Estate/Incapacity planning - sole proprietor

[FrebergCPA]

Illinois CPA sole proprietor with part time administrative assistant. While retirement is still several years away, I am past due to review my estate planning with a goal to do that in the second half of 2023. I would like to hear thoughts, comments, suggestions, and resources out there on planning for retirement and sale of one's CPA practice. My wife is certainly concerned about what would happen in the event of my death prior to death. Of equal importance to her (and me) is how to deal with temporary incapacity in the event of illness or injury. Again, would like to hear thoughts, comments, suggestions, and resources out there on this topic as well.

[FrebergCPA]

That should be event of my death prior to retirement.

[Rapid Robert]

See an attorney, and establish a conventional package for a married couple: 2 wills, a living (revocable) trust, health care POA, and regular durable POA. (NOTE: this is not legal advice! I am not an attorney!) Your situation may require additional special treatment (other trusts, etc) but a good attorney should be able to advise you.

As for business resumption after a disaster, such as your incapacitation, this is a good thing for all businesses to have. On the other hand, if you have provided complete copies of the filed tax returns to all your prior year clients, they should be OK without you. Even for the current year, surely they still have copies of the information they provided to you? (I'm paperless, so if they give me paper, I try to return it ASAP after immediately scanning it).

As for selling your practice, that is getting trickier from what I read. I am not in the market as either buyer or seller, but I read in other forums that hiring competent tax staff is getting harder, many tax practitioners are retiring (your competition), and of course technology and changes at the IRS may change the tax software technology tremendously in coming years ( not to mention tax law changes). You can hire a broker and try to sell your practice for top dollar (but a hefty commission), or maybe try selling off your clients in batches over several years. Obviously this is hyper-local, so nothing I said here may apply to you where you are.