What Taxes Do You Owe on Your Investments?
March 27, 2009
Tax day is quickly approaching and so is the IRA contribution deadline, April 15th. If you haven’t funded your IRA or Roth IRA for last year, time is growing short. Vanguard is always a good option with lots of funds to choose from and Etrade is offering 100 free trades if you open a new IRA account.
But why should you open an individual retirement account at all? How does it help with your investment taxes? To answer a lot of the investing tax questions that came up in our investing survey I’ve worked with a friend of mine who’s a tax attorney to put together an investor’s tax guide.
Investor’s Tax Guide
This is typically the busiest time of the year for tax attorneys so I want to thank my friend for taking time out of his busy schedule to work with me on this resource. I think it will be a useful overview for those of you with questions concerning investing and taxes.
The guide is broken up into three parts; the first takes a look at interest income, dividend income, & capital gains and how they are taxed. It covers short term vs long term gains, stock basis, investment losses, tax rates, and some tax forms.
The next section discusses how you can defer taxes on your investments with a variety of retirement plans and 529 plans.
Tracking and reporting on your investment returns is the final section. It takes a look at tracking your stock basis and reporting capital gains and dividend & interest income.
Downloading the Tax Guide
We’re putting the finishing touches on the investor’s tax guide right now; look for a post over the weekend or on Monday about how you can download it for free!
Update: Instructions on how to download the Investor’s Tax Guide
[...] At the same time, many of us saw the value of our investments plummet significantly over the last year. So with both investments and taxes on many of our minds, I announced last week that we’d have a resource ready covering investing and taxes. [...]
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[...] What Taxes Do You Owe on Your Investments? – It’s tax time, so what does that mean for your investments? Thankfully, if you do all of your investing in tax-deferred retirement accounts, you’re pretty much off the hook. But what about those investments on investments not inside a retirement account? [...]
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This article was useless. “What taxes do you owe on your investments?” Who knows, read the guide we haven’t posted.
Good point Amdu here’s a link to the Investor’s Tax Guide