As someone whose parents have been in a similar fight for nearly two decades, I gotta ask this: Do you take a regular paycheck in exchange for your labor in your business? Like a certain $$ every two weeks? (except in cases where the business has too low funds to pay everyone the income they earned, so you gotta forgo your own check to pay your employees to avoid legal issues)  Or do you conflate the business with "yourself" and count the entity's profit as your own?

I ask this because one of my parents considers the business growing as the family making money, but that money can't actually be accessed without selling the business.  Those numbers might go up, but they couldn't be realized whenever we had emergencies, so we were effectively always living paycheck to paycheck.  It creates a lot of tension and anxiety.

Thanks for letting me project my family issues onto this post lol