Improve Your Taxable Investments

The following is part of our 21 Days to Improve Your Financial Life special report.

Taxable accounts can fill a valuable role in many investors' portfolios. They're the best place to hold an emergency fund or assets you're amassing for short-term goals like home improvements, because you'll be able to withdraw the money without any explanation or penalty whenever you want.

Taxable accounts can also prove their mettle in retirement, in that it's possible to maintain a taxable portfolio that's highly tax-efficient. Because withdrawals of appreciated holdings in taxable accounts are eligible for long-term capital gains treatment, that means it will often cost you less to withdraw from a taxable account than it will to tap your tax-sheltered holdings, where withdrawals are subject to ordinary income tax. (Of course, once RMDs commence you won't have any choice but to draw from your tax-deferred accounts.) You can also take advantage of tax-loss selling or tax-gain harvesting in a taxable account; tax-loss selling isn't usually advisable with an IRA, for reasons outlined here.

At the same time, taxable accounts leave little room for error. Parking the wrong types of investments in a taxable account can translate into a costly tax headache that's not easy to alleviate. And while you have wide latitude to make changes to your tax-sheltered vehicles like IRAs and 401(k)s without facing any tax consequences, you're more hemmed in with your taxable holdings. If you'd like to swap out holdings that have appreciated since purchase, you'll owe taxes on that appreciation.

Many of the same steps that make sense for a retirement portfolio review will make sense as you assess your taxable portfolio. But there's an additional layer to consider when you're assessing your taxable account: how tax-efficient the portfolio is, as well as whether any changes to that portfolio will entail tax costs.

As you conduct a review of your taxable accounts, here are the key steps to take.

Step 1: Review portfolio fundamentals. Much of the process for reviewing a taxable portfolio is the same as conducting a review of your tax-sheltered retirement portfolio. Follow steps 1 through 3 of yesterday's retirement portfolio review: Enter all of your taxable account holdings in Instant X-Ray, assess your asset allocation given your proximity to your spending needs, and evaluate the fundamentals of your holdings, especially costs.

As you do so, be sure to factor in your spending plans for those taxable assets. If you're like many people, you're earmarking some of that money for retirement and other assets for shorter-term needs--to serve as an emergency fund, for example. If you anticipate near-term spending from this account, you need to keep the money in safer assets. I recommend true cash investments for emergency funds, while you can venture out a bit on the risk spectrum for goals with slightly longer time horizons. This article discusses how to invest for short- and intermediate-term goals and provides some model portfolios, too.

Step 2: Review tax efficiency of equity holdings. In addition to reviewing your taxable portfolio's asset allocation and holdings quality, take stock of the tax efficiency of your equity holdings. On the "Tax" tab for individual mutual funds and ETFs, you can view tax data for each mutual fund or ETF that you hold.

Equity exchange-traded and broad-market index funds tend to be ideal taxable-account holdings because their turnover is very low, which helps keep down taxable capital gains. Exchange-traded funds have a built-in edge over mutual funds on the tax-efficiency front because ETF buyers and sellers trade with one another; the manager doesn't have to sell stocks--and realize capital gains--to meet redemptions. Tax-managed mutual funds, which are explicitly managed to reduce the drag of taxes on returns, are also tax-friendly.

Your taxable account is also a good place to hold individual stocks. In short, individual stocks give you a lot more control over your tax situation than you'll have with funds. Some stocks are better than others for taxable accounts, though. For example, dividend-paying stocks and stock funds are a better option for tax-sheltered accounts than taxable, as discussed here.

Also know what to avoid when assembling your taxable portfolio. Real estate investment trusts are a bad idea, in that the income they kick off is taxed at your ordinary income tax rate rather than the lower dividend tax rate. Equity managers who use high-turnover strategies tend to pay out sizable capital gains along the way. And if the manager trades very frequently, you may have to pay tax on short-term capital gains, which are taxed at your ordinary income tax rate. Quantitative strategies can entail more trading and, in turn, more frequent capital gains payouts.

My model tax-efficient portfolios include tax-efficient holdings for investors at various life stages. I've created "Saver" tax-efficient portfolios for accumulators, as well as tax-efficient "Bucket" portfolios for retirees.

Step 3: Review bonds and shorter-term holdings. Generally speaking, stocks will tend to be more tax-efficient than bonds, because the income from bonds is taxed at your ordinary income rate, which is higher than the capital gains and dividend rates. For that reason, some planners recommend that you keep your taxable portfolio light on fixed-income assets. But that may not be practical if you're saving for a shorter-term, nonretirement goal.

If you need to hold bonds in your taxable accounts, it pays to see whether municipal bonds would be a better bet on an aftertax basis; use the tax-equivalent yield function of Morningstar's Bond Calculator to crunch the numbers. Whereas any interest you earn from a conventional bond fund is taxed at your own income tax rate, you won't have to pay federal income tax on a municipal-bond fund's payout; you may also be able to skirt state income tax by buying a muni fund dedicated to your state's bonds. I prefer muni funds to individual munis because smaller investors often get a raw deal on bid-ask spreads when buying and selling munis; buying a fund also helps reduce the credit risk associated with any one issuer.

It's also worth noting that, even more so than with equities, certain bond holdings can be a bad idea for taxable accounts. High-yield bond funds, because they tend to generate large amounts of current income, are a poor choice for your taxable accounts. Funds that hold Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities also tend to be a bad bet for taxable accounts because, with them, you're taxed not just on your yield but on the principal adjustment you receive to account for inflation. If you want to give your taxable portfolio a measure of inflation protection, consider I-Bonds, which enjoy more favorable tax treatment than TIPS.

Step 4: Take tax consequences into account before executing any changes. If you determine that changes are in order for your taxable account--either because there's something fundamentally wrong with a holding or it's been tax-inefficient--be sure to assess any tax costs before executing them. That's because you'll owe capital gains tax on any appreciation in your taxable holdings over your holding period. The good news is that if a holding has been tax-unfriendly in the past, you've already paid some of the taxes that are due so you've received a "step-up" in your cost basis to account for them. For that reason, giving your taxable portfolio a tax-efficient makeover may cost less than you think, as discussed here.

Step 5: Assess tax-gain harvesting opportunities. Amid a long-running equity-market rally, tax-loss sale candidates are few and far between in most portfolios; most holdings have enjoyed tremendous appreciation, not losses. But if you're in the 10% or 15% tax bracket, you can take advantage of the opportunity to tax-gain harvest--sell appreciated securities and re-buy them at their current higher price. The virtue of doing so is that investors in the 10% and 15% tax brackets currently pay a 0% capital gains rate, so they won't owe taxes on the gains. At the same time, rebuying the security at a higher price (or swapping into another, better holding) means that if they're subject to capital gains taxes when they do eventually sell, their tax burden will be less than if they had held onto the original security. This video discusses tax-gain selling as a strategy.