My boyfriend is terrified of ending up in the same position - he had to hire to grow the business, and then the economy tanked, and now I’ve had to lend him money myself to keep afloat.
Nothing was keeping me from it, and it retrospect I should have. But I had invested and didn’t want to lose that, and I believed in the company and wanted to try to help keep things going despite what I saw as a bad decision.
3trew, you are correct. I didn’t like that fact, but as our lawyer described it, costs of closing the company came ahead of everything else UNTIL we had a lien against us from the Dept of Labor. That never happened, so what money we had went to the lawyer. He didn’t get paid in full, but wrote off what we didn’t have.
Zsofia, my sympathies to you and your boyfriend. I hope things turn around for him soon. It’s a miserable situation to be in.
Oh, and one point of clarification based on what Rumor_Watkins was saying…the company wasn’t undercapitalized from the beginning. We’d been around for over two years at the point when we hired people, and I’d been a member of the LLC since the beginning of 2008. It was a combination of bad timing and bad decision making that got us into trouble.
Thanks for the comments everyone!
Moved from The BBQ Pit to Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share.
Gfactor
Pit Moderator
Here, by the way is an article on LLC veil piercing and inadequate capitalization: http://www.mmmlaw.com/publications/article_detail.asp?serviceid=3&articleid=37
Moonstarsun—Sounds to me that you have tried to do the right thing in a really tough spot, and I hope that you find yourself back on top very soon…
There are too many people around (apparently a few on this board) who feel no moral duty to pay their debts, and to try and honor (when possible) thier obligations—its nice to see someone who (though things didnt work out) knows there is a quiet dignity to seeing a bad situation thru, and doing your best to make it right.