If you own a company, your divorce has a second set of books to answer for. The business itself.
At some point someone will read your company's months around the filing line by line. A valuation expert, a forensic accountant, the other side's lawyer. Anything that looks different from the year before invites a question, and every question gets billed by the hour.
The goal is not to hide anything. It is to give nobody a reason to ask.
Six habits. None of them are clever. That is the point.
1. Pay yourself what you paid yourself.
Same salary. Same distribution schedule. Same timing as the last twelve months. A sudden pay cut after the marriage breaks down looks like an effort to shrink income before support is set. In many states a court can impute income, which means it treats you as earning what you earned before. You lose the number and your credibility with it.
2. Business pays business. You pay you.
Stop running personal spending through the company. The family phone plan, the car at home, the trip that was mostly vacation. Commingled spending is exactly what a forensic accountant is paid to find, and every item becomes a line in someone's report. If some of it has always run through the business, ask your CPA and your lawyer how to handle it before you change anything.
3. Write a memo for anything unusual.
Businesses have odd months. A lost client, a slow quarter, a large equipment purchase, a key employee leaving. When it happens, write a short memo that week: the date, what happened, why, and who else knew. File it with the company records. A reason written down when it happened carries weight. A reason assembled a year later has to be defended.
4. Close the books every month.
Reconcile the bank and card accounts. Categorize every transaction. Keep your bookkeeper on the same process they have always used. Late or messy books read as something worth digging into, even when nothing is there, and digging is expensive.
5. Stop saying what it is worth.
Not to a banker over lunch, not to a competitor who asks if you would sell, not to a friend at a bar. Any value you state out loud can come back as a question in a deposition. If a lender needs numbers, send statements your CPA prepared. Let the valuation happen once, on paper, by someone qualified.
6. Name who runs the day.
Divorce eats attention. Pick one person who can make the daily calls when you are with your lawyer or just not sharp. Write down what they can decide without you and what they cannot. A business rarely fails from one bad week. It drifts from months of nobody steering.
Boring is armor. Every quiet, documented month is a month nobody bills you to explain.
If you need the opening month organized, The First 30 Days gives you a four-week plan, a master checklist, a records-folder template, three lawyer-email templates and a commingling worksheet. Eleven pages. $47. One payment. Instant PDF download. Get The First 30 Days
Field Notes is educational. It is not legal advice, financial advice or therapy. Laws vary by state. Talk to a lawyer licensed where you live before you act on anything here.
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S.C.