your first child may make the situation worse.
If I were you I’d try to find a competent, reasonable attorney to help me sort through this. I would just want someone to give me some ideas on what the options are. I would not necessarily sign a big retainer to gear up for a battle.
Even though you don’t want your D to be ratcheting back and forth like a ping pong ball- sounds to me that she needs to understand that if she does nothing, she is not going to college in August. Not this college, nor any other.
That’s reality. Next move is hers.
Your ex-wife can get a court order but garnishing your (non existent?) wages-- which I don’t think is even a remote possibility- still doesn’t get her tuition paid in August.
I don’t know where you live but in my state judges are increasingly leery of women who fail to “relaunch” financially after a divorce. Yes- it’s sexist. But a family court judge isn’t a millionaire, and they are often women. They wake up every day and put on their robes and head off to work- while balancing everything else as well. I have a friend who ended up with a generous settlement (by any reasonable standard) but not as much as her lawyer had claimed she needed and the judge told her in open court, “you need to get a job. You speak English. You are not an illegal immigrant. You have a HS diploma (she has a college degree but this was for the sake of drama). So you need to get a job. Next time you appear with a frivolous filing about increasing your support, I need a paystub from your job before I will consider an amendment. Next case”.
So I think you need to tell your D- “either you and your mom cooperate, or you don’t go to college this year. What’s plan B and how can I help get you there?”
Those words from your DD, after you explained your financial situation and their need to fill out FA forms, speak volumes. She’s been brainwashed into thinking that you’re rich, and that her college costs are easily affordable, and therefore she doesn’t need to “stress herself” by filling out FA forms. She’s been raised in a household where the adult has never worked, yet things got paid for. She has no real grasp of these college costs.
Heck, maybe appeal to her sense of greed. Tell her that you’ll give her a dime for every dollar worth of free aid beyond her merit scholarship(s). So if she gets a $20k need-based grant from FA filings, she gets $2k. (Obviously, the aid must be need-based free money…not merit, not work study, not loans and it would be a school that she attends).
That said, I still think you need to have an atty get this court order modified to state “instate public college tuition” is the max paid, and that FA forms must be filled out correctly and timely.
I don’t see where you have any alternative but to go back to court. You have other kids to support and to ultimately put through college. You cannot let your daughter’s desire to go to a $60,000+ a year college put you in a position where you won’t be able to educate your younger children. It sounds like you can’t afford to pay for this school without significant loans. Even if you could scrape the money together for her first year, in your current situation you won’t be able to do that for four years. You do your daughter no favors by letting her start at a school she won’t be able to afford to stay at. And there’s no guarantee, even if your ex fills out the paperwork, that you’ll get much aid. They’re going to look at your income, your wife’s income and your ex’s income. And they’ll consider everyone’s assets (including business assets), as well. Do as a poster above suggests and run the school’s NPC. Good luck, it sounds like you’re trying to do the right thing in an impossible situation.
Agree about an attorney drafted letter stating the COA basis as state school avg from two states (or some other reasonable amount the attorney can support from other legal situations with similar circumstances/decrees in your state), and a deadline for getting the forms (FASFA etc) done for current school otherwise will need to take a gap year or receive no money as beyond the legal scope of divorce decree due to non-compliance of custodial parent.
Attorney may say you also have leverage either in or out of your period while you are providing child support.
Use your business brain which will be best for all. Keep us posted on progress. We are rooting for you OP.
as @mom2collegekids says this is exactly it. You cannot reason with this kind of brainwashing and conditioning. Do not try. You cannot actually fault your D for this if she’s not hearing about a potential issue until April, she had no reason to think she would have issues. It is truly unfortunate that you didn’t inject yourself into the process when applications and acceptances were happening and have the money talk then, but there isn’t much you can do about it now, it is what it is.
This is the situation in our household right now and as the stepmom I can very very much empathize with what your wife may be going through.
As stressful and as pointless as you may think it is to fight your ex, you will do far more damage to your marriage, to the ability to finance your other kids educations and your long term financial stability by rolling over now. Remove your wife from it as best you can and protect her from it. It may help you to come vent here, versus to her, so she can feel you have it under control and the ex isn’t winning. This also helps keep you from feeling caught in the middle and pleasing no one. That said, keep her informed, do not make decisions without her input or blessing. You have to be able to fight this together.
As the wife of someone who just sucks it up and pays what he is told the vast majority of the time, his ability to hold firm when he really does want to push back is next to nothing. He does it, much like you, out of fear of alienating his child which I completely understand. Unfortunately all you really do is teach the child they can have whatever they want if they play the game right and show the other children that different rules apply to some. I really do hope you will run a NPC and get a better feel for what you are up against. I strongly suspect that you may not qualify for any aid given what you’ve described, and if you do, it would not be more than 15k which does not sound as if it will be enough.
Don’t risk everyone’s future over this. There are still schools with openings and as everyone has already said, no court will interpret your order to read “any school of D’s choosing at any price without approval from the paying parent”. They just won’t. Modifying it to read in state flagship is a great strategy.
