Author Topic: Wells Fargo ---> Vanguard (Avoiding capital gains)  (Read 875 times)

Saving in Austin

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Wells Fargo ---> Vanguard (Avoiding capital gains)
« on: September 18, 2019, 10:11:21 PM »
Does anybody know how to avoid capital gains taxes if transferring an investment account from Wells Fargo to Vanguard ?

My cousin has been paying high fees and I'm trying to help him out.

His account has about 500K+ and 100-200K are probably market gains over a few years.

terran

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Re: Wells Fargo ---> Vanguard (Avoiding capital gains)
« Reply #1 on: September 19, 2019, 05:31:19 AM »
The only way to avoid "paying" capital gains taxes (assuming you have capital gains) is to not sell the investments that have capital gains. The way you do this is by making a trustee to trustee in-kind transfer, which just involves transferring the actual investments from one firm to the other without selling them. This requires that the investments be something both firms offer, not something proprietary. Vanguard can help with this.

I put "paying" in quotation marks above because, depending on your cousin's income, he may be in the 0% long term capital gains tax bracket. Remember that the gains count towards the limit and are stacked on top of other income, so he may have some gains taxed at 0% and some taxed at 15% even if his other income is low enough. State taxes vary in how they handle capital gains.

Saving in Austin

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Re: Wells Fargo ---> Vanguard (Avoiding capital gains)
« Reply #2 on: September 19, 2019, 07:42:49 AM »
Thanks for the reply.

I just copied and pasted in a message to him. He and his wife have enough working income that the capital gains would be taxed this year. That may change but for the moment he would have to pay.