9 Ways to Manage Capital Gains

Posted On April 7, 2018 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Tax Strategies /  

Investors want to rebalance or reduce their exposure to stocks without creating a large tax bill. We specialize in tax-efficient portfolio management and can help you minimize the taxes you will pay. Here are 9 ways to manage your investment taxes more effectively:

1. Use ETFs instead of Mutual Funds. ETFs typically have very little, and often zero, capital gains distributions. Actively managed mutual funds are presently sitting on very large embedded gains, which will be distributed on to shareholders as the managers trade those positions. Using ETFs gives you better control of when you choose to realize gains.

2. Donate appreciated securities to charity instead of cash. If you are already planning to give money to a charity, instead donate shares of a stock or fund which has appreciated. The charity will get the same amount of money and they will pay no capital gains on the sale. You will still get the same tax deduction (if you exceed the now higher standard deduction) plus you will avoid paying capital gains. Use the cash you were planning to donate to replenish your investment account. Same donation, lower taxes.

Consider funding a Donor Advised Fund and contributing enough for several years of charitable giving. If you give to a large number of charities, it may be easier to make one transfer of securities each year to the Donor Advised Fund, and then give to the charities from the Fund.

3. Give appreciated securities to kids in the zero percent capital gains bracket. Some taxpayers in the lower brackets actually pay a 0% capital gains rate. If your grown children are no longer dependents, and would qualify, they may be able to receive the shares and sell them tax-free. Just be sure to stay under the $15,000 annual gift tax exclusion per person. For 2018, the zero percent capital gains rate will apply to single taxpayers under $38,600 in income and married couples under $77,200.

4. Harvest losses annually. Those losses give you the opportunity to offset gains and rebalance your portfolio. Any unused losses will carry forward to future years without expiration. And you can also use $3,000 a year of losses to offset your ordinary income, which means that instead of just saving 15-20% in taxes you could be saving 37% or more.

5. Develop a Capital Gains Budget. It’s not all or nothing – you don’t have to sell 100% of a position. We can trim a little each year and stay within an annual capital gains target. We also can sell specific lots, meaning we can reduce a position and choose to sell shares with the highest or lowest cost basis.

6. Wait a year for long-term treatment. We try to avoid creating gains under 12 months. The long-term rate is 15% or 20%, but short-term gains are taxed as ordinary income.

7. Use your IRA. If you have a well diversified IRA, we can often rebalance in that account and not create a taxable event. While many investors put taxable bonds in IRAs and leave the equities in a taxable account, for taxpayers in a high bracket, you may prefer to buy tax-free municipal bonds in the taxable account and keep equities in the IRA.

8. Stop Reinvesting Distributions. If your position in a stock or fund has grown, don’t make it larger through reinvestment of dividends and distributions! Reinvesting takes away your choice of how to rebalance your portfolio with the cash flow you receive. However, please make sure you are doing something with your distributions in a timely manner and not letting them accumulate in cash.

9. Just take the Gains already! Don’t let a gain disappear because you don’t want to pay 15% in taxes. If you have a big winner, especially with an individual stock or a speculative investment like bitcoin, take your gains and move on. If we become too obsessed with taxes we run the risk of letting our investment returns suffer.

While most people are thinking about their 2017 taxes right now, reacting to what has already passed, we suggest looking ahead to 2018 and being proactive about managing your futuretax liabilities. Taxes can be a significant drag on performance. If you’re investing in a taxable account, we can give you peace of mind that you have a plan not only for financial security, but also to manage your capital gains as efficiently as possible.

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Beware: 2017 Fund Capital Gains Distributions

Posted On October 8, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management, Tax Strategies /  

We are starting to receive estimates for year-end 2017 Capital Gains distributions from Mutual Funds, and no surprise, many funds are having large distributions to their shareholders this year. As a refresher, when a mutual fund sells a stock within its portfolio, the gain on that sale is passed through to the fund owners at the end of the year as a taxable event.

