I deleted all the other December diary entries between December 10th and now because they were just a bunch of back and forth between the partners and myself about the Goodwill Clause, subsequent complaints about the sales price I had already "negotiated" with them before that clause, and other small details.
In the process I managed to leave town twice more (once for a break, once to visit my family now for the holidays), and all of our attorneys also managed to delay the process.
Formal Letter of Intent
After giving me a fair amount of grief, my partners finally agreed to the Goodwill Clause in combination with all of the earlier terms we had agreed to, and they drafted a Letter of Intent to buy my business interest and emailed it to me yesterday while I was driving home for the holidays.
Feeling like I can't delay the process any more, and not really wanting to, I told them that for sentimental reasons I would accept their offer formally as of December 31st, and as long as we got the paperwork completed within two weeks, we could use December 31st as the date of the sale, assuming the accountants and lawyers were okay with that.
At some point I think they finally realized what's been going on with the capital account and net income situation (where I've been making over $1K per day while this has been dragging on), and they wanted to back-date everything to December 10th, and I said there was no way I was going to do anything like that, that I hadn't "agreed" to anything until now, but I would agree to accept their offer on December 31st. (They got upset again when I just "assumed" the formal exchange would happen on the closing date, so again, this date was a compromise, and I agreed to it only in combination with the closing date having to come within two weeks. From my perspective I didn't want to agree to this date and then have to wait forever for the closing to happen.)
I called my attorney to let them know that we had finally come to terms on an agreement, and also called our company attorney to let her know as well. They both assured me that we could get this done in two weeks after the end of the year, so I'm happy to say I'm sitting here in my hometown, typing this diary entry, and I'll be out of my business in four months, at a price I can finally agree with.