St Louis Father's Rights Divorce Law Blog

While Missouri parents tend to focus on things like child custody and visitation schedules during a divorce, parents also need to be focusing on just how they are going to pay for their children's college education in the future. Ideally, these conversations should be happening in order for the plan to be included in the divorce settlement. Essentially, the settlement will discuss how much each parent is going to be paying for college.

In some situations, married couples may have already started a 529 plan account. These accounts are an investment account favored for educational purposes. With these types of accounts, parents have options.

Issues surrounding child custody are understandably very emotional for parents. In some cases, one parent may not agree with the child custody arrangement being enforced by the courts and wish to take matters into their own hands. However, while this may be tempting it is important to remember the arrangements have been set forth for very specific reasons and going outside of these arrangements could end up resulting in criminal charges. 

An example of this recently happened when a 26-year-old mother was arrested after removing her 4-year-old daughter from the primary school she attends. The mother -- who also had a friend with her at the time -- does not have custody of her daughter. Rather, the girl's paternal grandmother has custody. The family is reportedly in a custody dispute with the girl's father and her grandmother.

A 43-year-old mother who is a mountaineer and extreme athlete is being accused of purposely taking advantage of the father of her child in order to receive more than she is entitled to in child support. Her new boyfriend is also accused of playing a role in the scheme that involved deflating her finances in order to secure more than $50,000 a month in child support. Now the three -- the mother, her boyfriend and the father of the 5-year-old -- are all involved in a legal battle.

The boyfriend in this case is Andrew Cader. Cader is a former Goldman Sachs executive and part-owner of the Rays baseball franchise. He is accused of concealing money he was giving to his girlfriend, Annabella Bond, as loans. These "loans" of several million dollars allowed Cader to avoid having to pay gift tax and deflated how much money it would appear that Bond had.