Cash Killer with Matthew Murawski

Matthew Murawski works as a financial planner at Goodstein Wealth Management, where he manages both the firm’s 401(k) clients and his individual clients. He ensures that they are well-positioned for future growth by making personalized recommendations and strategies. He has worked in the financial services industry for 9 years and previously in small-cap venture capital.

Matthew has had an interest in finance since he was a child, and in his role at the firm, he has built his own book of business and enjoys working hard for his clients to help them succeed. He is responsible for their success and does not take it lightly. He wakes up every day with a new curiosity and is always looking for new ways to help his clients. He values the trust and guidance relationships he has developed with them.

Outside of work, Matthew enjoys spending time with his wife and baby daughter, and he is relishing the experience of being a new father. He also enjoys snowboarding, rowing, and running and is not afraid of an athletic challenge. He is also involved with the Youth Business Alliance, where he mentors and teaches high school students about the economy and business.

Episode Highlights Here:

Matthew Murawski:

The name of the game isn’t losing money and accumulating tax-loss harvesting, the name of the game is, a really smart guy who told me this 15 or 16 years ago, your objective is to owe as much tax liability as possible.

Pierce York:

You mentioned that diversification is the kind of the old adage is the best way to mitigate your risk. So someone who had invested a significant portion of their funds, whatever a good amount into some of these narrative stocks, the story stocks, mean stocks, whatever the case is and they made a lot of money. How can they exit that and then get into a more diversified portfolio without feeling the tax implications?

Matthew Murawski:

It depends on where they bought them. So if you’re buying them in an IRA, or if your 401k happens to be one of the rare 401k’s that offers what’s called a brokerage window, which most don’t, but if you do, you would you there is not taxable, there is no 1099 for this year, if you’re in a tax-deferred account, then you don’t have any mean to worry, because you’re going to pay taxes when you take the money out, unless you’re taking withdrawals. So depends on what kind of account and if you’re in an individual account or a trust account, what many people know as a regular brokerage account, there are two ways I mean that you guys talked about the Deferred Sales Trust. But also, before you even get to that, the years prior, if you’re brand new, it’s tough. But what you do is you want to tax loss harvest each year, and that’s where, let’s say you bought ABC company under now it’s at 50, you do get some credit for short term, but really, you want to have held a position over 12 months. To offset gains, let’s say you bought, Tesla at 500. And now it’s I think it’s floating around thousands, and you’ve got gains, 50%, or 100% gain there, you would be offsetting taxes by doing what’s called tax-loss harvesting, you have to be very smart about it. Because not just because something’s down at a loss doesn’t mean that you want to sell it, there are certain positions that I have, as that are losses that are great companies, or just what the markets doing or what the market is saying right now. So not you don’t need to sell everything that’s at a loss. But it’s most beneficial if you can find positions that are over you’ve owned for more than a year. And you can use that tax loss carried forward indefinitely. So over your investing career, in your individual accounts, the first action, the lowest hanging fruit, the best way to do it is to tax loss harvest, because at some point you’re going to buy, whether even if you’re just buying indexes, at some point that the large-cap growth is going to be negative and the value is going to be positive for the small caps gonna be negative and, and the mid-caps are going to be pot. So you got to be selective, and you have to wait at least 30 days to buy back that position. So tax loss harvesting is an extremely important aspect of investing. I don’t think many people really understand how to utilize it properly. Because it doesn’t mean that anything’s at a loss, you just sell it because there are just certain things but let’s say you own a stock. That was at 60. I won’t name names because we can’t be compliant and let’s say it’s trading at 16. The next year or two years doesn’t look too great. That’s something you might want and you’ve owned it for over 12 months, that’s something you might want to sell or might want to look at, you know taking that because you’ll get that tax loss carried forward against your gains and whatever you were buying, you had these huge but that takes time, that takes years to compile a meaningful and hopefully, the idea, the name of the game isn’t losing money and accumulating tax-loss harvesting the name of the game is, a really smart guy told me this 15 or 16 years ago, your objective is to owe as much tax liability as possible. No matter what field you’re in, your objective is to owe as much tax as possible. Here’s the difference. You want to find out ways to pay the least tax possible because if you owe the most tax, that means you made a lot of money. You want to create a huge tax liability. That’s not popular to say but that means you’ve made a ton of money. That is the only and then the second part of that and the more important part is you want to do the most you can do to legally obviously defer or mitigate those taxes but you want to create the biggest tax mountain you could ever think of because that means you made an insane amount of money. Then there are strategies that you guys talked about, as well as tax-loss harvesting. It which are extremely important to mitigate and do what you can within the realms of what’s legal to pay as little tax as possible as what’s in the book.

Pierce York:

Absolutely