Keeping Your Business and Home Life Separate

Written by nickel - 7 Comments

Whether you’re dabbling in self-employment, or you run your own full-blown business, here’s a good example of why you might want to dissociate your business address from your home address… A process server showed up on our doorstep on a Sunday morning awhile back. What a nice Sunday surprise! No, they didn’t show up looking to serve papers on my wife or me. Rather, they were looking for the guy that used to own our house. As it turns out, he’s a home builder, and someone is suing him. While his business partner was listed as the registered agent, they ended up using his (our!) address as the physical address of their business. While we got a good laugh out of this, it certainly reinforced the idea of using a P.O. Box for business-related mail, and also using something besides your house as the physical address of your business whenever possible.

Published on January 30th, 2007 - 7 Comments
Filed under: Self Employment
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Comments (scroll down to add your own):

Good idea about the PO Box. I expect to register my wife’s business this year and probably switch to a PO Box. Luckily, the post office is nearby and convenient.
Comment by Clever Dude — Jan 30th 2007 @ 8:33 am
Keeping business and home life separate idea is good for business and home life.

Which will give you peace of mind and at the same time to the family. Good idea Nickel thanks..
Comment by Finance Guide 101 — Jan 30th 2007 @ 9:55 am
I don’t think you can use a PO Box as the address for the registered agent, however. You’ll either have to pay someone to act as your reg. agent or use another “real” address.
Comment by Jonathan — Jan 30th 2007 @ 9:26 pm
Jonathan: Correct. We pay our attorney $50/year to serve as the RA.

Comment by nickel — Jan 30th 2007 @ 9:58 pm
My solution to this problem was to, instead of getting a PO Box, get a mailbox at The UPS Store (or one of its competitors). Since this will give your business a real street address, you can serve as RA for your company. Plus, there always will be live person available to sign for any packages you receive and having a real street address will allow you to receive shipments from anyone (some shippers won’t ship to PO Boxes). One added benefit is that it makes your business look more legitimate than listing a PO Box on your business card.
Comment by Steve — Jan 31st 2007 @ 5:45 pm