The Steward's Desk · Business and exit planning
The wire clears, the title disappears, and two questions arrive at once: what do I do with the money, and what do I do with me?
Jesse Plunkett, CEPA®, CRPC®
July 12, 2026 · Meet your advisor · 
Very little, on purpose. Park the proceeds somewhere safe and liquid, set aside the taxes you know are coming, and give yourself a stretch of months with no irreversible decisions. There is no penalty for moving slowly, and the expensive first-year mistakes are almost always things that were done too fast.
Parking money well is simpler than it sounds. High-yield savings, money market funds, and Treasury bills are the usual homes, and ultra-short-term bond funds belong on the list too. An ultra-short-term bond fund often pays a little more than the others while its value moves only slightly from day to day, which makes it a sensible place for money you won't need for a year or two. Each option carries a different risk, liquidity, and tax profile: bank deposits are FDIC-insured up to $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, per ownership category, while money market funds and bond funds are securities and carry no such insurance. That limit matters more after a sale than at any other point in your life, because a seven-figure wire lands in one account at one bank. If your cash sits well above the FDIC limit, you can spread it across CDs at several institutions so more of the balance stays covered. The first job, though, is with your CPA: confirm what the sale means for this year's taxes, and wall that amount off before anything else gets planned.
Expect your phone to get friendlier, too. A liquidity event attracts ideas: private deals, new ventures, family requests, and advisors of every kind. A parked dollar can still say yes later. Nothing about waiting closes a door.
For many owners this is the harder adjustment. The business organized your time, your relationships, and your answer to the question of what you do. When it transfers, all three go with it, and relief and grief tend to show up together. Both are normal, and neither means the sale was a mistake.
The sellers who adjust fastest usually planned the next chapter with the same care they gave the deal: work they still want to do, projects, family, boards, a new venture at a different pace. A consulting period or earnout can soften the ramp if it suits you. The exit planning framework I trained in as a CEPA treats personal readiness as one third of a good exit, equal to the business and the money, and the first year after closing is where that third proves its worth.
Start with a number: what the life you want costs per year, now that salary, distributions, and the benefits the company carried are gone. Then build the paycheck in layers. Cash and short-term reserves cover the near years, and a diversified portfolio is built for the far ones. Your money takes over the job the business used to do.
The mechanics change along the way. Taxes stop arriving through payroll and start arriving through estimated payments. Health coverage needs a new home if the business provided it. And spending that lived on the company's books, the truck, the phone, the travel, moves to yours. Pricing the paycheck accurately is half the plan, and if you want to test withdrawal numbers, the Retirement Withdrawal Calculator is a place to start.
Two questions shape how much weight the proceeds have to carry. The first: does the sale need to fund the rest of your life, or only a stretch of it? A price that fully covers your plan buys very different choices than one that has to be stretched, and being honest about which one you are holding keeps the spending plan grounded. The second: are you stepping straight into your next project, or taking a sabbatical first? A deliberate year or two away is a reasonable choice, but it means the portfolio carries your whole life with nothing coming in, so the reserve for that gap is worth setting aside on purpose rather than assuming it will be there.
Gradually, against a written plan. For years your wealth sat in a single company you controlled, and spreading it across thousands of companies you don't control will feel strange at first. The trade is worth naming: you give up control and concentration, and you get diversification and liquidity in return.
A plan funded in stages, on a schedule you set in advance, keeps the shift from hanging on anyone's market opinion. And the deal team doesn't disband at closing. Your CPA handles installment payments, earnout taxation, and state questions. Your attorney watches escrow and indemnification obligations, and updates the estate documents now that the wealth is liquid. My job is keeping all of it pointed at one plan, the same way it was before the sale.
The first months after a closing set the tone for everything that follows. If you want the proceeds, the taxes, and the paycheck question in one plan, a short call is the place to start.
There is no fixed clock, but think in months rather than days. The money should wait until the taxes are set aside, the plan is written, and you have caught your breath. Parked cash earns interest while it waits, so patience has a yield of its own.
Usually not. You are generally taxed on the gain over your basis, and how much and when depends on the deal's structure: asset sale or stock sale, earnout, installment payments, escrow. Your CPA runs the specifics. The planning point is knowing your after-tax number before you commit a dollar of it.
An earnout is a portion of the price paid later, contingent on the business hitting targets after you have handed over the keys. Plan your life on the money that is certain and treat the earnout as a bonus. If it pays, wonderful; if it does not, your plan never depended on it.
Having enough does not remove the decisions; it changes them. The proceeds still need to become income, taxes still reward multi-year planning, and your estate picture just changed completely. And the question of what the money is for, what you build or give or do next, is the one a plan answers best.