Can You Waive Child Support if Everyone Agrees not to Collect it?

People fight about two things in divorce: kids and money.

Child support is the intersection of those two things. So, as you would expect, there are some fights about child support in many Utah divorces.

Sometimes, to lessen the fight, people will try to agree to waive (i.e., not collect) child support.

But, can you actually do this? Can you just waive child support?

The answer is a pretty resounding “no.” The reason for this is child support doesn’t belong to you or your spouse. Child support belongs to your kid(s), so you can’t bargain it away.

Judges guard child support very jealously. This means if you try to agree in divorce papers to not collect child support, your judge will not accept the agreement and will not finalize your divorce.

(I know this because I tried it a few times. Every time, the judges would send back the agreements and tell me to rework the agreement to include child support.)

What all this means is you have to include child support in a Utah divorce agreement. There’s simply no way around that.

Possible Solution

Now, a possible solution is this: you could have a gentlemen’s agreement that, even though child support is in the divorce decree, that the person owed child support will not collect it.

You really need a lot of trust in a situation like this because the person owed child support can turn around at any moment and go collect all the child support you haven’t paid. If you don’t have complete confidence you both will abide by the gentlemen’s agreement, don’ do it.

Honestly, this is the best solution I’ve found to address this problem. It’s far from perfect, but it’s really the best you got.