Got a phone call from the investment advisor at Schwab assigned to my account. I usually ignore the calls from Schwab, but was bored so I took it. He wanted to “review my accounts” with me, and then suggested a strategy “to save on taxes”.
My long standing strategy is to do nothing, which results in no capital gains taxes. All my holdings (in taxable accounts) with Schwab are S&P500 index funds. I do have some individual stocks in the IRA accounts.
His recommendation was that I sell the index funds and replace them with a basket of individual stocks that would mimic the index fund. This, he explained, would allow me to sell losers each year to generate a capital loss which I could use to offset gains. He rattled off lots of numbers to show me how much I would have saved in years past if I had sold hypothetical amounts under this strategy.
He didn’t mention the capital gains taxes I would incur today by selling the index funds in the first place. He also had no comment when I asked how this new collection of equities would perform as well as the index fund, when the index fund had a management fee of 0.02% vs. the new fee of 0.40% that would apply to the new basket.
He also didn’t seem to understand that I would already be in a 0% long term capital gains tax bracket until I exceeded $127,000 in gains.
The kicker came when he suggested I also apply this strategy to my 92 year old mother’s account. That account already has enough cash/money market in it to fund the rest of her days. I couldn’t understand why I would want to voluntarily trigger capital gains taxes on her equities.
Yeah, he was looking out for me, no doubt. /sarcasm