What about “cost of attendance at the state flagship for the state/s that the student is a resident of”?
Also, make sure you’re fair:
you can tell your daughter that you promise you’ll engage the same percentage of income for her as for her step/half siblings, and even more since your business has failed.
It’s very important, for your daughter’s sake, that she understand there’s no “favorite” between your three children, all three will get an equivalent financial effort from you.
One issue though is that, although YOU don’t make money, your wife probably does, and your ex wife may consider that either 1° you sold your business to escape your financial responsibilities toward your daughter’s college, or 2° if you’re living off your wife’s wages, then she’s glad to make her pay.
Letter from you to daughter and ex: I have this amount of money for college ($$ per year or 529 amount). Include info the school told you about how to get financial aid. That’s it. Tell them how you will pay, either a lump sum in august and jan, or on a monthly payment plan to the school (not to ex).
If ex wants more, she’ll have to sue you in your state. How will she get the money by August to pay the college?
You have to take control. Can you make her complete the FAFSA? No. Can she force you to pay? Not without going to court. Even in NJ, the courts aren’t ordering parents to pay for $65000 schools, and I think most are ordering each parent to pay half of the state tuition, not thousands for room and board, not for private schools. Most states will not require a parent to pay an unreasonable amount, especially if things have changed in 15 years since the agreement was made.
I would have liked to have told my kids, ‘pick any school you want, live in the most expensive dorm, sign up for study abroad and never work.’ Not in the budget, and they had to do the work of filling in forms and applying for scholaships in order to go to college. Families all over America are trying to figure this out right now, and many will NOT go to the schools they want to this fall because of finances. If your daughter doesn’t fill out the forms, she’ll be one of them.
Be firm. This is how much I have for your college. Period.
Yes, I agree the school is likely unaffordable even with maximum of $25 k of aid from the school (if you get that much and they most likely won’t stack $11 k of merit on top of need based aid).
So would you be able to pay $37 k a year? If you don’t draw a salary right now and have two more children to put through college?
OK, so now I’ve read the details. I’m going to play devil’s advocate because, frankly, I think everyone’s jumped on the “nightmare ex” bandwagon and have glossed over some points.
If I’m understanding correctly, you knew you were responsible for your daughter’s college education cost and you knew her age. Did you ever think to look at what current tuition rates were, say, a year or two ago? Maybe start thinking about the gap between what you’d saved in the 529 vs cost of attendance? Since you’re under the impression that your ex’s assets may be significant, it should have occurred to you that your daughter may not quality for any financial aid and, therefore, she would be full pay… or did you not think that far?
I think, at this point, you need to think beyond getting your ex to complete the FA forms, to the real possibility that there will still be a significant net cost. You haven’t said, in real numbers, how much you would actually be able to pay. Is it enough to send her to an in-state public university as full-pay? I’m not at all condoning your ex’s actions and I’m sincerely sorry about what you and your family have had to go through, but I’m not sure that it justifies you not doing your part, or at least to have given it an honest try.
Your situation really isn’t all that different from those parents who proudly let their kids apply to great schools and only start thinking how to pay for it when acceptances started rolling in.
Except for the fact that OP is a business owner who’s suffered reverses in the last year and has an ex and a daughter who only started speaking with him again after the apps were in. OP can’t force his daughter to communicate with him. It appears she and her mother refuse to do so unless they want something. That’s hardly his fault.
I’m not going to judge anything about the OP’s relationship with his daughter or his ex. I know enough about divorces and custody to know that there’s always two sides to every single story.
What I do know, which is what I’ve been saying from my first comment, is that in the world of divorces/custody, when there are significant changes in a parent’s finances, the way to handle it is by petitioning for a modification to the order. It’s done all the time. In many states, it’s pretty straight forward to do without an attorney if the circumstances are straightforward and well-documented. If the OP’s finances have changed significantly, he needs to file for a modification.
My main point is that, even if the order is modified to take into account the steep rise in college costs over the last 15 years and his businesses losses, it doesn’t erase the fact that he’s known for 15 years that there will come a day when his daughter will come to him expecting him to pay for college. And if, during the last few years while his daughter was doing so well in high school, he hadn’t given any thought to how much college actually costs, or how financial aid works, then he’s not any different from the parents I mentioned.
FWIW, one of my closest friends has a child he’s only seen a handful of times in the last 8 years because of his ex and I know full well what a horrible thing that is to do to a child but, in the U.S., child support and other financial obligations are never tied to visitation/access. Denying access never relieves the financial obligation of the non-custodial parent. I’m pretty sure the OP is aware of that. But given his ex and the history he paints, I’m surprised he thought his ex would cooperate in lowering the costs he’s ordered to pay.
Seems like a common unfortunate situation, where both ex-spouses have spent and are spending what should be their kids’ college funds to send their lawyers’ kids to college.