Tax-gain harvesting is an opportunity to convert a long-term taxable gain into a potentially tax-free cost basis. Readers are probably familiar with tax-loss harvesting. Tax-loss harvesting is a form of tax planning. It’s the process of selling some investments at a loss, usually to offset gains you’ve realized when selling other assets at a profit. The losses can offset the gains, thereby reducing your tax bill. As the owner of a financial advisory firm (Berkshire Money Management), tax-loss selling is not an unfamiliar practice to me. Not only do I appreciate it because it reduces tax obligations, but I like…
Insights & Advice
Allen Harris
Here’s what retirement looks like
I went Halloween shopping last week, but I didn’t see anything scarier than the chart below (and I bought zombie babies, people). The horizontal numbers on the right measure the drawdown of the S&P 500 year-to-date 2021, as graphically depicted by the yellow line. The horizontal numbers on the left show that nearly 90% of the indices’ members have already had at least a 10% correction year-to-date, as graphically depicted by the blue blob. The result is that it’s been a good year for you if you’ve held the S&P 500. However, because a substantial amount of the index’s underlying…
New taxes to know about
Tax proposals from as recently as June 2021 have changed. The stuff that could fall under this topic has filled months and months of news coverage. Today I will focus on some interesting ones you should be aware of. I’ll keep it brief, just so that you know we’re monitoring it for you. The ABCs of ETFs When relevant, I use this column to tell you the trades I made in my portfolios. Readers know that I primarily use exchange-traded funds (ETFs). I use ETFs for a few reasons. ETFs are usually “passive” investments that track indices. If you look at the…
Are mandatory vaccinations legal?
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the broadest measure of economic growth. The U.S. GDP grew 6.4% in the previous quarter. By any standards, that’s a remarkable growth rate. GDP for this quarter has dropped precipitously to a forecasted rate of 3.7%. At the start of the quarter, there were growth expectations of 6.5% from Oxford Economics and Morgan Stanley. Typically, a 3.7% growth rate would be considered exceptional. However, measuring a $21 trillion economy is complicated and includes some mathematical estimates. I won’t run us through the calculation, but here’s the gist of it: the demand had been so significant that…