When you invest in a 401(k), IRA, or other qualified account, these capital gains distributions don’t create any additional taxes for you. If you reinvest your distributions, your dollar value of the fund remains the same, and you are unaffected by the capital gain. However, if you are investing in a taxable account, these distributions will cost you money in the form of increased taxes.

A quick look at estimates from American Funds, Columbia, and Franklin-Templeton shows that many equity funds are having capital gains distributions of 3-10% this year. A few are even higher, such as the Columbia Acorn (17-21%) and Acorn USA (23-28%). Imagine if you made a $100,000 investment at the beginning of the year, your fund is up 16% and then you get a distribution for $28,000 in capital gains! Yes, capital gains distributions can exceed what a fund made in a year, when the fund sells positions which it owned for longer.

Capital Gains Distributions create a number of problems:

  • Even if you are a long-term shareholder, when the fund distributes short-term gains, you are taxed at the higher short-term tax rate.
  • If you didn’t sell any of your shares, you will need to find other money to pay the tax bill, which can run into the thousands each year if you have even just a $50,000 taxable portfolio.
  • If you are thinking of buying mutual fund shares in Q4 of this year, you could end up buying into a big December tax bill and paying for gains the fund had 6-12 months ago.
  • In addition to paying capital gains on fund distributions, you will still have to pay tax when you sell your shares.
  • Capital gains distributions are in addition to any dividends and interest a fund pays. In general, we want dividends and interest income as additions to our total return. Capital gains distributions, however, do not increase our return and are an unwelcome tax liability.

If you have a taxable account, or both taxable and retirement accounts, we may be able to save you a substantial amount of money on taxes. We can use tax-efficient investments like Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), which typically have little or ZERO capital gains distributions at the end of the year. This puts us in control of when you want to sell and harvest your gains. When you have multiple types of accounts, we can place the investments into the best account to minimize your tax bill.

If you do presently have mutual funds in a taxable account, it may be a good idea to take a look at your potential exposure before the end of the year so you are not surprised. If you sell before the distribution is paid, you can avoid that distribution. Now that will mean paying capital gains based on the profit you have when you sell. But you definitely want to be planning ahead. When you’re ready to create a tax-managed portfolio that looks at all your accounts together, we can help you do that.

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Are Investment Advisory Fees Tax Deductible?

Posted On April 25, 2016 By Admin In Financial Planning /   1 Comment

 

It surprises me how few questions I receive about the tax deductibility of Investment Advisory fees. I hope that your CPA asks this question as they prepare your tax return, but I fear that some people miss this potential tax deduction. As with many tax rules, this one has quite a number of caveats. Here are three things you need to know:

1. First, we need to distinguish between Investment Advisory Fees (also called Investment Management Fees), Financial Planning Fees, and Commissions. Only Investment Advisory Fees are tax deductible. If you are a client, note that the fees charged by Good Life Wealth Management are Investment Advisory Fees.

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6 Steps to Save on Investment Taxes

Posted On June 17, 2014 By Admin In Portfolio Management /   1 Comment

For new investors, taxes are often an afterthought.  Chances are good that your initial investments were in an IRA or 401(k) account that is tax deferred.  If you had a “taxable” account, the gains and dividends were likely small and had a negligible impact on your income taxes.  Over time, as your portfolio grows and you have more assets outside of your retirement accounts, taxes become a bigger and bigger problem.  Eventually, you may find yourself paying $10,000 a year or more in taxes on your interest, dividends, and capital gains.

A high level of portfolio income may be a good problem to have, but taxes can become a real drag on the performance of your portfolio and eat up cash flow that you could use for better purposes.  Luckily, there are a number of ways to reduce the taxes generated from your investment portfolio and we make this a special focus of our process at Good Life Wealth Management.  We will discuss six of the ways that we work with each of our clients to create a portfolio that is tax optimized for their personal situation.

