Spousal and Child Maintenance in Singapore
Maintenance is the financial support paid for a child, and sometimes for a former spouse. Here is how the amount is worked out, and what can be done if payments stop.
Maintenance is financial support: for children, and in some circumstances for a former spouse. It is the part of a family matter that most often continues long after everything else is settled, which is why getting it onto a sustainable footing matters more than winning the argument about it.
Children first
A parent has a duty to maintain their child. That duty does not depend on the state of the parents’ relationship, on whether they were ever married, or on how much access is happening.
The amount reflects the child’s reasonable needs weighed against each parent’s means. Both halves of that matter: a figure that ignores what the payer actually earns fails as surely as one that ignores what the child actually costs.
Spousal maintenance is a narrower question
Narrower than most people expect. It turns on the circumstances of the particular marriage: how long it lasted, the standard of living during it, what each person gave up, and what each is now able to earn.
A long marriage in which one spouse left the workforce to raise children looks very different from a short one in which both continued to work. Neither produces an automatic answer.
Disclosure is where the fight usually is
Disputes about maintenance are, in practice, usually disputes about what somebody earns. Bonuses, rental income, a business that pays for things the accounts do not obviously show. This is normal, it is anticipated, and there are ways of dealing with it.
When payments stop
Non-payment is common. There is machinery for enforcement, and it is more effective than asking again.
The single most important thing is not to wait. Arrears become harder to recover the longer they run, and a pattern of missed payments that has been tolerated for a year is a worse position than one raised after a month.
How we help
How we help
Work out a realistic figure
Based on the child's actual needs and both parents' actual means, rather than on a number that sounds about right. Figures pulled from the air tend to be either unaffordable or inadequate, and both come back.
Assemble the evidence of means
Maintenance turns on what each party earns and spends, and disputes about it are usually disputes about disclosure. We know what to ask for and what an incomplete picture looks like.
Negotiate it as part of the wider settlement
Maintenance rarely stands alone. It interacts with the division of assets and with who keeps the home, and settling it in isolation can produce an outcome that makes no sense overall.
Apply for interim maintenance
Where support has stopped and the divorce is still running, this does not have to wait. It is one of the things that can and should be dealt with immediately.
Enforce an order that is not being paid
Non-payment is common and there is machinery for it. Enforcement is not a matter of asking more firmly, and the earlier arrears are raised the more recoverable they are.
Vary an order when circumstances change
Redundancy, illness, a new child. Where the basis on which an order was made has genuinely changed, it can be revisited rather than simply defaulted on.
