Are you worried about taking the tax hit on your investment gains and unsure what to do?

Well, in today's episode, I'm going to share a very simple framework that will show you when,

or even if, you should realize those gains and the way you should go about doing it.

This is another episode of Ready for Retirement.

I'm your host, James Cannell, and I'm here to teach you how to get the most of the life with your money.

And now, on to the episode.

As part of this episode, I'm going to share with you simple ways that you can pay nothing in taxes

on some of these gains. This is from simple things, like taking full advantage of the

0% long-term capital gain tax bracket, creative ways to gift money to charity to offset

the tax impact, gifting money to children

so they can realize some of the gains at their tax bracket, understanding when you get a step

up on your unrealized gains, and also understanding how tax loss harvesting can help to offset

some of this. So I'll talk about some of those, but before I do so, I want to go through the general

framework of how you should even think about the gains that you have in your portfolio.

You've invested in something that's grown, and now you're stuck wondering, what do I do?

Do I take the tax hit?

Or do I keep it going to avoid taxes and maintain the same investment exposure that I already have?

And just in case it's not already obvious, what I'm talking about specifically is gains in a brokerage account.

Not an IRA, a Roth IRA, a 401k. All of those gains are either tax-free or tax-deferred.

I am talking about gains on things held in a brokerage account where anything that you realize,

any gain that you realize, is potentially subject to taxes. So to start, let's go through the

framework of when should you hold onto your investment and avoid paying gains versus when should you sell your investment and pay taxes on those gains.

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