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How Can I Minimize Taxes When I Invest?

Taxes often signal good news for investors: they’re usually a sign you’re making money. At the same time, taxes can also eat into your returns and reduce the amount of earnings that you get to keep. Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do as an investor to lower your tax bill and invest more tax-efficiently. In this post, we’ll explain seven ways you can minimize the taxes you’ll owe on your investments.

1. Invest in index-based ETFs

Index-based ETFs are exchange-traded funds that let you track a broad market index with one investment. They are inherently tax-efficient because they pass on very few earnings (or “taxable gains”) to investors who own the ETF, even when the value of the ETF is increasing—which, of course, you hope it will over the long run.

How do index-based ETFs manage this? One, there’s not much change in the companies included in an index from year to year—typically, there’s only about 5-20% turnover each year, depending on the index in question. As a result, the ETF manager doesn’t have to sell stock that’s at a gain very often in order to remove it from the ETF’s holdings. And two, ETF issuers can reduce the gains they have to pass along to investors by intelligently realizing investment losses on the individual investments that make up the index.

2. Invest for the long term

Long-term investing isn’t just a smart way to take advantage of compounding—it’s also more tax-efficient than short-term investing. That’s because your investments are taxed at a much lower rate if you hold them for at least a year and a day, meaning you get to keep more of what you earn. To get this lower tax rate, you need to hold your investments long enough so that your gains will be treated as long-term capital gains, not short-term capital gains.

Long-term capital gains are taxed at a maximum rate of 20% at the federal level. By contrast, short-term capital gains are taxed at the same rates as ordinary income (like your paycheck). The top tax rate at the federal level for short-term capital gains is 37% in 2022.

3. Optimize your asset allocation for taxable and tax-advantaged accounts

You should factor in the rate at which your investments will be taxed when you select an asset allocation. The fancy name for this is “asset location,” but it really just means choosing the right investment mix for each type of account you have. For example, if you have a Roth IRA, any withdrawals after age 59 ½ that follow IRS rules should be tax-free. Because of this, you might consider holding more investments with less favorable tax treatment in that account than you would in a taxable account.

Asset location can be complicated to figure out on your own, which is why you might prefer to let a service like Itrust do it for you. Itrust uses what’s known as “differentiated asset location” in choosing the right mix for your taxable and tax-advantaged accounts. Our software evaluates the way each asset class is taxed, its risk and return profile, and how it balances out other asset classes to pick the mix that’s right for your account and situation.

4. Rebalance with dividends

Rebalancing your portfolio means buying and selling investments to keep your mix of investments (or “asset allocation”) from drifting too far away from what you want it to be. In other words, you sell some of the investments that have done well and you buy more of the investments that have performed less well. Rebalancing is important because it ensures your portfolio stays at (or near) your intended level of risk and expected return.

Let’s say you had a portfolio with 60% stocks and 40% bonds, and stocks performed extremely well and bonds did not. Over time, your asset allocation might drift to 70% stocks and 30% bonds. To rebalance your portfolio and get back to your target allocation, you would need to sell some stocks and buy some bonds.

Of course, selling your winners usually means realizing some taxable gains. Fortunately, dividends can help with this. If you hold investments that pay dividends (for investments offered at Itrust, this information is readily available if you search here), you can use those dividends to rebalance your portfolio by buying investments you need more of. This should reduce the number of investments you need to sell to rebalance your portfolio, and reduce your tax bill as a result. When you invest with Itrust, we automatically rebalance your portfolio with dividends.

5. Harvest your losses

Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy that has historically been used by sophisticated, wealthy investors with high-end financial advisors to lower their tax bills. The concept is simple: when an investment declines in value below its purchase price, you sell it, “harvest” the loss, and then buy a similar investment that keeps your portfolio at the right level of risk and expected return. Come tax time, you can use the losses you’ve harvested to effectively cancel out other capital gains so you don’t owe taxes on them. No gains? No problem. You can use your harvested losses to offset up to $3,000 of ordinary income (like your salary) each year and carry the rest of the losses forward to a future year.

As you might imagine, tax-loss harvesting can become very time-consuming if you’re doing it manually. Itrust’s Tax-Loss Harvesting service automates this process with the ETFs in your portfolio at no extra cost, and because software doesn’t get bored, it can look for losses every day the market is open and find more opportunities to harvest them than a human checking a few times a year is likely to. In 2021, our Tax-Loss Harvesting service generated average estimated tax savings worth between 4-9x our annual 0.25% advisory fee for clients who started using the service in a Classic or Socially Responsible portfolio last year.

