Tax Prep side hustle??

[BeanCounter]

 DH and I are close to FI and looking to do a slow RE transition. I am a CPA who has been in the corporate finance world for the last ten years, corporate accounting prior to that. So I have little to no tax experience beyond what was required for my CPA certification and preparing my own taxes. I'm thinking I might like to do individual returns out of my home in retirement for a little extra spending money for travel. Is anyone else doing this? What would be a good way to prepare myself for this? And how much money could I reasonably expect to make?

[jwright]

I am a CPA and moved from public accounting in tax to industry about three years ago.  I have continued to prepare tax returns as a side hustle.

I charge $125 an hour plus processing fee.  When I bought my tax software, I chose "pay-as-you-go" option, so for every return I pay a filing fee before I can submit it.  I pass that 100% on to my clients.   Software is very expensive and the program I use now is not nearly as sophisticated as what I was using in my firm.  This has led to some issues.  For more complex return, I have to override my software at times and that makes me nervous from a liability standpoint.  I do not currently carry E&O insurance, and have turned down work that I am capable of doing but would give me too much exposure.  I'm trying to actually pare down my list to only friends and family.

I have made about $10k net per year the last three years without really trying.  I just carried my clients over so I don't have to do any business development, I get more referrals than I want.

I am scaling back because of the liability issues I mentioned above and because I don't like being on-call for clients outside of working hours.  I also had never worked from home before so not having all the office functionality was frustrating.

However, every CPA I know in town has too much work.  There is definitely a market for the service and you can make a nice income. 

Let me know if you have specific questions.