Lol. Ok. OP, if you aren't afraid of prison (which I can understand why you wouldn't be, IRS CID doesn't always do the job they should with this stuff, and even when they do, DOJ Tax doesn't always green light the pros) add up the potential interest and penalties you can get hit with when transactions are found to lack economic substance. Do that math. |
+1 "harvesting" lol |
| Can someone explain to me what it is that OP is looking to do? I get realizing a loss to offset a gain, but it seem like OP is talking about something else. |
Omg. |
Once again. Omg. |
Lots of dumb people on here. OP, our wealth manager does regular tax loss harvesting with many trades over the year. That said, he recently presented another vehicle for a more sophisticated approach. The company is Quantinno and their focus is tax harvesting using long and short sales. The catch is that Quantinno management fees would be on top of our existing fees to our wealth manager, which is why we haven't made the leap. We currently pay .05% for assets under management, and the Quantinno funds would cost another .045% on top of that, bringing us to almost 1% in management fees. Not sure it is worth it, but we are HNW family and apparently the tax lost harvesting loses its strength over time, whereas the long/short approach gives you more options. I'm not financially saavy, so bare with this explanation. |
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Here is a vanguard white paper on it which explains both what it is and provides some granular estimates of how useful it is or isn’t
https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/dam/corp/research/pdf/tax_loss_harvesting_why_a_personalized_approach_is_important.pdf Basically they find that if you are a really high tax bracket and NW and you do everything perfectly it can add 1% or more to your returns of your taxable account (not your retirement accounts of course), but if you relax those assumptions then the benefit is probably more like .05-.1% (of the taxable account). TLH in theory is perfectly legal. There is of course room to abuse it but the IRS has shown no real appetite to get into arguments about what investments are so similar as to trigger a wash sale. |
What’s your NW? We’re technically in the HNW bucket (lower end) and what we’ve been told is these vehicles make sense when you’re $10M+ investable assets. Anything below you’re over complicating it. |
It's useless in a normal year. It's helpful if you have to cash out for a big purchase and want to generate losses to offset it. If you are a good investor you don't have losses to harvest. Profits > taxes. |
Net worth is $14M, so yes, it is worth the exercise. |
In the past several years we had incredibly high income due to company provided stock options about to expire and need to exercise. We exercised and sold to keep our portfolio more balanced but it has been a big tax hit year after year. No way around it unless we held, which I am glad we didn't. The stock has not been doing well lately. We are now retired and will be taking big hits with deferred income payouts starting next month. Next month is a big one which will be a big tax hit again. Nice problems to have I guess. |