Direct indexing

If you’re really serious about maximizing your harvested losses, you can use a strategy known as direct indexing. Direct indexing involves holding the individual stocks that make up a given index (rather than an ETF that tracks the index) and conducting tax-loss harvesting with those individual stocks. Individual stocks tend to be more volatile than indexes, so it’s easy to imagine a situation where a broad index might be up but a few individual stocks are down. As a result, you’ll generally get more opportunities to harvest losses with direct indexing than you would with ETF-level tax-loss harvesting. At Itrust, we offer our Direct Indexing service in all taxable Investment Accounts of at least $100,000 at no extra cost.

6. Incorporate your existing investments when you transfer between accounts

Selling investments that have increased in value generates a taxable gain—and that means you’ll probably owe the IRS money. So if you’re moving investments from one platform or institution to another, you can minimize your taxes by incorporating existing investments into your new portfolio whenever possible (instead of selling and realizing a gain, moving your money, then buying the same investments all over again). At Itrust, our software automatically incorporates your existing investments whenever it can.

7. Keep taxes in mind when you make withdrawals

If you make a withdrawal from your investment account, you will typically need to sell some investments. To minimize the taxes you’ll owe, don’t just sell investments at random. Instead, consider selling investments that have lost value first—this won’t generate any taxes—followed by investments with relatively small gains, or gains that qualify for long-term capital gains treatment. This can help you minimize the taxes you’ll owe as a result of the withdrawal. When you withdraw from an Investment Account at Itrust, our software automatically sells investments to keep you close to your desired asset allocation—and within each asset class, we sell investments tax-efficiently.

Bonus tip: use a robo-advisor to improve your after-tax returns

If you have a lot of time on your hands, it’s possible to implement most of the tips in this article by yourself. But it probably won’t be fun. When you invest with Itrust, we automate all of this for you to help maximize your after-tax returns with no extra effort or extra cost on your part. The following services are all included in Itrust 0.25% annual advisory fee:

Expert-built portfolios of index-based ETFs
Different asset allocations for taxable and tax-advantaged accounts
Tax-sensitive rebalancing with dividends
Tax-loss harvesting
Direct indexing (for accounts of $100,000 or more)
Tax-minimized brokerage transfers
Tax-minimized withdrawals

At Itrust, we’re focused on maximizing your after-tax returns: we believe that’s a big part of what sets us apart from other robo-advisors. At the end of the day, we want to see our clients (you!) successfully build secure and rewarding financial futures. Helping you keep more of what you earn is just one way we try to get you there a little faster.

The Stock Market Is Down—What Should I Do?

Stock market volatility can be unnerving. No investor, whether they’re new to investing or have been making deposits for years, likes to see the value of their portfolio go down—even if it’s just temporary. When the market takes a turn, some people will inevitably sell investments in an attempt to minimize their losses, while others will stop making new deposits to their investment accounts. Unfortunately, both are usually mistakes that can cost you in the long run. Instead, we think you should do nothing. Don’t make any changes to your strategy: Just keep investing on a regular schedule even when the market is down. Why? History shows that markets have behaved predictably in the long run, and investors who stay the course are likely to come out ahead.

We know this can be tough to do, and we want to help. So in this post, we’ll provide some historical perspective on past market downturns so you can feel more confident that you’re doing the right thing for your portfolio, even when markets are turbulent.

Market declines are very common

Market declines can rattle investors, but it’s important to keep in mind that they’re very common. The chart below shows the maximum drawdown (this is the largest loss experienced over a certain time period, expressed as a percentage) of the US stock market every year since 1927 as well as the market’s total return that year. As you can see, large drawdowns (or declines from a recent peak) are extremely common. And you might be surprised to learn that even years with large declines can still yield impressive positive returns for investors at the end of the year.

Of course, the last five years have been extraordinary in some ways because of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, those events still haven’t altered the overall trajectory of the market. Below, we’ve zoomed in on the section of the chart covering the last 10 years. As you can see, the overall trend of the broad US stock market is still very clear: It goes up. History has shown that even in the case of a bear market (a decline of 20% or more from a recent high), the market tends to recover much faster than you might think.

