Hockey, Braces and Tutoring: Splitting the Extra Costs Fairly

The situation

Zofia and Piotr separated after eighteen years of marriage, both still living in Mississauga to stay close to their two children, aged eleven and fourteen. Zofia works as a paramedic, earning about $80,000 a year; Piotr is a millwright at a manufacturing plant, earning about $60,000. Between them, household income sits around $140,000, and the family had always run a tight but comfortable budget on that combined figure.

The couple had already worked out the basics of parenting time on a fairly even schedule, and had a rough handle on the monthly table amount of child support — the base figure set by the federal child support guidelines according to the paying parent's income and the number of children. Piotr, as the parent with more overnights away from the children, would be paying that table amount to Zofia. What they had not settled was everything sitting on top of that base amount: their older child's competitive hockey, their younger child's orthodontic treatment, and a tutor brought in earlier that year for a documented learning need.

Zofia came to our team wanting a separation agreement that would hold up over the years the children had left in school and in hockey, rather than something that would need to be renegotiated every time a new expense came up. Piotr, for his part, was not trying to avoid paying — both parents agreed the children should keep doing what they were doing — he simply did not agree with how the costs were being split, or in some cases whether a given item should be split at all rather than absorbed by whichever parent wanted it.

The disagreement

The child support guidelines treat two kinds of costs differently. The table amount is meant to cover ordinary day-to-day expenses of raising a child — food, clothing, an ordinary level of activities. Special or extraordinary expenses sit outside that base amount and are shared separately between the parents, usually in proportion to each parent's income, because they are costs an ordinary household budget built around the table amount was not expected to absorb on its own.

Not everything a child does or needs automatically qualifies. The guidelines look at whether an expense is necessary given the child's best interests, and whether it is reasonable given the parents' means, the family's spending pattern before separation, and the cost relative to the paying parent's income. A single ski weekend or a new pair of cleats does not typically rise to the level of a shared special expense; a competitive sports program with real travel and equipment costs, or a medical or educational need with a documented basis, more often does. That last piece — what actually counts — is where Zofia and Piotr disagreed most.

Three items were on the table. Competitive hockey, including registration, ice time and travel to out-of-town tournaments, ran to roughly $4,800 a year — a level the older child had been playing at for two full seasons before the separation, with both parents driving to games and splitting the volunteering. Orthodontic treatment for the younger child came to about $5,200 total, offset by roughly $1,200 in insurance reimbursement through Zofia's workplace benefits, leaving a net cost of about $4,000. Tutoring for a documented learning need cost about $2,600 a year and had started only a few months before the separation, on the recommendation of a psychoeducational assessment arranged through the children's school.

Piotr did not dispute the orthodontics or the tutoring on their merits, but he wanted every shared cost split evenly down the middle rather than proportionally to income, which would have shifted a meaningfully larger dollar share onto him despite earning less than Zofia. He also wanted to fold in a $900 summer hockey development camp their older child had asked to attend that year — something the family had never paid for before the separation, and that Zofia considered a discretionary extra rather than a necessary continuation of an existing program. Left unresolved, the disagreement risked turning three genuinely reasonable expenses into a recurring flashpoint every registration season.

What we did

1. Calculated the proportional split. With combined income of about $140,000, Zofia's income represented roughly 57 percent of the total and Piotr's roughly 43 percent. Under the guidelines, that ratio — not an even split — is the default starting point for sharing special expenses, and we explained why: the guidelines are built around each parent contributing in line with their means, not identical dollar amounts.
2. Sorted the expenses by category. We reviewed each item against the guideline factors. The orthodontic treatment qualified cleanly as a medical expense not fully covered by insurance. The tutoring qualified because it responded to a documented, professionally assessed need rather than a general wish for extra help. The competitive hockey qualified because it reflected the family's established spending pattern before separation — a key factor, since expenses that began only after separation face more scrutiny.
3. Excluded the summer camp. Because the development camp was a new request that postdated the separation and had never been part of the family's prior spending, we advised that it did not fit the guideline test for a shared special expense. It could still happen if Piotr wanted to fund it directly, but it would not be billed to Zofia.
4. Netted the orthodontic cost against insurance first. We confirmed that special expenses are shared after subtracting any tax credit, subsidy or insurance reimbursement available for that cost, so the $5,200 treatment was split on its $4,000 net cost, not the sticker price.
5. Drafted the sharing formula into the agreement. Rather than list a fixed dollar figure that would go stale as costs and incomes changed, the agreement set out the proportional formula itself, the categories of expense it applied to, and a mechanism for updating both income figures and the resulting percentages once a year using each parent's tax return.
6. Built in a receipts and reimbursement process. The agreement required the parent who paid an expense upfront to provide a receipt within a set number of days, with reimbursement due on a fixed schedule after that, so future disputes would be about paperwork logistics rather than principle.

The outcome

Piotr accepted the proportional approach once he saw the guideline reasoning laid out plainly, and once the summer camp was off the table as a shared cost rather than something he had to fight to exclude. The final agreement had Zofia responsible for roughly 57 percent of the $11,400 in annual qualifying special expenses — about $6,500 — and Piotr for the remaining 43 percent, about $4,900, split across hockey, the net orthodontic cost and tutoring.

Both parents signed a comprehensive separation agreement covering parenting arrangements, the table amount of child support, and this special expense schedule, avoiding a court application altogether. That mattered to both of them: neither wanted the cost or the delay of litigating what were, underneath the disagreement, two reasonable positions about a shared family budget. The agreement's annual review clause meant that if Zofia picked up overtime shifts or Piotr moved into a higher pay grade, the split would adjust with their actual incomes rather than staying frozen at separation-year numbers, which is often where these arrangements quietly go stale.

The agreement also anticipated the next disagreement before it happened, by setting out in writing how a genuinely new expense — a change of hockey level, a second child needing tutoring, an unexpected medical cost — would be evaluated against the same factors used for the original three, rather than negotiated from scratch under time pressure. Eighteen months on, the arrangement has worked as intended: two orthodontic reimbursement cycles and one full hockey season have gone through the receipts process without a disagreement serious enough to need our office again, and both parents credit the specificity of the schedule for that.

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