We all have to prepare for the day we can't conduct our own business matters and someone has to take over.

My heirs are going to inherit a bunch of things to do, and with online banking and bill payment, he is not going to be aware of what all there is. My dad died in a small plane crash in 2003, and he didn't do things online, so to deal with his estate, all I had to do was pick up the mail and deal with whatever showed up - bills, notices, various business matters.

And there's things to know about the houses - where the shut offs are, how things work, what has gone wrong in the past, and what to do about it if it happens again.

In an effort to help, I've created a notebook with index that can guide them through it all. It changes constantly.

The latest process to describe is a new federal law that kicks in January 1, 2024, enacted by Congress in 2021 (during the Trump admin) that requires all small businesses to register online. We are supposed to identify the person in charge and send an image of our government-issued ID. There is 1 year to register the first time. After that, any time anything changes, such as a driver's license number or that person is no longer in charge, the government must be notified within 30 days. The fines are $500 per day of non-compliance, and a short jail sentence.

They can find out who should be reporting because we have our businesses registered with the Secretary of State for our state of residence. Of course, the lawbreakers are going to ignore all this and continue to rip off the taxpayers. I've seen a lot of businesses that claim to be registered with the state and aren't - they add "Inc" or "LLC" to their business name to make it sound legit. I think some people do that and don't realize it means filing paperwork with the state.



Once this kicks in I hope they extend the 30-day deadline to report changes because you can imagine how burdensome that would be when an individual dies - getting started on settling an estate can take much longer. I expect my heirs to think I made all this up because it sounds like something out of a novel.

It feels very Big Brother, and I expect the online registration to start out very buggy and take months to work. I always struggle with this online registration stuff here because we don't have a cell signal, so there's likely to be problems with that, too. Often, the government requires a cell phone to be one of the expensive ones with a contract instead of the cheaper month-to-month plans that senior citizens prefer. We'll see.