The bottom line: Market declines are an opportunity

We encourage you to see short-term stock market declines as an opportunity: If you keep putting money in the market, you effectively get to buy investments while they’re “on sale.” Plus, you can help lower the taxes you’ll pay with tax-loss harvesting. Itrust offers automated Tax-Loss Harvesting to our clients at no additional cost, which we estimate has saved clients over $1 billion in taxes over the last decade.

Periods of volatility are a good reminder of the importance of diversification—or buying a wide range of investments instead of focusing on a single company, sector, or geography. Diversification can increase your risk-adjusted returns and, to some extent, insulate you from losses. When you feel insulated from losses, it’s easier to stay invested, which is key to investing success.

You might hear people talking about “buying the dip” or waiting until the market bottoms out to begin investing again. This sounds good in theory, but it is hard to do in practice. That’s because in the moment, it’s virtually impossible to tell whether the market has hit bottom or will continue to fall. There’s also the opportunity cost of sitting on uninvested cash waiting for the bottom. Unfortunately, academic research has shown that timing the market doesn’t work—even most professional investors can’t consistently get it right. That’s why we think it’s wise to stick to your investing plan regardless of what the market is doing.

We hope the information in this post helps you feel more confident about staying the course with your investments. We know it’s tough, but you’ll be glad you did.

Is a Roth Conversion Right for You?

IRAs, or individual retirement arrangements, are a popular way to save for retirement, and with good reason: IRAs have numerous benefits. You may already be familiar with some of the different types of IRAs, including traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs. But you might not know it’s possible for people who typically don’t qualify for a Roth IRA to convert a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA. Depending on the details, this process is known as a “Roth conversion” or a “backdoor Roth IRA,” and in this post, we’ll walk you through two common scenarios where they’re likely to be beneficial.

IRA basics

First, let’s review a few basics about IRAs. IRAs are retirement accounts you open for yourself, unlike 401(k) plans which are offered through your employer. Roth and traditional IRAs have lower contribution limits than 401(k)s and they tend to have more flexibility around investment options. Here are some highlights at a glance:

Traditional IRAs: In general, depending on your income and whether you have a 401(k) plan at work, you get a tax deduction in the year you contribute to a traditional IRA and then pay taxes on withdrawals.
Roth IRAs: You don’t get a tax deduction when you contribute to a Roth IRA, but withdrawals after age 59 ½ are tax-free. You can’t contribute directly to a Roth IRA if you earned $161,000 and over as a single filer or $240,000 and over as a married joint filer in 2024, and those numbers rise to $165,000 and $246,000 respectively in 2025.

The tax advantages of both account types can be significant, but the tax-free growth and withdrawals you get with a Roth IRA can be especially powerful. Not everyone is eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA directly, so that’s where Roth conversions come in. A Roth conversion is when you move money from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. You might owe taxes in the year of the conversion, depending on whether you have any pre-tax funds in your account, but then your withdrawals from your Roth IRA after age 59 ½ are tax-free.

Let’s look at two instances where a Roth conversion is likely to be beneficial.

Scenario 1: One-off Roth conversion in a low-earning year

Let’s say you know you’re in an unusually low-earning year. Maybe you’re going to grad school or you’re taking time off to travel. You have an existing traditional IRA with some pre-tax funds in it (either because you rolled over a 401(k) from a previous employer or you contributed to one directly), and since you’re in a lower-than-usual tax bracket, now could be a good time to pay taxes on the conversion and then benefit from the tax-free growth and withdrawals you get with a Roth IRA in the future.

Let’s look at an example of how this might work. Assume your ordinary income tax rate will be 20% this year instead of the 40% it would be in a typical year. You have $10,000 (pre-tax) in a traditional IRA, and you’re wondering if you should execute a Roth conversion. If you were to leave the money in a traditional IRA for 30 years, assuming a 6% return compounded annually, it would be worth $34,460.95 after paying a 40% tax upon withdrawal. However if you converted the account to a Roth IRA, you’d pay $2,000 in taxes now (that’s your 20% current income tax rate multiplied by the value of the account), but the value of the remaining $8,000 compounded at 6% annually over the next 30 years would be worth $45,947.93 after taxes, because you wouldn’t owe any additional taxes upon withdrawal as long as you were at least 59 ½ years old. In other words, converting your traditional IRA in a low-earning year has the potential to give your retirement savings a big boost.

