We noticed an interesting trend starting late 2022: a five-fold increase in older or retired taxpayers reaching out for help. Possible causes:

• As of 2020, 75% of CPAs are at retirement age
• From 2020 to 2022, over 300,000 accountants, or 17% of the accounting workforce, left the industry

Accountants are retiring at the fastest pace on record, leaving many older or retired taxpayers without an accountant. This affects not only their ability to find someone to help them file, but also impacts availability of proactive tax planning & guidance.

Planning for retirement, tax-impact of chosen investments, sale of home, gifting, and how to structure assets are all important topics that can have a large impact tax-wise if planned properly.

Some unique challenges are:

• Many accountants in practice for many years still use a manual, paper-based process for preparing, reviewing, and filing taxes. Their clients are accustomed to this, however, post-covid, most newer firms are working 100% online
• Learning someone’s entire financial and tax history requires dedicated time & attention and cannot be rushed through during peak tax season

For these reasons, if you have an older relative or friend that may need to transition accountants, we have the following suggestions:

• Have them get in touch with us now to get started on some essential logistical tasks that we may not have time for during peak tax season. This includes digitizing documents, pulling prior year or historical information, and getting files in order
• Scheduling an appointment to review their tax profile in detail so that we can hit the ground running during tax time
• Go over long & short term planning in advance for tax strategies & opportunities. For those of you that use us for proactive planning, you already know that such appointments pay for themselves multiple times over as generally speaking, we tend to find at least a few thousand in savings per year from a tax planning appointment.

These essential introductory tasks must be completed now in the spring/summer months so we are prepared during the tax season (with us or any accounting firm).

If you need assistance with this, please contact us below  and please feel free to send this (or any) post to any friends & family.

www.dimovtax.com/contact

(833) 829-1120 toll free