“Don’t agree to a divorce until she agrees to 50/50 custody and no state interference.”
You do realize that you “don’t have to agree” to a child custody order or a divorce for her to get one, right? You can only dodge a process server for so long before she can prove that she exhausted all possible attempts to serve you and what’s called “substituted service” can be performed, such as taping the service to your front door, serving you by mail, serving you by posting notice at the local courthouse if it is a divorce involving no minor children, or serving you by running an advertisement in the local newspaper (or the local newspaper of the area that you were last legally known to reside in the event that you are actively “on the run”). You can also choose to default on the finalization of your child’s custody order or divorce by continuing to refuse to cooperate, and absolute worst case, not know that a custody order or your own divorce has been finalized. There are provisions in place to ensure that if you want to be abusive, continue to be abusive, or try to “leverage” in situations like these that orders can be finalized, and they are for individuals like you.
There is also what I like to call the “LLC shuffle”, where the man puts an LLC in his wife’s name and intentionally has her cut him nearly poverty-level checks for that business thinking that the state can only garnish from those checks while she cuts herself an extremely large check, thinking that he is “getting one over” on his ex. What has begun to happen in cases like these are that the judge requests, or orders, discovery on the man, finds out what he has been capable of working — and a lot of time, the judge finds out that this was a really sudden, convenient move on the man’s part thinking that it was the most ingenious move ever to “get out of paying a whole lot of child support” — and then the judge imputes against the man what he is generally capable of being able to pay. Then one of two things happens: either the man starts to go into arrears quickly, or he begins paying what he is actually capable of paying in terms of child support.
I intend on getting into Father’s Rights Activists in later posts, but these are some of the games that they play, games that judges are becoming increasingly wiser to, especially because they are foolish enough to post them on their pages on social media. If the judges themselves don’t see them, their exes certainly do.