1) Maximize contributions to tax-favored accounts.  While the 401(k) is the obvious starting place, investors may miss other opportunities for investing in a tax advantaged account.  Since these have annual contribution limits, every year you don’t participate is a lost opportunity you cannot get back later.  In addition to your 401(k) account, you may be eligible to contribute to a:

  • Roth or Traditional IRA;
  • SEP-IRA if you have self-employment or 1099 income;
  • “Back-door” Roth IRA;
  • Health Savings Account (HSA).

Also, don’t forget that investors over age 50 are eligible for a catch-up contribution to their retirement accounts.  For 2014, the catch-up provision increases your maximum 401(k) contribution from $17,500 to $23,000.

2) Use tax-efficient vehicles.  Actively managed mutual funds create capital gains distributions as managers buy and sell securities.  These capital gains are taxable to fund shareholders, even if you just bought the fund one day before the distribution occurs.  These distributions are irrelevant in a retirement account, but can be sizable when the fund is held in a taxable account.

To reduce these capital gains distributions, we use Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) as a core component of our equity holdings.  ETFs typically use passive strategies which are low-turnover and they may be able to avoid capital gains distributions altogether.  It used to be difficult to estimate the after-tax returns of mutual funds, but thankfully, Morningstar now has a tool to evaluate both pre-tax and after-tax returns.  Go to Morningstar.com to get a quote on your mutual fund, then click on the “Tax” tab to compare any ETF or fund to your fund.  I find that even when a fund and ETF have similar pre-tax returns, the ETF often has a clear advantage when we compare after-tax returns.

One last factor to consider: many mutual funds had loss carry-forwards from 2008 and 2009.  So you may not have seen a lot of capital gains distributions in the 2010-2012 time period.  By 2013, however, most funds had used up their losses and resumed distributing gains, some of which were substantial.

3) Avoid Short-Term Capital Gains.  Short-term gains, from positions held less than one year, are taxed as ordinary income, whereas long-term gains receive a lower tax rate of 15% (or 20% if you are in the top bracket).  We try to avoid creating short-term capital gains whenever possible, and for this reason, we rebalance only once per year.  We do our rebalancing on a client-by-client basis to avoid realizing short-term gains.

4) Harvest Losses Annually.  From time to time, a category will have a down year.  We will selectively harvest those losses and replace the position with a different ETF or mutual fund in the same category.  The losses may be used to offset any gains harvested that year.  Additionally, with any unused losses, you may offset $3,000 of ordinary income, and the rest will carry forward to future years.

A benefit of using the loss against other income is the tax arbitrage of the difference between capital gains and ordinary income.  For example, if you pay 33% ordinary tax and 15% capital gains, using a $3,000 long-term capital loss to offset $3,000 of ordinary income is a $540 benefit ($3,000 X (.33-.15)).

5) Consider Municipal Bonds.  We calculate the tax-equivalent rates of return on tax-free municipal bonds versus taxable bonds (i.e. corporate bonds, treasuries, etc.) for your income tax bracket.  With the new 3.8% Medicare tax on families making over $250,000, tax-free munis are now even more attractive for investors with mid to high incomes.

6) Asset Location.  This is a key step.  Not to be confused with Asset Allocation, Asset Location refers to placing investments that generate interest or ordinary income into tax-deferred accounts and placing investments that do not have taxable distributions into taxable accounts.  For example, we would place high yield bonds or REITs into an IRA, and place equity ETFs and municipal bonds into taxable accounts.  This means that each account does not have identical holdings, so performance will vary from account to account.  However, we are concerned about the performance of the entire portfolio and reducing the taxes due on your annual return.

If these six steps seem like a lot of work to reduce taxes, that may be, but for us it is second-nature to look for opportunities to help clients keep more of their hard-earned dollars.  The actual benefits of our portfolio tax optimization process will vary based on your individual situation and can be difficult to predict.  However, a 2010 study by Parametric Portfolio Associates calculates that a tax-managed portfolio process can improve net performance by an average of 1.25% per year.

Tax management is a valuable part of our process.  And even if, today, your portfolio doesn’t generate significant taxes, I’d encourage you to think ahead.  Prepare for having a large portfolio, and take the steps now to create a tax-efficient investment process.

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