Why You Should Harvest Losses Annually

Posted On November 23, 2015 By Admin In Portfolio Management /  

Death_to_stock_photography_wild_8

This time each year, I review every client’s taxable accounts in search of losses to harvest for tax purposes. While no one likes to have a loss, the reality is that investments fluctuate and have down periods, even if the long-term trend is up. I’ll be contacting each client in the next two weeks and will let you know if I suggest any trades.

Even though we may make some sales, we still want to maintain our overall target asset allocation. Under US tax rules, we cannot buy a “substantially identical security” within 30 days in order to claim a tax loss. This precludes us from taking a loss and immediately buying back the same ETF or mutual fund. It does not however, prevent us from selling one large cap ETF and buying a different ETF that tracks another large cap index or strategy. This means that we can harvest the loss without being out of the market for 30 days and missing any potential gains during that time.

When we harvest losses, we can use those losses to offset any gains we have received and reduce our taxes in the current year. The criticism against tax loss harvesting is that it just serves to postpone taxes rather than actually saving taxes.

For example, let’s say that we purchased 10,000 shares of an ETF for $10 per share and today those shares are only worth $9.00. Our cost basis is $100,000 and if we sold today for $90,000 we could harvest a loss of $10,000. We replace that position with a different ETF and invest our $90,000. Fast forward a couple of years and the position is now worth $120,000. If we sell for $120,000, we would have a $30,000 gain, whereas if we had not done the earlier trades, our gain would be only $20,000. Apply a long-term capital gains rate of 15% and the savings of $1,500 in taxes this year is offset by $1,500 in additional taxes down the road.

So, why bother? There is an additional benefit to tax loss harvesting besides deferring taxes for later: you may be able to use those losses to offset short-term capital gains or ordinary income, which can be at a much higher tax rate than the 15% long-term capital gains rate.

The rules for capital gains are that you first net short-term gains and short-term losses against each other. Separately, you will net long-term gains and long-term losses. If you have net losses in either category, those losses may be subtracted from gains in the other category. So if you had $10,000 in net long-term losses, you could apply those losses against $10,000 of short-term capital gains. For someone in the 35% tax bracket, that $10,000 long-term loss could be worth $3,500, if you can apply that loss towards short-term gains, instead of the $1,500 we would normally associate with a long-term loss.

If you have more capital losses than gains in a year, you can apply $3,000 of those losses against ordinary income, and carry forward the remaining losses into future years indefinitely, until they are used up. If we can use our $3,000 loss against ordinary income, a taxpayer in the 35% bracket will save $1,050 in taxes, which is a lot better than the $450 we would save in long-term capital gains if we did not harvest the $3,000 loss.

After deferring gains for many years, taxpayers may be able to avoid realizing gains altogether two ways. First, if you have charitable goals, you can give appreciated securities to a charity instead of cash. If you give $1,000 worth of funds to a charity, the charity receives the full $1,000; you get a full tax deduction AND you avoid paying capital gains on those shares.

The second way to avoid capital gains is if you allow your heirs to inherit your shares. They will receive a step-up in cost basis and no one will owe capital gains tax. That’s a rather extreme way to avoid paying 15% in capital gains taxes, and most people are going to need their investments for retirement. However, the fact is that delaying taxes can be beneficial and that the tax is not always inevitable.

The reason I share this is that the argument that tax loss harvesting only serves to delay taxes ignores quite a few benefits that you can realize. You may be able to use those capital losses not just to offset capital gains at 15%, but potentially to offset short-term gains at a much higher rate, or to offset $3,000 a year of ordinary income.

Since we primarily use ETFs, we already have a great deal more tax efficiency than mutual funds, and we should have little capital gains distributions for 2015. If you’re not with GLWM and have mutual funds in a taxable account, be aware that many mutual funds have announced capital gains distributions for the end of this year.

There are quite a few ways we aim to add value for our clients and we take special interest in portfolio tax optimization. If there’s a way to help you save money in taxes, that’s going to help you meet your financial goals faster.

