Divorce can be a bit more complicated if you and your spouse are also joint business owners. You may have started the business together and then fallen in love and gotten married, or you may have already been a married couple when you decided to start working together. Either way, you have to figure out what to do with the business now that you’re getting divorced.
When you’re both co-owners, this means that the business has to go through property division. Below are three options you can use to do this.
Buying out your spouse
First off, you can buy out your spouse by purchasing their ownership share. Maybe you know that they want to keep the family home. You could offer them the home in trade for the business, or you could take out business loans and buy their share from them.
Selling the business
Of course, you could also sell the business to a third party. Both you and your spouse would leave it behind, but you may earn a significant amount of money selling the business. You can then just divide your earnings, splitting up your assets.
Working together
Finally, you and your spouse may decide that you’d like to just keep working together. It really depends on the specifics of your relationship. For some couples, this is too emotional and difficult, but others are in an amicable divorce and so they just work together to draft a partnership agreement.
No matter what you decide to do, divorce can be complex. With expensive assets like a business, it’s critical that you understand all of your legal options.