Business owner approaching retirement, no pension, SEP-IRA/Solo 401k, business sale as retirement event.
R-02 is the pre-retirement profile where the business itself is the retirement event. Substitute a sale, an installment note, or QSBS proceeds for the pension election an R-01 household would be negotiating — same age, entirely different testing surface.
R-02 sits at a specific gap in publicly available test data: a 55-to-65-year-old household where the largest single asset on the balance sheet is the business interest, and the planning horizon is dominated by the sale, succession, or wind-down event. There is no defined-benefit pension to elect, no employer health plan to bridge to Medicare from, and no W-2 catch-up matched against a corporate 401(k). Instead, the qualified-plan stack is a SEP-IRA or a Solo 401(k) with terminal-year contributions that may run to $76,500 (regular plus 50+ and 60–63 catch-up, depending on plan type and year), the health-coverage path runs through the ACA marketplace with income-cliff sensitivity, and the retirement income event is structurally a transaction: outright sale, installment sale under IRC §453, ESOP transition, or a QSBS-eligible C-corp redemption when the structure permits.
The corpus reflects this structural pivot. Median combined income is $148,577 — close to R-01 — but the underlying composition is Schedule C, K-1, and S-corp distributions rather than W-2 wages, and 23 of 30 households are homeowners (a notably higher rate than R-01). Liabilities skew toward business-attached debt: mortgages on owner-occupied property that the SBA or seller-financing tail still touches, auto loans on vehicles often run through the business, and a notably higher student-loan carry than R-01 because professional-services owners financed graduate training earlier. The legacy/estate goal appears in every R-02 household; debt-payoff appears in 83% of them.
What separates R-02 from neighbors is the combined absence of corporate benefits and the presence of a transactional exit. R-01 has pensions and NQDC; R-02 has installment notes and earnouts. SB-01 and SB-03 are mid-career operators; R-02 is the operator in their final-five-year exit window. P-02 established business owners overlap on operating profile but live on a longer timeline and at higher wealth tiers. The R-02 corpus is deliberately sized to make exit-planning, QSBS, and installment-sale stress tests realistic at the mass-affluent tier where most actual practitioners and small-business owners actually exit.
Aggregated across the 30 R-02 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Joshua (64, self-employed in a professional-services consulting role at Apex Consulting Partners) and Lisa (71, already retired from a prior career in education) sit inside the final consulting-practice exit window: combined income $149,768 near the corpus median, net worth $1.52M above it, and $636k of liquid assets large enough to fund Joshua's pre-Medicare ACA bridge while Lisa already qualifies. The seed carries two distinct debt_payoff goals — a $4,247 residual student-loan balance and the $262,418 remaining mortgage — both still on-track, alongside a separate $3,543 credit-card balance and a $1.86M legacy goal currently on-track at $1.55M progress; the $2.87M retirement target is the goal materially behind. The diagnostic shape is the asynchronous-retirement-age problem (one spouse past 65, one still under) layered on a household whose retirement-funding plan depends on a successful consulting-practice sale or wind-down rather than continued W-2 accumulation.
Every R-02 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles use R-02 most heavily. Tax-software teams use it to exercise QSBS §1202 eligibility flows, installment-sale §453 schedule generation, and QBI §199A deduction phase-outs under sale-year income spikes. Wealth-platform engineering teams testing exit-planning modules — cash-flow visualization with installment-note inflows, single-life vs joint annuity comparisons funded from sale proceeds, and concentration-risk metrics when the business is 60%+ of net worth — use R-02 to populate the realistic mass-affluent operator-owner profile. ACA marketplace and healthcare-compliance teams use R-02 to test MAGI-cliff subsidy clawbacks in the year of sale, where a single $1M-plus transaction can eliminate the prior years' subsidies and push the household into IRMAA's higher Medicare premium tiers two years later.
R-02 is calibrated as a US-domiciled, single-jurisdiction owner-operator within five to ten years of exit. Households where the business has already been sold and the household is now living off the installment note belong in RE-01 or RE-02 depending on age. Operator-owners with materially larger businesses (net worth above $3M dominated by the business) belong in P-02; pre-liquidity equity-rich operators sit in SB-03 or A-04 depending on stage. Corporate W-2 pre-retirees with a pension are R-01. Public-sector pre-retirees with DB plans are R-03. Households where the exit is forced by health or partner action, rather than planned, intersect with S-01 (divorce-in-progress) or HC-02 (disability claimant) rather than R-02.
Income and net-worth bands during v3 synthesis were anchored to upper-middle bands of the Survey of Consumer Finances for self-employed households aged 55–65, with industry mix loosely informed by IRS SOI Schedule C and S-corp filing statistics for the cohort. The corpus over-represents professional-services owners (medical, legal, accounting, architecture) relative to retail and trades because the exit-planning testing surface buyers value concentrates there. State distribution favors CA, NJ, and FL — a mix of high-income-tax exit-planning destinations and FL as a common destination state. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the corpus is frozen and not regenerable; calibration claims here are descriptive rather than reproducible.
Corporate W-2 pre-retiree with a pension and NQDC stack. The R-01 retirement event is an election; the R-02 retirement event is a transaction. Use R-01 when the testing surface is pension lump-sum-vs-annuity, NQDC distribution schedules, or employer health bridge.
Public-sector pre-retiree with a defined-benefit pension and WEP/GPO Social Security offsets. R-03 is mass-market wealth tier; R-02 is mass-affluent. Different planning surface entirely — DB pension administration vs business-sale structuring.
Established business owner at a higher wealth tier and earlier in the exit horizon. Use P-02 when the business is the dominant balance-sheet item (>$3M, >50% net worth) and the planning question is multi-year exit choreography rather than imminent sale.
FIRE achiever in early retirement. Both archetypes lack pensions and run an ACA bridge, but RE-02 is post-exit and typically a decade younger. Use RE-02 for post-sale FIRE drawdown modeling, R-02 for the exit transaction itself.
R-02 is the Self-Employed Pre-Retiree: a 55–65 year-old owner-operator household within five to ten years of business exit. The defining structural feature is that the business sale, not a pension election or 401(k) rollover, is the retirement event — and the household's qualified-plan stack, healthcare path, and tax planning are all shaped by that fact.
Yes. The corpus is sized so that a meaningful share of records can plausibly support a §1202 QSBS scenario overlay, particularly in professional-services and tech-adjacent industries. The corpus does not explicitly mark each household as QSBS-eligible or not — builders applying QSBS test scenarios overlay eligibility on the household profile.
P-02 households are mid-career operators at higher wealth tiers ($3M+ net worth, business often >50% of balance sheet) and not yet in the final exit window. R-02 is specifically the five-to-ten-year exit horizon at the mass-affluent tier where most real-world small-business and professional-practice exits actually occur.
The shipped corpus encodes pre-exit balance sheets — the installment note, if any, would be a future asset created at exit. Builders modeling §453 installment-income streams should treat R-02 as the starting state and project the post-sale balance sheet forward; the income, asset, and goal levels are sized to make that projection realistic.
R-02 is tagged for six bundles — B02, B03, B14, B17, B18, and B22 — covering tax planning, retirement income, employee/owner benefits, business-exit planning, decumulation, and behavioral finance. See the sidebar for the specific data sets that ship R-02 households.
No. The v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09). The 30 R-02 households are a fixed reference dataset; sampler improvements land in v4.
Download households matching this archetype as part of a Wealth Data Set.
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