When selecting one of the best, most experienced divorce mediators, you need to be sure that her or his skills are “johnny up-to-date”. As a co-founder of the Mass Council on Family Mediation in 1982, I am one of the two longest established and most experienced and family mediation in the Commonwealth. We, the MCFM, instituted a bi-monthly series of continuing education seminars that have taken place over 37 years.
In September of 2019 the MCFM hosted the Academy of Family Mediators and The Association of Divorce Financial Professionals and International Divorce Professionals Conference with mediators attending from as far away as Australia!
To keep our skills up to date, there were 28 in person and live-streamed seminars with topics as varied as:
- Understanding the Small Business
- Women and Financial Planning in Divorce
- Managing Student Loans in Divorce
- Challenges of Mediating an Over-60s Divorce
- Creating a Child Support Account: Instead of Using Guidelines
- Social Security and Retirement Planning
- Creating Liquidity from Business Assets
We are recommending an option to parents of using a Child Support One of the distinct advantages of an account is that the payor of the child support never has to tell the children that he or she cannot afford a requested item because her money has already been giving to the other parent. Each parent is free to buy items from the budget that the two of them have designed.
Another feature of our work is offering exact calculations of alimony The new federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated the straight deductions of alimony payments from a payor’s income. The Massachusetts 2012 Alimony Reform Act had very conveniently designed an alimony formula, subtracting lower earner’s income from higher earners income and multiplying by 30-32.5-or 35 percent. That formula may still be used. In addition,we use a custom percentage adjusted for by Medicare, FICA, State and Federal Taxes, so you are still receiving the benefit of the formula in the Alimony Reform Act. The calculation is simply adjusted to reflect that alimony is no longer deductible to the payor, and included in the income of the payee. We encourage all clients above the age of 60 to include our expert Certified Divorce Analyst in a session or two so that you will know your cash flow from Social Security, Pensions, savings and investments — until you take your last breath.