Capital Gains

I’m going to be talking about capital gains and some people kind of grumble a little bit because guess what? Typically capital gains often generate taxes. I remind you, to my knowledge yet there’s no tax rate greater than 100%. So capital gains are still a good thing, right? It means you’re making money. So what is a capital gain? Simply put, I bought something here and I’m selling it for greater, right? I have a gain in that. So buy low, sell high creates a capital gain. So what types of things can have capital gains? Obviously stocks, right, investments, that sort of stuff. What about property? Maybe possessions of some sort. Now you have these cryptocurrencies coming out, right? Basically anything that could appreciate in value where you have a gain from your original purchase, right? Then there’s two differences, we have short-term and long-term capital gains. Short-term, simply anything held, owned less than one year. Long-term, anything longer, right? And the reason why that they separate those two is because they’re treated differently for tax purposes. Currently under the current tax law short-term capital gains are basically taxed as ordinary income. It was just like you’ve had an extra wages or something like that. It’s income. Long-term capital gains are taxed at the capital gains rate dependent upon your income level. So in some cases it can be favorably treated and then if you have higher incomes your capital gains may go up a little bit under our current tax laws. So once again, it’s important to know what two you have or maybe there’s maybe an argument that you may want to hold that longer to fall into that category depending upon your tax situation. Remember, you can offset capital gains with capital losses. So the idea of I bought high and sold low there, right? I had a capital loss, that can offset capital gains. And so why could that be important? We talk a lot about tax planning on the show and mainly focus, it seems like a lot on Roth IRAs or Roth conversions. Paying taxes on those 401KS and IRAs. What about these non-qualified accounts that are producing these capital gains? They call that tax harvesting. And that’s something that a lot of times at the end of each year you want to be looking at. Do I have a large, unrealized capital gain? And I’ll get to unrealized in a second. But a large, unrealized capital gain? Maybe I want to look at realizing that’s there because I’m in a certain tax situation. So once again plan, plan, plan, plan for taxes even in these non-qualified non area accounts. I mentioned unrealized. Hopefully you haven’t sold it yet. You have something you bought low. It’s appreciated in value and now it’s worth more, but you haven’t sold it. You haven’t realized those gains yet, so therefore you don’t have taxes owed yet. So that would be those positions that potentially are considered for tax harvesting. Inheriting something with capital gains, boy that could be tricky, right? Right now under current tax law there’s some favorable with step up and step up in benefits, step up in capital gains and so you may have a better tax situation. But be cautious, that may be changing. That’s something to be keeping an eye on. Remember IRAs don’t have capital gains because you’re deferring the growth and when you take out out of your IRA, it’s all considered income. Hope that was valuable folks. If you have account like this, give us a call. We’d love to walk through and see if there’s strategies that may be able to put you at a better position so you can keep more in your pocket.