The second part of your court-ordered parenting plan, after the— there's been a determination of physical custody and legal custody orders, are going to be the financial orders that the court's going to order with regard to your children. So in that second part of financial orders, there are about 5 different topics that the court's going to make a decision on. These can be topics that you and your co-parent agree on and we have a settlement. Sometimes they're contested and the court needs to determine that. So those topics Some of the topics would be child support, whether there's going to be a formal child support order, an allocation of who is providing medical insurance and what the parameters of that order is, allocation of uninsured or uncovered medical expenses— those would be medical, dental, orthodontic, counseling, anything that falls under that umbrella that insurance doesn't cover.
Extracurricular expenses, and taxes. Who's going to claim the, the kiddo on taxes every year? So circling back on child support, the way we determine child support in Missouri is we use what's called the Form 14. This is a form that was generated by the Missouri Supreme Court that gets updated by number every couple of years, but it spits out a child support number after we fill in all the blanks. So the first set of blanks are going to be your gross monthly income, and your spouse's gross monthly income. If you and your co-parent or spouse are W-2 employees, this is very easy. We're gonna take your pay stubs or your tax return. We're gonna plug that in. Some people have atypical employment arrangements or they're unemployed or they're underemployed. In those instances, determining their gross monthly income for purpose of the Form 14 can be a dispute or can be something that we need to do discovery on or gather evidence on. Mm-hmm. There might be some argument about it.
So for instance, you might have a co-parent who is self-employed, who runs their own business, or is a 1099 employee who has expenses. You might have someone that's a stay-at-home mom who's remarried, who doesn't, is out of the workforce. You might have somebody who lives, you know, lived with their parents and is choosing not to work or is working part-time. All of those are instances where we might need to either use tax returns or bank accounts or things like that to make a determination of income, or we might ask the court to impute income to them. If we have somebody who's out of the workforce but could work and is choosing not to, we might say, "Hey, Judge, plug in a number that they could make if they went to work." And there are different ways that we can gather evidence on that or make our case on that. So that is a case-by-case thing we can determine. Okay. Once we have a gross monthly income for both parents, agreed upon or not, 'cause it might be something we're just proposing that we're asking the court to make decision on, the next thing the chart's going to do is take both of those incomes, add those together, and then determine each party's percentage of income. So if we have, for instance, a co-parent who makes $8,000 per month and a co-parent who makes $2,000 per month, Our aggregate income on a monthly basis is $10,000 per month.
One party makes 80%, one party makes 20%. On that aggregate income number, the Missouri Supreme Court has a chart where we take your combined gross monthly total income number and the number of children that you have, and that gives us the presumed child support amount that goes in that box. Mm-hmm. That presumed child support amount, then on the second part of the Form 14, there are additions for if we have work-related childcare we're putting in the chart, health insurance expense, could be extraordinary expense, and then it takes that number and then there's a percentage by your aggregate.
So if you're making 80%, you're paying 80% of the presumed number or, or whatever that percentage is. The last part of it is there is a percentage that is discounted for the party paying child support based on how much overnight custody they have. And that is why we need to figure out what the physical custody schedule of the children is generally before we can finalize a child support number. A couple of things to consider. In that second part of the chart, the expenses that we include can make a significant difference in the overall child support number. Mm-hmm. So for example, work-related childcare.
If we have work-related childcare for a child that is not school age, that is generally going to be a pretty huge expense. So if we put that in the chart and we have a paying parent who's paying 80% of the aggregate amount, the chart is having them pay 80% of that daycare amount. Why is that important? Because If— when daycare ends, and hopefully it ends, right? When it ends, if we have it in the chart and we don't have a mechanism to deal with that, that paying parent's going to be then overpaying child support. That could put you in a modification situation. It could put you back in court. We want to look at costs that we're putting in the chart. If those costs are fluid or going to be changing, we might want them outside of the chart so that we can avoid this becoming a future litigation issue that you have to spend attorney's fees on and go back to court for. So we might have two different charts. We might have a chart with daycare, we might have a chart without daycare.
Also, you can put extraordinary expenses, and those would be costs that you incur for your child. If we have a regular prescription that they get every month, if they have an extracurricular that has a typical cost, if we put it in the chart the parent who's receiving the child support going to pay all of that expense, but because the parent who's paying child support is paying their percentage within that child support number. Typically, we are not going to put extraordinary expenses in the chart. Why? Because they change. The cost of soccer might change, the season might change, the prescriptions might change. But we can, if we have a parent who's typically hard to collect from, is unreasonable with paying, doesn't like to pay expenses, ignores expenses. If you want to include extraordinary expenses in your child support chart, one, we need to come up with a typical amount that you're paying for extraordinary expenses, and then we probably need to look at whether we can generate some evidence that if we don't put those in the chart, they're going to be hard to collect from the other parent for. Mm-hmm.
So those can be in the chart. Another question on child support that's a very typical question is, "If we have 50/50 custody, do I still have to pay child support?" The answer to that is yes, if there's a significant difference in your incomes. What's a significant income, income difference? I would say on gross monthly income, if your income difference per month is $1,000 or more, it is probably a significant income difference where even on 50/50 custody, we're going to do a child support chart. The number might be very low, especially if the paying parent's also providing health insurance and we're subtracting that, but there may be some child support. That is a rule of thumb. It varies between judge to judge. I could have a judge who tells me $500 is enough. I could have a judge that tells me $2,000 is the benchmark.
So— There in the Form 14 Notes on Use, there isn't a specific differentiation in income that triggers child support in 50/50. I find it's a judge issue, and I think $1,000 is a good rule of thumb. Outside of child support, the other expenses that we need to look at allocating would be typically uninsured medical and extracurriculars. Uninsured medical are going to be generally pretty basic, um, copays. If your child has dental work, if your child has orthodontia, if your child has counseling that's not covered by insurance, those can either be allocated 50/50. They might be allocated by your percentage of income that's on that Form 14. So if you're an 80/20 or you're 70/30, that might be the allocation of those expenses as well. If there's a significant deviation in your income. Last would be extracurriculars. Extracurriculars are generally going to be shared expenses if they are incurred by agreement.
So problem we run into is people say, "Well, what if my co-parent just won't agree to extracurriculars?" That could happen. That, that is something that we need to take a look at. If you think that's going to happen, let's discuss that. Let's talk about how to anticipate that. Let's look at extracurriculars your children have been historically in and see if we want to put those in the parenting plan as already shared expenses even without agreement. But a good rule of thumb is they're going to be shared expenses if both parents agree, especially if you have joint legal custody.
If you have sole legal custody, you're generally going to be paying for your extracurriculars 100% because if you have sole legal custody, you're considered the sole decision maker. So unless the other parent says, "Yes, I'll pay half of soccer," you're gonna be on the hook for it. So if your child or your children are children who participate in a lot of extracurriculars, if they're typically involved in a lot of sports, if they do select sports, they do hockey, they do anything that is expensive or involves a lot of travel, like competitive dance or competitive gymnastics, bring that to me and let's talk about those expenses and let's talk about allocation of expenses, what the expenses are, and how we need to define that in your parenting plan, because you can avoid a lot of future conflict with your co-parent if we develop a parenting plan that addresses all of those issues. Thank you.