Tax-Gain Harvesting with Bonds

Tax-loss harvesting is a very common tax strategy in which you sell a holding when its value is less than the amount you paid for it, then reinvest the proceeds from the sale in a similar (though not “substantially identical”) investment. The idea is that you then get to use the capital loss (up to $3,000 per year) to offset ordinary income on your tax return, without having to make any significant change to your portfolio.

Tax-gain harvesting is a somewhat less common strategy, as it’s generally only helpful for people in the 15% tax bracket or below. The idea is to sell a long-term holding for a gain, then reinvest the proceeds in a similar investment. The benefit comes from the fact that, if you’re in the 15% tax bracket or below, you do not have to pay any tax on the long-term capital gain, and now your cost basis in the asset has increased to the asset’s current value, thereby reducing the size of the capital gain that you might have to pay tax on in the future.

There is, however, a form of tax-gain harvesting that can be helpful even to investors who are in a tax bracket higher than 15%. It becomes relevant when you’ve held a bond for more than one year, and it is currently valued at a price higher than what you paid for it (i.e., the price has gone up because interest rates have fallen since you purchased the bond).

The idea is that, rather than holding the bond and continuing to receive payments at the bond’s higher-than-market interest rate, you sell your bond at a premium, then reinvest the proceeds in a bond that:

• Has a similar credit quality and remaining maturity (so that you’re not changing the risk of your portfolio), yet
• Is selling at (or very close to) its par value (e.g., because it’s a new bond).

By doing so, you essentially convert a portion of the yield that you would have received as interest into a long-term capital gain, which will be taxed at a lower rate than the interest income would have been. While it does result in having to pay the tax sooner than you otherwise would have had to (which is generally not a good thing), taking advantage of the difference in tax rates often allows you to achieve a higher after-tax return.