Tax Loss Harvesting

[MD & DPT]

What are people doing with their new funds after tax loss harvesting? Are you simply keeping them and treating them as if they are the previous fund with regards to your asset allocation, or do you buy back the original fund after the 30 days and if the price has gone up bite the short term capital gains bullet knowing you will offset it with what was just harvested? Or hope the new fund drops and you exchange it back?

For example say you want your asset allocation at 70% VTSAX. You have the option to TLH on the VTSAX so you exchange into an SP500 or large cap fund or whatever. You simply consider that new fund as VTSAX when calculating out your asset allocation in the future?

[CordMcNally]

Don’t buy a fund you don’t want to hold forever. There’s so much similarity in the funds you mention that I wouldn’t worry about it much.

[Tim]

“or do you buy back the original fund after the 30 days and if the price has gone up bite the short term capital gains bullet knowing you will offset it with what was just harvested?”
Don’t do this. Unless you had a big loss and a small gain. Offset of equal amounts destroys the TLH.
Stick holding. You can resume new funds into VTSAX.

[MD & DPT]

Don’t buy a fund you don’t want to hold forever. There’s so much similarity in the funds you mention that I wouldn’t worry about it much.

Makes total sense. I should probably stop thinking about my asset allocation as specific funds and look more at the category as a whole.