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Factors to Consider When Dividing Your Business Assets

Factors to Consider When Dividing Your Business Assets

Factors to Consider When Dividing Your Business Assets

Divorce is something that no one ever plans on doing. When you break up with your spouse or common-law partner, you face some problems. This can be much harder to do if the breakup means you have to sell your share of the company. After the breakup, the business will probably need to support you, your ex-partner, and your children. This makes it hard for people to agree on how to share the company's assets, and that’s where our family law practice in Orlando comes in to help. Here's what you need to know about this emotional and financial landmine as you try to sell it.

Determining How Much Did Your Ex Invested

If your partner is very important to the business, it could make things harder. Do they want to sell the business to someone else? Should the whole company be sold? Have they talked about keeping the business and working with you after they split up?

How you handle the breakup will depend on how much each of you wants to stay involved in the business. How much cash is there to make a buyout possible? And the best way to separate the business from its money.

Figuring Out a Fair Price

What do you do for a living? Is it based on knowledge? Do you have employees? Are there other factors that are unique to your industry? How much would you get for your company if it was put on the market today? Getting a formal appraisal may or may not be worth it for your business, depending on what it is. Most of the time, the courts say that an evaluator should do the evaluation.

This ensures that no one pays too much or too little for the company being sold. A professional will look at your organization's history, finances, assets, and debts to determine its worth. Along with other parts of your business and come up with a good estimate.

Realizing How Divorce Will Affect Your Tax

It is important to plan for the legal separation process. Different tax situations require different ways to plan when the split will happen. It depends on whether you are married or living together as a couple. Remember that the tax code's definition of a spouse differs from the law's definition of a common-law partner.

The law says that you have to be married to get a divorce and split up any joint business assets. On the other hand, people who live together without getting married are not considered married by the law. For a common-law connection, one of these three things must be true.

  1. You've been living together for the past 12 months, with breaks of no more than 90 days.
  2. You gave birth to a child or got it through adoption.
  3. Your child lives with you and depends on you and your ex-spouse for all their financial and emotional needs.

This means that the 90-day rule makes it easier to legally break up with a person you lived with for 90 days or more. Before getting a divorce or a legal separation, it's a good idea to talk to a tax expert about how to divide your business assets to save you money on taxes.

Spousal Rights on Inherited Business Assets

Can the assets of a business be split up in a divorce? If you are the person who is supposed to get an asset from a company, the value of that inheritance is not added to your family's net worth. Suppose the donor's last Will or Deed of Gift was put together correctly.

Most of the time, this would be done with clauses in your Will that say the item should not be counted as part of your net family property. For your business's long-term success, you should keep any paperwork that has to do with securing your sole ownership of this.

Any Previous Domestic Contracts that Were Signed

Having a plan for getting out of a relationship before you get into it is one way to possibly make it less likely that you will have to go to court over your assets. At first, it might seem strange to think about ending a relationship because you can't imagine what could go wrong. Even if you and your partner have the best intentions, marriages and common-law relationships don't always work out.

If you are looking for a family law practice in Orlando to help with the division of your assets, contact us to hear more today.