As we are getting closer to the year end, we should always take a look at our taxable brokerage accounts. One thing to do is called Tax-Loss Harvesting which can help you reducing your capital gains.
If you have capital gains during the year, one questions to ask is whether you have some stocks that you don’t want to own anymore and you will sell for a loss, or you have some stocks losing their values but you still want to own them.
In the first scenario, you can just sell the losing stock and use it to offset your gain. For the second scenario, you can buy the stock and sell the same stock 30 days later, or you can sell the stock first and buy the same stock back after 30 days. Either way, you can use the proceeds to offset the capital gain. This is called ‘Wash-Sale’ rule which will allow you to deduct the loss in your tax return.
https://www.sec.gov/answers/wash.htm
One way to not trigger the Wash-Sale rule is to sell a security and buy a different security, for example, sell JP Morgan stock and buy Bank of America stock, or replace a mutual fund with a similar yet different enough mutual fund.
