If you trade your tax bill with Jeff Bezos, does that mean you get his income too?
Actually, a tax swap doesn't refer to trading tax liabilities with someone else. Instead, it's a maneuver meant to take advantage of a capital loss, even though you want to maintain the loss-inducing investment.
If you take a loss on an investment, you can deduct the loss on your taxes (after all, you have to pay taxes on capital gains, so why shouldn't you deduct the losses?). Unfortunately, to take the loss, you actually have to, uh...take the loss. In other words, you have to sell the investment and book the loss, in order to deduct it from your taxes. A paper loss doesn't count.
So a tax swap involves selling the investment that has the loss, then buying a new investment that's pretty similar (though it can't be exactly the same; the government is onto that trick).
You own shares in a major (legal) drug maker that have fallen in the past few months. You are now $2,000 underwater on the investment, and want to deduct the losses on your taxes. In order to achieve this goal, you sell the shares and lock in the loss. Then you take your capital and buy a drug-maker ETF, which happens to have the stock you just sold as its highest-weighted component.
You didn't sell and repurchase the same stock. You bought a different vehicle with similar exposure. You still have an investment in the sector you had before...plus, now you've got that $2,000 tax deduction.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Tax Basis?8 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is tax basis Well your basis
is your cost Your costs for assessing how much you
owe when the tax man coming you bought a thousand
shares of whatever dot com at twelve bucks a share
in its eye po and huzzah Three years later the
stock is at thirty You decide whatever dot com is
now passe because a kardashians said so it'll be over
taken by whenever dot com and you want to sell
So you dio and you live in a thirty percent
marginal tax blue state And that is your federal tax
rates in twenty percent But then you add in ten
percent for state taxes and whatever's left for obamacare and
you pay about thirty percent tax on your gains Well
you paid twelve grand to buy the stock and after
the sale you took in thirty grand when you sold
it for a gain of eighteen thousand dollars Your tax
basis on those shares is twelve grand so you pay
thirty percent tax on the eighteen grand of gain or
fifty four hundred dollars to net from the sale of
thirty thousand dollars worth of stock How much Yeah twenty
Four thousand six hundred dollars He fancy math Had you
just gotten those shares free I'ii they were gifted to
you and you had no tax basis or a tax
basis of zero dollars a share Well then your gain
would have been from zero to thirty grand or a
gain of thirty thousand dollars to then be taxed at
thirty percent or nine grand in taxes to net just
twenty one thousand dollars after the sale So having ah
high tax basis or at least being able teo point
toe one saves you money when the tax man coming
and well that's pretty much it alright he's gone Now
you can all come out Come on it's Okay it's 00:01:53.698 --> [endTime] safe
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