Year-End Tax Tips [Podcast]

This hour is all about year-end tax planning tips. Find out how you can take advantage of your losses with tax loss harvesting. You’ll also learn why mutual funds are tax-inefficient and could be hurting you at tax time. You only have a few weeks left (deadline is December 31) to convert money to a Roth IRA. Find out other important tax deadlines and some tips for getting out of tax trouble.

2:44 “When it comes to your retirement assets, you want to take the minimal amount of risk as possible”

6:27 “You want to take a look and see where your positions are relative to your original cost basis—what you paid for it”

8:29 “Sometimes folks will try and time it so they have just enough loss to offset their gains. We would tell you to go ahead and create as much loss as you possibly can—that’s called tax loss harvesting”

10:57 “With individual stocks, you have to sell them and then you have 31 days—there’s something called the wash sale rule: you can’t buy it and sell it the same day or next day, you have to wait 31 days on either side of the transaction”

14:39 “If you own a mutual fund outside your retirement accounts, you need to act now before it’s too late”

17:03 “Mutual funds themselves, outside of retirement accounts, are very tax-inefficient. You want to be careful with what type of investments that you own, inside your retirement accounts, outside your retirement accounts, inside a Roth IRA account and so on”

19:02 “Short-term losses first net with short-term gains. Long-term losses first net with long-term gains. After that happens, they all get added together and the net effect of all this is a short-term loss can go against a long-term gain and vice versa”

25:14 “This is one of the best gifts the IRS has ever given us in Al and my opinion—it’s the Roth IRA. You have a few weeks left to get money into an IRA via a conversion”

25:43 “A Roth IRA conversion is just taking money from your retirement account and then moving it into a Roth IRA…why would you want to do that? The money you put in that Roth IRA will forever grow tax free”