Scenario 2: Backdoor Roth to save more for retirement

Let’s assume you earn too much to contribute directly to a Roth IRA and you aren’t eligible to deduct contributions to a traditional IRA (either because your income is too high or because you have a 401(k) plan at work), but you still want to save some additional money for retirement. Assuming you don’t have any pre-tax money in a traditional IRA and don’t anticipate needing the funds within five years, you’re likely to benefit from a type of Roth conversion known as a “backdoor Roth.”

Again, let us explain with an example. If you fit the description above, you can either invest by opening a taxable investment account or making a non-deductible contribution to a traditional IRA. If you invest $7,000 in a taxable investment account at a 6% return compounded annually over 30 years, ignoring the taxes you’d have to pay on dividends and the gains associated with account rebalancing, your account would be worth $40,204.44 at retirement, but you’d still owe capital gains taxes when you sell to withdraw. If your capital gains tax rate in retirement were 15% then that account would only be worth $35,223.77 after taxes. However if you contributed $7,000 (after-tax) to a traditional IRA (this is the contribution limit for 2024 and 2025 if you are under 50) instead and converted to a Roth IRA, your account would be worth $40,204.44 at withdrawal because you would owe no taxes on the sales (again, assuming you were at least 59 ½ at the time).

When a Roth conversion isn’t right for you

If you’re still unsure, here are two signs that a Roth conversion probably isn’t right for you:

You plan to retire within five years. You have to wait at least five years to withdraw earnings from a Roth IRA with no penalty, even if you are 59 ½ years old (the typical age at which you can start taking withdrawals with no penalties).
You don’t have enough cash on hand to pay taxes on the conversion. These taxes could be significant if you have a lot of pre-tax money in a traditional IRA. You can estimate them by multiplying the amount of pre-tax money in your traditional IRA by whatever you expect your marginal tax rate to be.

Automation makes it easy

Typically, the Roth conversion process involves a bunch of paperwork. But at Itrust, we’ve automated the process so you can convert an Itrust SEP or traditional IRA to a Roth IRA with just a few taps on your phone. Automated Roth conversions are just one of the many tax-minimization features we offer you at no additional cost, including:

Tax-Loss Harvesting, both at the ETF level and the individual stock level
Tax-minimized withdrawals
Tax-minimized brokerage transfer
Tax-sensitive rebalancing

At Itrust, we want to help you build long-term wealth so you can meet your financial goals (like retirement!) with confidence. We hope the information in this post helps you make an informed decision about Roth conversions. For even more help planning for retirement, check out our IRA calculator.

What Are the Benefits and Drawbacks of IRAs?

Individual retirement arrangements (IRAs) are a popular way to save for retirement, and with good reason—they come with numerous benefits for investors building long-term wealth. They also come with a few drawbacks you should be aware of. In this post, we’ll break down what you need to know, focusing on two popular account types: traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs.

IRA benefits

IRAs are tax-advantaged

Itrust IRAs are fully automated to make retirement saving simple. Open a Itrust IRA

Perhaps IRAs’ best known benefit is their tax-advantaged status—this benefit is designed to encourage you to put money away for later. The tax advantages of traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs are slightly different.

Traditional IRAs let you take a tax deduction in the year you contribute as long as you (and your spouse, if you have one) don’t have a retirement plan like a 401(k) plan at work. If you or your spouse do have a 401(k) plan at work, you can still deduct at least some of your contribution as long as you earn under $87,000 as a single filer or $143,000 as a married couple filing jointly for 2024 (for 2025, those numbers rise to $89,000 and $146,000 respectively). If your income is above the IRS limits and you’re covered by a retirement plan at work, you can’t deduct any part of your contributions (but you can, of course, still contribute). If your contributions were tax-deductible, when you take qualified distributions in retirement, those distributions are taxed like regular income.

With Roth IRAs, you don’t get a tax break in the year you contribute, but any growth and distributions in retirement that meet the IRS’s rules (also called “qualified distributions’) will be tax-free. However, not everyone is eligible to contribute directly to a Roth IRA. In 2024, you can’t contribute to a Roth IRA directly if you earn $161,000 or more as a single filer or $240,000 or more as a married couple filing jointly (those numbers rise to $165,000 and $246,000 respectively in 2025). There’s a way around this. You can complete what’s known as a “backdoor Roth,” where you make a non-deductible contribution to a traditional IRA for the purpose of converting it to a Roth IRA. Itrust automates this process so it takes just a few clicks. Once you’ve completed the conversion, you get the same tax benefits you’d get if you contributed to a Roth IRA directly.

