Family Mediation Can Help With:
● Parenting Plans ● Support Arrangements ● Property Division ●
Parenting Plans
Decision-making Responsibility - How will major decisions be made for your children? Decisions regarding education, non-emergency medical concerns, language, culture, religion, ect.?
Parenting Time - How much time will the children spend with each parent? How will you divide holidays, special events and vacations? How will you handle transportation and flexibility?
Relocation - If one parent has to move residence in the future, how much notice is needed? How will be parenting time be renegotiated?
Travel - If one parent wants to take the children out of province, how much notice should be provided? How much detail should be shared? Should the children have passports?
Communication - Should appropriate boundaries be placed on how parents will communicate and co-parent with each other?
Support Arangements
Child Support - Child Support is the money a parent must pay to support their dependent children. Child Support is a mandatory obligation and the right of the child intended to cover the needs of the children as long as they are dependents. The 2017 Simplified Federal Child Support Tables are a helpful starting point for determining what child support arrangements may be appropriate.
Special Expense Payments - Extraordinary expenses of the child such as child care, heathcare, educational and extracurricular activities. Parents will need to determine how these expenses will be shared.
Spousal Support - Spousal Support is a more complex entitlement than Child Support. Spousal Support is intended to recognize any financial advantages or disadvantages to the spouses as a result of the relationship or its breakdown and relieve financial hardship while a spouse becomes self-sufficient. It is strongly recommended that parties who wish to discuss Spousal Support seek individual legal advice prior to mediation.
There are helpful tools online for calculating the support amounts in your situation such as: https://www.mysupportcalculator.ca/
Property Division
Property division can be very different depending on if the parties were legally married or not.
Married - Generally speaking, married parties will divide equally the values of what they own which may include the family home, RRSPs, investments, bank account, insurance policies, pensions and any other financial interests. Family Mediation can help determine who will keep what, and how to equably split fair value.
Unmarried - Generally speaking, parties will take out what they brought in. There is no automatic equal division of property. Property bought by an individual belongs to the person who paid for it. Shared assets or property in both names are generally divided in proportion to the amount owned or value divided.
It is always strongly recommended that parties that wish to discuss property division seek individual legal advice prior to mediation.