2020 Last-Minute Year-End Tax Strategies for Your Stock Portfolio
When you take advantage of the tax code’s offset game, your stock market portfolio can represent a little gold mine of opportunities to reduce your 2020 income taxes. The tax code contains the basic rules for this game, and once you know the rules, you can apply the correct strategies.
Here’s the basic strategy:
• Avoid the high taxes (up to 40.8 percent) on short-term capital gains and ordinary income.
• Lower the taxes to zero—or if you can’t do that, then lower them to 23.8 percent or less by making the profits subject to long-term capital gains.
Think of this: you are paying taxes at a 71.4 percent higher rate when you pay at 40.8 percent rather than the tax-favored 23.8 percent.
To avoid the higher rates, here are seven possible tax-planning strategies.
In other words, make the high taxes disappear by offsetting them with low-taxed losses, and pocket the difference.
Under the wash-sale loss rule, if you sell a stock or other security and purchase substantially identical stock or securities within 30 days before or after the date of sale, you don’t recognize your loss on that sale. Instead, the code makes you add the loss amount to the basis of your new stock.
If you want to use the loss in 2020, then you’ll have to sell the stock and sit on your hands for more than 30 days before repurchasing that stock.
If you sell stocks to purge the capital losses, you can immediately repurchase the stock after you sell it—there’s no wash-sale “gain” rule.
If so, consider giving appreciated stock to your parents and your non-kiddie-tax children. Why? If the parents or children are in lower tax brackets than you are, you get a bigger bang for your buck by
If you have any question(s) above, feel free to contact us at 503-747-6534. Or email us at info@llwmg.com. Please note: We strongly suggest reaching our to your CPA in regards to any question(s) in regards to tax related matters.
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