IRAs have more investment options than 401(k) plans

If you have a 401(k), you’ve probably already noticed that it doesn’t give you many choices when it comes to how your money gets invested. Fortunately, this isn’t the case for IRAs. Usually IRAs, much like taxable investment accounts, come with many investment options. At Itrust, you can customize your IRA with hundreds of investments or invest in a pre-made Classic or Socially Responsible portfolio.

IRAs are more flexible and liquid than you might think

Roth IRAs in particular come with a surprising amount of flexibility. If you make direct contributions to a Roth IRA, you can typically withdraw these contributions early, which means before age 59 ½, without paying additional taxes or a penalty (which isn’t the case for a 401(k) or traditional IRA). However, you’ll still owe income tax and a 10% penalty on earnings (or money you earn on your contributions) you take out of your Roth IRA before retirement with a few exceptions. For example, one popular exception allows you to withdraw up to $10,000 in earnings for a first-time home purchase.

If you have a traditional IRA, you might be able to execute a Roth conversion and benefit from the flexibility that comes with a Roth IRA. If you decide to do this, Itrust offers easy Roth conversions that eliminate the paperwork and hassle. Just keep in mind that you need to wait at least five years after the Roth conversion to be able to withdraw contributions without paying a penalty.

IRAs can often have lower fees than 401(k) plans

At Itrust, we think it’s important to minimize fees. When you invest, you’ll typically pay for what’s known as the expense ratio (the fee charged by an ETF’s issuers to manage the fund) as well as advisory fees. It’s important to keep an eye on the fees you’re paying, because over time they eat into your returns.

Average 401(k) advisory fees are generally between 0.5% and 2%. IRAs, on the other hand, are typically less expensive. Itrust IRAs are subject to our low 0.15% annual advisory fee.

IRA drawbacks

IRAs have low annual contribution limits

One drawback of using IRAs to save for retirement is that the annual contribution limits are relatively low. In 2024, you can contribute up to $23,000 to a 401(k) plan (and up to $23,500 in 2025), but you can only contribute $7,000 to an IRA in 2024 (also $7,000 in 2025) unless you’re at least 50 years old, in which case the limit is $8,000 in 2024 and also $8,000 in 2025.

IRAs sometimes have early withdrawal penalties

If you have a traditional IRA and withdraw from the account before age 59 ½ , you’ll generally pay a 10% penalty and income tax. There are a few exceptions to this, like if you withdraw up to $10,000 for a qualified first-time home purchase or lose your job and withdraw to pay health insurance premiums, under certain conditions.

As we explained above, Roth IRAs are significantly more flexible when it comes to withdrawing your contributions before retirement—you can typically do this without paying taxes or penalties. But if your early withdrawal exceeds your contributions and you take out earnings, or if you had previously completed a Roth conversion, you may be subject to taxes and a 10% penalty when you file your taxes with the IRS.

Some IRAs have required minimum distributions (RMDs)

If you have a traditional IRA, once you reach age 73 you have to start withdrawing at least a minimum amount of money each year—this is called an RMD. The amount you must withdraw is your account balance at the end of the previous year divided by the “distribution period,” which is based on your age and set by the IRS each year. You can also calculate your RMDs using this tool from investor.gov. Practically speaking, RMDs mean your earnings can’t compound in a traditional IRA indefinitely. This rule doesn’t apply to Roth IRAs, however. If you have a Roth IRA, you typically don’t have to take RMDs during your lifetime unless you inherited the account.

The bottom line

IRAs can be a powerful tool for building long-term wealth. If you’re thoughtful about your contributions and only invest money you won’t need until retirement, the benefits of these accounts outweigh the drawbacks.

We know choosing the right IRA can feel tricky, so we developed our IRA calculator to help you determine what kind of account is right for your specific situation. Just enter your filing status, income, and a few other details and we’ll help you figure out the rest. When you’re ready to start saving, Itrust offers traditional and Roth IRAs, as well as SEP IRAs and rollover IRAs so you can save for retirement on your own terms.