Digging Into Tax-Loss Harvesting

Tax-loss harvesting is a tax strategy, but how does it actually affect your tax return and are there any limitations?  In this episode of the Finance for Physicians Podcast, Daniel Wrenne talks about tax-loss harvesting—what it is, why it's beneficial, and how it works on your tax return. Topics Discussed: Tax-loss Harvesting: Only beneficial for those with taxable assets What is tax-loss harvesting? Book losses while staying with similar investments Wash-Sale Rule: Why the IRS won’t let you buy the same security back What are the benefits of tax-loss harvesting? Take up to $3,000 a year of capital losses to offset ordinary income Defer or postpone taxes on normally taxed investment account Give it away to a nonprofit or beneficiary to realize step-up in basis How does tax-loss harvesting work on taxes? Form 1040, Line 7, Schedule D Links: Wash-Sale Rule Step-Up in Basis Form 1040 Schedule D Contact Finance for Physicians Finance for Physicians Full Episode Transcript: Hello, everyone. I hope you're having a great day. Today, I was hoping to cover a question that's come up quite a few times in our work with clients one-on-one. One of you brought up the question specifically, so I wanted to make sure and maybe dig into this a little bit more. The question is about tax-loss harvesting, understanding that a little bit more, how it works into your tax return, and some of the specifics of how that works. I'm going to dig in a little bit today and cover that. For any of you guys that are either doing that or interested in it, I think this will be something to check out and hopefully get a little bit of knowledge on this. We'll jump into that now. Like I said, we're going to talk a little bit more specifically about tax-loss harvesting. I'll start out with just a brief summary of what it is and why it's beneficial, and then we'll talk about how it actually comes into play on your tax return. This is a tax strategy, so that's a really good question. It's like, well, how does this actually affect my tax return? We'll talk about that and any limitations around that. For starters, it's important to clarify that tax-loss harvesting is only beneficial for those of you that have taxable assets. That's an investment account in your name. It could be a brokerage account. It could be cryptocurrency. It could be a baseball card. You could buy and sell baseball cards. That's technically a taxable asset. A taxable asset is anything that's invested not in a tax-sheltered account. A tax-sheltered account is like a Roth IRA, 401(k), 529, those kinds of things. Tax-loss harvesting is only beneficial for taxable assets, typically a brokerage account or a joint investment account—sometimes it's called that—an investment account in your name or you and your spouse's name. That's an important clarification. Also, to clarify, the best tax strategy really that there is is to maximize tax-sheltered vehicles first. Tax-loss harvesting is great, but I've seen on multiple occasions where people are looking into tax-loss harvesting and maybe have taxable assets like I just talked about, but they haven't yet maximized those tax shelters. Oftentimes, it's even more efficient to just go ahead and max out all your tax shelters or make sure that you're not missing out on...