How do you value a spouse’s business during a divorce? <\/p>\n
In Divorce a lot of things are valued easily because there is a dollar amount associated with it. If there is a bank account that\u2019s subject to division, you know how much is in the bank account and you equally divide it. Businesses are different, and usually what is required to value a business is a forensic accountant. The reason that is, is because businesses do not have price tags, meaning they don\u2019t walk around with a value assigned to them usually.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re valuing a sign-making business, restaurant, or a medical practice, typically the court will either appoint a joint forensic accountant or you can hire your own forensic accountant to do a business valuation. If you or your spouse owns and operates a business and that business was started during marriage, or even before marriage but was operated during marriage, there\u2019s going to be a community value component to that.<\/p>\n
In order to value that properly, the forensic accountant will look at the books, and look at the documents and the bank statements and the hard assets, and come up with a value and make that representation to you as a litigant and also to the court. If you can\u2019t use that valuation for purposes of settlement, then you need to take it to court and have it divided.<\/p>\n
Usually, spouses who operate businesses will think their business is not worth anything because they want to say, \u201cWell my business is just me\u201d or, \u201cIt\u2019s me and my phone\u201d or, \u201cIt\u2019s me and two employees and there\u2019s no value to it\u201d, and there really is. There\u2019s really community value to a business, and usually the court will find that there\u2019s some \u201cgood will\u201d, a term that the courts, forensic accountants, and lawyers use to mean that, and this isn\u2019t the technical definition obviously, are people going to come back to your business? That\u2019s kind of an intangible value that a forensic accountant will put on a business using the various tax returns, bank statements, cash flow, and things that are relative to the business so that you can develop a value for purposes of division.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How do you value a spouse’s business during a divorce? In Divorce a lot of things are valued easily because there is a dollar amount associated with it. If there is a bank account that\u2019s subject to division, you know how much is in the bank account and you equally divide it. Businesses are different, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":383,"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/383"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billfergusonmediator.com\/pdm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}