Co-Parenting A Business With Your Ex

Amanda Lockhart — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:00:00 -0500

Divorce is hard enough when it's just between two people. It's even more complicated when there are children involved. But what happens if you and your soon-to-be ex own a business together?

I saw that question posed in a tax advice column the other day, and the answer provided something valuable, beyond the simple X's and O's of how the assets are shared.

Sure, there was the standard discussion of the tax implications — the issues to consider if you or your ex wants to sell off your share of the business, or if both of you want to sell. But then there's the other possibility: Nobody sells anything and the two of you continue to operate the business together. And that's the part of this that I found most interesting.

No matter how much we talk about collaborative divorce and co-parenting through a divorce, it's easy to assume that two people who split up are so eager to be rid of one another that they're never going to talk again once the divorce is final. But increasingly that's not the case. For every acrimonious divorce, there are plenty of divorced couples who spend holidays together with their kids. And if your business is your child — or one of your children — there's no reason to believe you shouldn't co-parent it as well.

Is it easy? Of course not. But guess what? That's life. Or that's post-divorce life, I should say. None of it is going to be easy. But it's what you've got. You adapt, you learn to work with it and you continue to live your life.

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Co-Parenting A Business With Your Ex