Suppose that a Florida court has ordered that the other parent of your child must pay child support to you until your child reaches the eighteenth birthday. What if the other parent, over the years, has steadily become farther and farther behind in payments and your child is approaching age eighteen? Is it time to worry that you will never get your money?

In Florida, the law allows you to continue to collect child support from the other parent if there is a delinquency in the support due when the normal child support period ends. Your expert Tampa divorce lawyer can ask the court to order the full amount to be paid from funds available to the other parent or order that the monthly regular payments must continue.

If there is a court order that the regular child support payments should be paid out of the other parent's paycheck, the court can even order that the paycheck deduction continue until the child support arrearage is made up. Bottom Line: Just because your child reaches age eighteen before all of the child support is paid doesn't mean that you can't collect it.

(copyright Stann Givens 2009)