New online user. I have finished my first pass at entering all my information, and it appears that I don't necessarily benefit greatly from Roth conversions (unless I was to assume big tax rate increases in the future) but I have a lot of unrealized gains in my taxable Brokerage account. Is there a good way to model taking capital gains each year (above what I need just for my expenses) up to the 0% gain dollar limit and then reinvesting that money? I would probably just move the money from S&P 500 mutual fund to S&P 500 ETF. Ari Taublieb did some good YouTube videos on this recently although he failed to mention some of the potential side effects of doing the asset sales. I guess I am asking for a tool like Roth Conversions but for Capital Gain harvesting where I can specify up to what Capital gains rate and then keeping under IRMAA and FPL limits and looking at impacts for various scenarios.
@kingmota Hi Daniel, there is no way to do that currently but I'd recommend that you submit an enhancement request via the Feedback mechanism built into the tool. Thanks!
Stuart
I'll second the endorsement for adding the ability to analyze tax gain harvesting in a manner similar to the current roth-conversions. I figure that lots of us using the program have a lot of unrealized gain from the last decade's record returns in our taxable accounts.
I can tell when a roth conversion is better than not converting; but I can't currently tell when converting taxable gains would have been even better still. With the addition of an optimizer for tax gain, in theory we could model by turning "off" and "on" each type of gain in specific years to see how it would all play out.
One modeling difficulty I can see is the complexity of cost basis with capital gains compared with the "simple" withdrawal tax for IRAs. The program would likely need to assume an average cost basis method (rather than individual lots or FIFO) to be practical.
I do have to say that the current Review>Tabular Projections>Expenses>Taxes>Taxes screen is extremely helpful for exploring tax gain considerations, as it has nice columns for LTCG information. This includes very useful columns list the Income Taxed at LTCG Rates, your Marginal LTCG Rate, and--crucially--the Amount Above Next-Lower LTCG Bracket and the Amount Below the Next-Higher LTGB Bracket, and also your remaining Unrealized LTCG left in your Taxable investment account.
After Pralana gains the ability for the user to tailor withdrawal from and to specific accounts, we could do our own crude modeling of different possibilities using this screen alone.
Was the Review > Expenses > Taxes > Taxes (online) template recently changed? I could have sworn Pralana recently showed columns for:
Income Taxed at LTCG Rates, Marginal LTCG Rate, Amount Above Next-Lower LTCG Bracket and the Amount Below the Next-Higher LTGB Bracket, Unrealized LTCG.
Last few days I've only seen columns for Unrealized LTCG.
Were they removed?
@jkandell Yes, they were temporarily removed. An error was discovered in there somewhere and they were removed rather than showing erroneous amounts. They'll be back in the near future.
Stuart
This would be a great feature! Wade Pfau of Retirement Researcher has a spreadsheet that calculates the additional "tax" of losing ACA subsidies (and other irregularities of the tax code like the SS torpedo) as one does Roth Conversions and/or Gains Harvesting for 2025, updated each year.
@jlee can you post the link?
It is in the Tools section of the for-fee Retirement Researcher Academy--a downloadable Excel. They do offer a 7-day free trial I believe. Or the course with just that tool is $99. The visual output is a tax map - below is a generic example. The spreadsheet adjusts the map to your age, income, and other inputs to show where you are in some of the nonlinear tax gotchas if you made Roth Conversions and/or performed Capital Gains Harvesting. Descriptive text is found in Dr. Pfau's latest Retirement Planning Guidebook (2025 update). I have no affiliation. A best-case for me would be to have this functionality wrapped into Pralana Online. I believe it would be more of an interactive report/UI vs. new back-end functionality.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GMW0mpCXEAAkF4E?format=jpg&name=large
