Hi Brownste01
Thank you for your post. I am William, the Child Maintenance Options consultant. I will provide you with some information that may help answer your questions around child maintenance.
If you and your wife have a court order in place for child maintenance, your wife can approach the South African equivalent of a county court. If child maintenance is paid privately via a family-based arrangement, your wife can apply for a court order for child maintenance to be made. This may then be enforced by Reciprocal Enforcement of Maintenance Orders (REMO). This is an agreement that is set up via the British Government, with other countries, to enable child maintenance to be paid when parents are living in separate countries. You can find more information about REMO, including the list of participating countries by visiting the REMO section of the Official Solicitor Public Trustee (
www.justice.gov.uk/protecting-the-vulnerable/official-solicitor). As Fiona mentioned, you may also wish to seek legal advice regarding this matter.
With regards to negotiating an agreeable amount of child maintenance, if you have a family-based arrangement in place, both of you have the flexibility to decide how much child maintenance will be paid without the cost of using the court.
A family-based arrangement is simply an agreement between you and your ex-wife and is about how your son will be provided for. Your arrangement does not need to be all about money, both of you have the flexibility to negotiate the cost of travel into your agreement. A family-based arrangement is not legally enforceable, although many parents do prefer this type of arrangement because it is very flexible and can easily be reviewed if you or your ex-wife''s circumstances change.
To help you come to an agreement on how much child maintenance will be paid, we have a number of tools that you may find useful. We have discussion guide that you can use to plan your conversation with your ex-wife. We also have a family-based arrangement form that is not a legally-binding document, but it can help to formalise your arrangement when used to write down what you have agreed. You can gain access to all our tools, forms and guides by visiting our website at
www.cmoptions.org/en/toolbox
For more information about family-based arrangements, please visit our website at
www.cmoptions.org. Alternatively, please call us free on 0800 988 0988 between 8am and 8pm Monday to Friday or 9am and 4pm on a Saturday. We also have a Sorting Out Separation web-app that you may find useful. It offers help and support to separating and separated families. The link is:
www.wikivorce.com/divorce/Sorting-Out-Separation.html 
