**Build your regular budget assuming no child support arrives, and allocate those payments when you actually receive them.** With payments now unreliable, they cannot safely fund recurring commitments. This follows the approach of budgeting around your lowest dependable income. [MoneyHelper](https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/everyday-money/budgeting/how-to-budget-for-an-irregular-income)

You’re right that “borrowing from savings” needs a repayment plan to mean anything. But using savings temporarily to protect essential expenses can be reasonable. The problem is an open-ended withdrawal that hides a continuing shortfall.

I’d work through this together:

- **Calculate the monthly gap without support.** That is the amount you must cover through reduced spending, additional income, or deliberate savings withdrawals.
- **Protect essentials across the household.** Housing, food, utilities, necessary childcare and medical needs come first. The missing payment doesn’t automatically mean your wife’s spending or the children’s spending should bear the entire reduction.
- **Review discretionary spending across everyone’s categories.** Distinguish children’s necessities from optional activities and purchases, just as you distinguish adults’ necessities from optional spending.
- **Put a limit on any savings bridge.** Agree on a monthly maximum, an end date and a minimum savings balance. Record withdrawals as money spent, without assuming overdue support will replenish it.
- **Agree what happens if support arrives.** For example, cover deferred child-related needs and then rebuild the savings used to support the household.

For illustration, if the missing support is $400 a month and you agree to use $1,200 from savings, that buys three months to adjust—it doesn’t make the ongoing budget affordable.

A useful way to frame the conversation is: **“Neither of us caused this missing payment. How do we cover our family’s needs with the money we actually have?”** That acknowledges your wife’s concern about the children while making the financial limit explicit.

Separately, document missed payments and investigate the child-support collection or enforcement options where you live. Keep that effort separate from the spending plan: money owed is not yet money available.