Britney Spears Pays Kevin Federline $20K a Month in Child Support — and Lawyer Says He's Requesting 'Three Times' More
Britney Spears‘s ex-husband Kevin Federline is requesting more child support for their two sons.
Federline, 40, claims he makes less than 1 percent of what Spears does in court documents filed on Tuesday and first obtained by The Blast. The father of six — who shares sons Sean Preston, 12, and Jayden James, 11, with the pop star — claims he is currently earning $3,000 a month and receives $20,000 ($10,000 per son) each month from Spears in child support. Federline claims in the documents that Spears “earns in excess of $34,000,000 per year.”
“We think the reasonable needs for the children while they would be in Kevin’s custody is probably three times what he’s currently receiving,” Federline’s attorney — celebrity divorce lawyer Mark Vincent Kaplan — tells PEOPLE of how much more child support he estimates Spears should pay his client.
A rep for Spears did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment, though a source close to the singer tells Entertainment Tonight, “Kevin wants a raise in money and he can’t account for where the $20,000 is going.”
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Federline filed an Income and Expense Declaration request to review Spears’s financial documents to ascertain her net earnings and how they would inform her child support payments to him; a hearing is expected in August.
“We had attempted to see if we could negotiate a voluntary increase in child support over the last several months, and we were not successful,” Kaplan says. “We’re still hoping to resolve this without judicial intervention, but that’s something that is going to be a decision they will make.”
Because Federline is the lower income earning parent, Kaplan says he is entitled to more child support.
“The standard of living of the children while the low-income parent … doesn’t have to be identical, but it’s structured in a way that the child support orders enable the children to enjoy the benefit of the standard of living both parents can provide while they’re with both parents,” Kaplan tells PEOPLE.
“Otherwise, you have a situation where when I go with Mom, I get to pick out what pony I wanna ride that day; when I go with Dad, my high point is mowing the lawn with him,” Kaplan adds.
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Federline says in the documents obtained by PEOPLE that one of the reasons why he is requesting more money is because he is “no longer able to perform as a dancer due to my age, and I have not been as successful in putting out new music as I was in 2008.” He further states that he is “less of a name and less in demand than I was in 2008, which has negatively affected my income.”
The deejay and Spears, 36, reached their last official child support agreement in 2007 around the same time the singer’s financial assets were entered into a court-ordered conservatorship managed by her father, Jamie Spears.
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Federline also touches on the disparities in lifestyles the two offered Sean and Jayden, citing Spears’s “13,264 square foot Neoclassical Italianite [sic] villa on 21 acres of land in a gated community” complete with an elevator, a library, a wine cellar and a pool house among other amenities.
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The dancer claimed in the documents he couldn’t “afford to take the minor children on vacation” or give his kids any of the other luxury items he alleges Spears does, including “ATVs, every video game system imaginable, iPads, laptops, and the best and abundance of clothing, technology and consumer goods.”
In February, The Blast reported Kaplan alerted Spears and her legal team that he would like to re-negotiate the amount the singer pays him in child support each month.
Then in March, The Blast reported that after Federline asked for double the $20,000 he collects monthly from Spears, the pop star’s father offered to set a budget for Federline rather than discuss increasing child support.
Regarding the disagreement, Kaplan told The Blast in a statement: “Unfortunately, the proposal that came back amounted to no modification of support, but it indicated to me that Mr. Spears has to recognize that he is the conservator for Britney and not for Kevin.”
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According to the outlet, Spears’s team threatened to audit Federline’s child support spending; Federline’s attorney responded by requesting to see Spears’s 2017 tax return and could allegedly seek millions of dollars in back child support pay. (As of June 2017, Spears earned $34 million, per Forbes.)
Spears and Federline divorced in 2007 after nearly three years of marriage. In 2013 Federline married Victoria Prince, with whom he’s welcomed two daughters, Jordan Kaye, 6, and Peyton Marie, 3½. The former rapper and dancer is also dad to daughter Kori Madison, 15, and son Kaleb Michael, 13, with ex-fiancée Shar Jackson.
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The “Slumber Party” singer, who is dating trainer and model Sam Asghari, is gearing up to take her wildly successful Las Vegas show Piece of Me on tour this summer. But in recent years the pop star has focused on motherhood over music, documenting her adventures in parenting — from tropical vacations to practical jokes — on Instagram.
“My kids come first in my life, bottom line,” Spears told PEOPLE exclusively in a 2015 cover story. In the same story, her mom told PEOPLE: “I am so proud of my daughter and all her accomplishments, but I am especially proud of the mom she is and the woman she has become.”
