Rizki's Plumbing Business Kept Running While the Options Vested

The situation

The plan had been straightforward for years. Rizki ran a small plumbing business in London, three trucks and two employees, built up gradually since the business was just Rizki and a used van. Agus worked as a court clerk, a steady job with regular hours that had let the household absorb the unpredictable cash flow of running a trade business. The two of them had talked, more than once, about Agus eventually leaving the clerk role to help manage the business's books and scheduling once it grew a little more, using a cushion Agus still had from an earlier career: a block of stock options granted years before, at a technology company Agus had worked for prior to the court clerk job, some of which had not yet vested under the original grant schedule.

That plan held together until it did not. Rizki and Agus separated after nine years together, with their daughter Milica, age six, splitting time between two homes. The separation itself was handled without much acrimony at first, and both of them assumed the property side would be straightforward: a house with modest equity, a couple of vehicles, and Rizki's business, which Rizki had always run alone and assumed would simply stay with Rizki.

The business could not simply pause for the separation. Rizki still had two employees expecting a paycheque every second Friday, ongoing service contracts with several property managers around London, and equipment that needed regular maintenance regardless of what was happening at home. Rizki had built the business up slowly over eight years, and any legal process that assumed the business could be put on hold while the family law matter worked itself out was going to run headlong into the reality of payroll and client commitments that did not wait for anyone.

The options were almost an afterthought in the first conversations. Agus mentioned them the way someone mentions an old employee stock plan they have not thought much about in months, some vested, some not, worth something but nobody was sure exactly what. It was only when Rizki's side began pulling together a full financial picture for the equalization process, the calculation Ontario family law uses to compare what each spouse's net worth grew by during the marriage, that it became clear the unvested portion of those options was not a minor detail. Depending on how they were valued, they could represent a meaningful share of the property being divided, and meanwhile Rizki's business still needed trucks fixed, invoices sent, and two employees paid every second Friday, with no ability to put any of that on hold while the legal process worked itself out.

The gap nobody had noticed

The gap was this: an early, informal draft of a separation arrangement the two of them had sketched out between themselves treated the stock options as a fixed, known amount, essentially their current market value if sold today. That was wrong in a way that mattered to both sides, just in different directions. Unvested stock options are not the same as cash sitting in an account or shares Agus already owned outright. A portion of what Agus held would only become Agus's property at all if Agus remained employed, or in this case had already left the employer entirely, which changed what those unvested grants were actually worth under the plan's own forfeiture terms.

Ontario's equalization framework requires valuing what each spouse owned at the date of separation, and unvested equity compensation sits in an awkward middle ground for that purpose: it has value, because it was earned during the marriage and represents real compensation for work performed while the couple was together, but it is not a guaranteed asset the way a bank balance is, because it can be reduced, delayed, or lost entirely depending on the terms of the plan and what happens with the employer afterward.

The informal draft had also missed that some of the options had been granted partly for work performed before the marriage began and partly during it, which meant not all of the value was even part of the marital property being equalized in the first place. What belonged in the equalization calculation was the value attributable to work done up to the date of separation — including the portion that had not yet vested by then, valued with a discount for the real chance it would never pay out — while any value attributable to work done after separation fell outside it. Separating those portions from each other required going back to the original grant dates and vesting schedule, not just looking at a current account statement.

Neither Rizki nor Agus had noticed any of this when they first sketched out numbers between themselves, and if the informal figure had simply been carried into a signed agreement, Rizki likely would have paid Agus based on an inflated and improperly calculated value, while Agus would have had no real protection if a portion of those unvested options were ultimately forfeited before they vested.

There was a further complication in how the plan itself treated a departure from the company. Agus had already left the technology employer for the court clerk role, and the plan's own terms determined what happened to unvested grants after an employee departs, in some cases accelerating a small portion and cancelling the rest. Reading those specific plan terms, rather than assuming a generic vesting schedule applied, turned out to change the value materially.