Read More

5 Tax Mistakes New Retirees Must Avoid

Posted On September 8, 2014 By Admin In Retirement Planning /  

Taxes

New retirees often overlook the bite that taxes will take out of their income.  Even though they are no longer receiving a paycheck, taxes can still add up in retirement.  There are quite a few ways to reduce these taxes, which unfortunately, most people will miss on their own. Here are 5 mistakes you can avoid through careful planning.

1) Taking a large withdrawal from a retirement account in one year. If your income is modest and you will require $60,000 from an IRA, you will pay much less in taxes by taking withdrawals of $20,000 over three years versus taking $60,000 out in one year.  Plan ahead and aim to smooth your withdrawals from qualified accounts, or better yet, take only RMDs.  Don’t wait until an emergency or for a large expense to plan your IRA distributions.

2) Taking a withdrawal from a retirement account to avoid a capital gain on selling a stock.  The IRA withdrawal will be fully taxable as ordinary income, but a long-term capital gain would be taxed at the lower rate of 15% (or 20% if you’re in the top tax bracket).  Only the gains portion of the sale is taxable, whereas 100% of the IRA distribution is taxable.  For ETFs and individual stocks, you can even specify which lots to sell, giving you the opportunity to sell the lots with the highest cost basis, rather than the default first in, first out, or average cost method used by mutual funds.

3) Inefficient Asset Location.  I often see that portfolios are set up with bonds in a taxable account and stocks in the IRA, so that retirees can take the income from the bonds and avoid touching the stocks in the IRA.  Actually, it would be much more tax efficient to reverse the locations and place the bonds in the IRA.

Bond interest is taxed as ordinary income, as are IRA distributions. Put your bonds in the IRA and take your bond income from the IRA, as the distributions will be taxed exactly the same.  Place your stocks in the taxable account, and you can receive favorable tax rates (15%) on capital gains and dividends, and you won’t have any capital gains until you sell.  (If you’ve been burned by taxable distributions from equity mutual funds, it’s time for you to learn about ETFs.)

Keeping high growth stocks out of your IRA will also reduce your future RMDs and reduce the taxes that will have to be paid by your heirs.  Heirs receive a step-up in basis on stocks in a taxable account, but not in an IRA.  By placing bonds in your IRA, you can reduce future taxes in many ways.  This concept can often be difficult for people to grasp, so if you’d like an example, feel free to email me or give me a call.

4) Selling the oldest savings bonds.  Many retirees hold EE savings bonds but are not managing these bonds.  Some older bonds had fixed rates or guaranteed minimums, whereas bonds issued starting May 2005 currently pay only 0.50%.  (This resets every 6 months, and this rate is current through 10/31/2014.)  As a result, you’re better off selling your newer bonds and keeping the older ones (pre-2005) which have higher interest rates.  Don’t forget that the bonds are guaranteed to reach their face value in 20 years, so you may be rewarded by holding on to a 17 year old bond for a couple more years.  EE bonds will receive interest for up to 30 years, which is the maximum time you should hold bonds.  By selling the newer bonds, you will pay less in taxes compared to selling older bonds which have appreciated more.  Use the tools at TreasuryDirect.gov to keep track of the current values and interest rates on your EE bonds.

5) Failing to harvest losses on investments. While your heirs will receive a step-up in cost basis for an appreciated security, they will lose any tax benefits associated with a position at a loss.  Sell the position and redeploy the capital as needed to maintain your target asset allocation.  A loss can be used to offset any capital gains in that year, plus $3,000 can be used against ordinary income and any remaining loss will carry forward to future years.

New retirees can undermine their retirement planning if they ignore the impact of taxes.  It can be costly to make changes after the fact, so it’s best to make sure you have a plan in place before retirement.  It’s not a once and done event either, because managing taxes is an ongoing process.  Many people turn to a financial planner for selecting investments, and discover that they receive even greater benefits from other areas such as tax management.

Read More

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.

Read More