Can I understand why offset support if living standard is the same in both households in shared situation? Whatever means could be shared living with a new spouse (decreased expenses now allow for more), could be living with grandparents, lottery, inheritance etc. In our situation both parents have same level of education, same years in the workforce, shared maternal/paternal leave. Yet one remains under employed and turns down promotion (openly admits this)bc she is happy and stress free. So she will continue to do bare minimum, have an abundance of free time to scrap book when the children are with us 60% (she measures the hours to make sure she stays just above 40%- she has a spreadsheet) of the time.
Child Support is determined purely from the incomes of the two parents. Not their assets, and not the income of their new partner or any other people they live with. A parent is legally required to devote a proportion of their income to their child, no matter where that child lives.
Offset does distribute the CS in a slightly odd manner, but the intention is still for both parents to be supporting the child in proportion to their own income. So money flows from the higher income parent to the lower income parent. Regardless of what else either parent has going on in their financial situation.
There are remedies to this, if the situation is unfair, however. Those are called 'undue hardship' and 'imputation of income.' To get either going though, you usually have to go to court, because the lower income parent isn't going to voluntarily agree.
Undue hardship is a declaration that the households' financial picture is so one-sided that it would be too much of a hardship to have the money flow from the higher income parent to the lower income parent, due to the differences in the whole household that would result. Like if the higher income parent is still single and the lower income parent is supported by a wealthy new partner. You would go to court to ask that the total household income be considered, not just the individual parents' incomes. I'm told that to prove this is necessary, the one household has to be really suffering in comparison to the other one though, like struggling to afford the normal bills.
Imputation of income is a determination that the lower income parent is deliberately underemployed or unemployed, and taking advantage of the increased CS from the higher income parent to cover their own self-created shortfall. Like someone who works part-time when they could be full-time, resulting in getting more CS through the offset system. You would go to court to ask that the offset CS calculation use a pretend income that the lower-income parent should be making, instead of what they are actually making. I'm told that to prove this is the case, you need to be able to demonstrate that the other parent could be working more and has deliberately chosen not to, for whatever reason.
You have to look at your particular situation and figure out which option most applies to it, and your likelihood of success.