What we did

1. Retained a valuator experienced specifically with equity compensation, rather than relying on the options' face value, because unvested grants require a different valuation approach that accounts for vesting conditions, forfeiture risk, and the portion of the grant tied to service before versus during the marriage. This produced a defensible number instead of the rough market-value guess the couple's own draft had used.
2. Requested the full grant documentation from Agus's former employer, including original grant dates, vesting schedules, and the plan's own forfeiture terms, since the separation agreement could not be built on Agus's general recollection of what had been promised years earlier. The documents surfaced the exact post-departure forfeiture rules that later shaped the valuation and would have been impossible to reconstruct from memory alone.
3. Separated the pre-marriage and marriage portions of the vesting schedule so only the value attributable to the years the couple was together was brought into the equalization calculation, keeping the figure defensible rather than inflated. This step alone reduced the equalization figure meaningfully compared with treating the entire grant as if it were all marital property earned during the marriage.
4. Structured a deferred payment approach for Rizki's share of the settlement tied to the business's actual cash flow, because forcing a lump-sum payment on a timeline set by the litigation, rather than the business's revenue cycle, risked destabilizing the two employees and the trucks that depended on steady income. This gave Rizki a schedule the business could genuinely sustain without disrupting payroll or the two employees who depended on it.
5. Negotiated a risk-sharing mechanism for the still-unvested portion of Agus's options, so that if a tranche were ultimately forfeited before vesting, the settlement adjusted rather than leaving Rizki to have paid for value that never actually materialized for Agus. This protected Rizki from bearing a risk that properly belonged to Agus as the option holder, not to the spouse paying an equalization figure.
6. Kept the business valuation and the options valuation on parallel but separate tracks, since combining them into one rushed negotiation risked either side feeling pressured to accept a weaker number on one asset to close the file faster. Running them separately let each figure be tested and challenged on its own merits before either side had to agree to a combined number.
7. Reviewed the plan's post-departure forfeiture terms with the valuator to confirm exactly which unvested tranches survived Agus's move to the court clerk job and which had already lapsed, since treating the whole unvested block as equally at risk would have either overstated or understated the real number. This produced a tranche-by-tranche figure rather than a single blended estimate that could easily have overstated what Agus actually stood to keep.
8. Set clear payment milestones tied to calendar dates rather than vesting events alone, giving Rizki predictability for cash flow planning even though some of the underlying option value remained contingent. Fixed dates meant Rizki could budget around the settlement the same way as any other recurring business expense, rather than a floating obligation tied to an uncertain, unpredictable vesting trigger.
9. Reviewed the settlement with Rizki against the business's cash flow projections before signing, confirming that each scheduled payment fell in a month the business could realistically absorb it, rather than assuming the schedule would work simply because it looked reasonable on paper. This final check caught nothing that would have forced a payroll shortfall down the line, and it gave Rizki confidence to sign rather than second-guessing the schedule afterward.
10. Documented the agreed valuation methodology in the settlement itself, not just the final numbers, so that if a dispute ever arose about how a later forfeiture should adjust the payments, both sides could point to an agreed method rather than renegotiating from scratch. That documentation is exactly what let the later forfeiture adjustment happen automatically rather than reopening negotiations from scratch a year on.

The outcome

The final settlement split the properly calculated marital-period value of Agus's options roughly down the middle, consistent with how the rest of the property was equalized, but it did not treat every dollar of face value as guaranteed. The portion still unvested at separation was valued at a discount reflecting the real chance some of it would not ultimately vest, and the parties agreed that if a specific tranche were later forfeited, Rizki's remaining payments would adjust downward to reflect that, rather than Rizki bearing a risk that was really Agus's to carry as the option holder.

Rizki's payment to Agus was spread over a defined period rather than due in a single sum, timed around the business's typical revenue cycle so that neither payroll nor equipment maintenance had to be deferred to fund the settlement. That was a real concession from Agus, who gave up the certainty of an immediate lump sum in exchange for the security of a structured schedule Rizki could actually meet.

Neither side got everything they might have argued for at the outset. Agus did not receive the full face value of the options as first assumed, and Rizki did not avoid paying for value genuinely earned during the marriage simply because it happened to be sitting in an illiquid form. What both of them got was a number that reflected what the options were actually worth given the real risk attached to them, a payment structure the business could sustain without disruption, and a settlement neither had reason to revisit once it was signed.

A year after the agreement was signed, one of the smaller tranches Agus was still waiting on was in fact forfeited when the plan's post-departure vesting window expired with that portion still unvested, exactly the kind of event the settlement had anticipated. Because the risk-sharing term had been built into the original agreement rather than left as an assumption, the adjustment happened automatically according to the formula both sides had already agreed to, without a fresh dispute or a return trip to negotiate.

Rizki kept both employees through the settlement period, the trucks stayed on the road, and the client contracts continued without interruption, which was the outcome Rizki had cared about most from the very first meeting: a settlement that was fair to Agus without becoming the thing that broke the business Rizki had spent eight years building.

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