Here’s why tax-loss harvesting can be easier with exchange-traded funds

Despite a strong year for the stock market, you could still be sitting on portfolio losses. But you can leverage down assets to succeed in seducing a tax break, experts say.

The tactic, known as “tax-loss harvesting,” involves selling losing brokerage account assets to rights a loss. When you file your taxes, you can use those losses to offset portfolio gains. Once your investment disappointments exceed profits, you can use the excess to reduce regular income by up to $3,000 per year.

“Tax-loss harvesting is a tried and true blueprint to lower investors’ tax bills,” said certified financial planner David Flores Wilson, managing partner at Sincerus Admonitory in New York. 

After counterbalancing $3,000 in regular income, investors can carry any additional losses forward into future years to offset primary gains or income.

“Investors can benefit substantially over time” by tax-loss harvesting consistently throughout the year, Wilson remarked.

Tax-loss harvesting can be simple when you’re eager to offload a lose out asset. But it’s tricky when you still want exposure to that asset.

That’s because of guidelines from the IRS recollected as the “wash sale rule,” which blocks you from claiming the tax break on losses if you rebuy a “substantially identical” asset within the 30-day window in front of or after the sale.

In other words, you can’t sell a losing asset to claim a loss and then immediately repurchase the verbatim at the same time investment. 

While the wash sale rule is a challenge, exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, can remedy investors avoid trouble with the IRS, experts say.

“The beauty of using ETFs for doing tax-loss harvesting … is that there are so various similar, but not identical, ETFs that could be exchanged for a losing one,” said George Gagliardi, a CFP and founder of Coromandel Abundance Strategies in Lexington, Massachusetts. 

For example, many ETFs in the same sector, such as large-cap value, emerging hawk or small-cap growth, use the same pool of stocks with different selection criteria, he said.

But ETFs with selfsame indexes, like the , “will run afoul of the wash sale rule” and the loss won’t be allowed, Gagliardi said.

Ultimately, the IRS delimitation of “substantially identical” isn’t black and white and “depends on the facts and circumstances” of your case, according to the agency.