The wash sale rule has no application to realising capital gains. You can realise capital gains whenever you want with no restrictions.
Make sure you understand the taxation of qualified dividends and long-term capital gains before you engage in your planned transactions though. Many users on this forum misunderstand how it works and think that being in a certain bracket makes you get unlimited tax-free long-term capital gains and qualified dividends. That is not correct. It's only tax-free to the extent that the income is within the 0% bracket.
Do I have to sell my VTSAX, then get the money, then repurchase VTSAX? Or is there a way I can accomplish the entire transaction in a single step?
I was under the impression I was able to get long term gains tax free to the extent that AGI didn't exceed the 15% bracket. For 2015 the 15% bracket is $74,900 at the upper end, so with my expected AGI (not including long term capital gains) is going to be less than $36,500, I could potentially have realized long-term gains of $38,400 (all of which would be taxed at the long-term capital gains and qualified dividends rate of 0% since my overall income is still within the 15% marginal bracket). Of course such huge capital gains would adjust my AGI above the thresshold to take full advantage of the tax savers credit though, but since I am only looking to realize less than 4k in gains (most optimistic guess - probably less) I should be ok.
Is my understanding correct?
My expectations for this year are:
Income 60,000
401k 18,000
IRA 11,000AGI 31,000 (Tax savers credit cut off between 0.2 and 0.5 multiplier is $36,500)
standard 12,600
2 exemp 8,000Taxable 10,400 (all 10% bracket)
Tax 1,040
Savers Cred 2,000
Actual tax due: $0
This leaves me $5,500 to have long term capitals (or perhaps a bonus or over time) and still be able to take advantage of the tax savers credit to get to $0 tax due. If I (or my wife) earns an additional $5,500 this year I guess we won't be able to tax advantage of it and will owe some tax.
Follow up questions:
If I sell my VTSAX at a loss I can use that to reduce my AGI? Like in my example above, if I earned an additional $6,000 that would raise my AGI to $37,000 and I would miss getting the full tax savers credit. If I sold my VTSAX at a $500 loss that would reduce AGI to $36,500 and I could qualify for the credit?
Do I have to exceed the loss limit of $3,000 in order to carry over losses to following years? If I sold at a loss of $30,000 could I carry those and use $3,000/yr until it runs out or do they expire at some point?