If you own your practice, nobody's setting up a retirement match for you the way an employer would for a W-2 associate elsewhere. That's not a small gap. It means retirement planning has to be something you deliberately build into the practice, because it isn't going to happen automatically the way it does for people working a traditional employed position.

A few options exist specifically designed for self-employed practice owners, and which one fits depends largely on your business structure and how much you're able to contribute. A SEP-IRA is one of the simpler options to set up and allows contributions up to a meaningful percentage of your income, with relatively low administrative overhead, making it a common starting point for smaller practices. A Solo 401(k) allows for potentially higher contribution limits by letting you contribute both as the employee and as the employer, though it comes with more paperwork and is generally more attractive once profit is substantial enough to make the higher limits worth pursuing. A SIMPLE IRA can work well if you have associates or staff you also want to offer a retirement benefit to, without taking on the full complexity of a standard company 401(k) plan.

Beyond picking the right account type, the bigger issue we see is owners simply not contributing consistently, treating retirement savings as whatever's left over after everything else rather than a planned, recurring commitment. Strong years and lean years both happen in practice ownership, and it's easy to tell yourself you'll catch up on retirement contributions next year, which quietly becomes a pattern that never actually happens.

There's also a real tax benefit tied to most of these options, since contributions typically reduce your taxable income for the year, which means retirement planning and tax planning aren't really separate conversations for a practice owner. They're the same conversation.

If you don't currently have a retirement account set up for yourself, or you have one but haven't contributed consistently, that's worth addressing before another profitable year passes without taking advantage of it.

Jeremy Brewer is the founder of 911 Bookkeepers LLC in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 911 Bookkeepers partners with MBJA Accounting Service to give chiropractic and MDVIP practices clean, current financials. He is a Xero Certified Advisor.