why make a whole subreddit for one post
Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
131–140 of 504 posts
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#132It always puzzled me how tax-adverse some wealthy people are. I'm not talking about the wealthy people that have 100% of their wealth tied up to company (stock) that they operate - but the wealthy people that are just asset-rich, with zero operational duties. Their wealth is handled by wealth managers, they probably don't even know what they own. But minimizing taxes and hoarding wealth is priority number 1.
Why does this puzzle you? It seems like completely expected behavior to me. Most people try to minimize taxes. Who do you know that gladly pays more than they legally have to pay?
It’s more than tax minimization. It’s buying politicians and distorting society so they pay less.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be unpopular but I think there are ways that taxing unrealized capital gains could work without being super radical. 1. Allow unrealized losses to be deducted. 2. Once a certain percentage of the gain is taxed, step up the cost basis by the amount of tax paid. That way you avoid double taxation (once under the unrealized value and again when the asset is sold). 3. (optional) Keep the tax rate on unrealized…
Taxing unrealized capital gains already isn't all that radical -- property tax is effectively a tax on unrealized gains of property value, and essentially every municipality has that tax.
Property taxes do not take into account the amount you paid for your house, so they are not a tax on unrealized gains since the gains are not calculated. You could be underwater on your mortgage and you would be taxed just the same.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea. They all do it. It's a well known exploitable tax loophole. You have to be rich to even take advantage of this method of tax evasion. This is probably one of the best digestible write ups that I've seen on the topic, I highly recommend just reading it.
If “they all do it” and it’s so well‐known, surely one can point to examples where it has been used?
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
The step-up in cost basis on death is the original sin that underpins the entire debate over unrealized gains. It's disheartening to see so much thought and deliberation going into an obviously toxic idea (taxing unrealized gains) when the obvious solution (removing the cost basis step-up when assets change hands) is being ignored. Inherited wealth is the least earned, so it should be politically palatable to change…
Do you consider municipal property taxes (which, when the property value has risen since purchase, effectively taxes unrealized capital gains) also to be "obviously toxic"?
It's a pretty common belief. People having to sell/mortgage their family homes in order to pay higher taxes because their neighborhood is being gentrified is a self-feeding process. If they didn't have to pay taxes until they sold, it would seem far more just.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#136I can't read reddit anymore because I always get "Your request has been blocked due to a network policy. Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing." Any way to bypass this?
You can access via tor (they have an onion address as well) — or run individual links through an archive service
For the “old” Reddit frontend: https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqn...
For the new, crappier Reddit frontend (which has more dark patterns funneling people to the app): https://reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4...
However, the TLS certificates on both have been expired since August 28.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Inherited wealth is the least earned Let's be real. No wealth is 'earned'. It's almost entirely luck and social connections. No different from inheritance. Besides, inheritance can be hard work, psychologically. Your parents may be in a very different socioeconomic group than you for most of your adult life. Your baseline expectation for a 'normal' lifestyle is somewhat elevated (due to the lifestyle you experienced…
People can live a long time which can turn relatively modest investments with average returns into significant wealth. 21 to 101 is 80 years and cost dollar averaging kicks in. Sure you could call a long life and decent job luck, but a lot of people live into their 90’s.
What do you call living to be 90 years old, if not very lucky?
Again, luck.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I have ever been able to determine, it only makes sense as a strategy under a specific set of circumstances. It is not the general-purpose infinite money glitch many people make it out to be. There are many scenarios under which it is a suboptimal financial strategy.
If we take the post at face value, one of the requirements for this strategy to work to have your "net worth exceeding around $300M". Already there it becomes pretty specific, how many in the US has that? As far as I remember, you're already in the 1% with $10M.
The US has at least 10k individuals with wealth exceeding 100M but I can't find data for specifically > 300M.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/10/number-of-people-with-100-mi...
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The step-up in cost basis on death is the original sin that underpins the entire debate over unrealized gains. It's disheartening to see so much thought and deliberation going into an obviously toxic idea (taxing unrealized gains) when the obvious solution (removing the cost basis step-up when assets change hands) is being ignored. Inherited wealth is the least earned, so it should be politically palatable to change…
Maybe there's just no good solution here, but I think the original inspiration for this sort of law was about family homes. It's one thing to inherit stocks and have to sell some of them off, but it's much more complex to try to pass down a property that can't be arbitrarily subdivided. There are various options obviously, but I think enough people had to sell their beloved childhood home because of the tax obligatio…
What are you talking about? Removing the step up basis doesn’t force anyone to sell anything. It just means when the asset is sold that capital gains are due—just as they would be if the original owner had sold it while alive—instead of disappearing into thin air.
Re: Buy, Borrow, Die – Explained
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
How odd. This is a rather interesting catch, especially in light of the upcoming tax fight in 2025 with the TCJA and Expanded Child Tax Credit expirations, and the unrealized capitals gains tax proposals. Given the other comments pointing to the SEO benefits of creating a subreddit just for a single post, it has shades of an effort to seed the information space and shape the narrative in advance of the tax fight by g…
It's mainly just a really bizzare post, super interesting and informative, but why would anyone in that position go into the trouble of typing up that amount of detail and post it in a brand new subreddit?
The practice of using Google to search within Reddit is already known to SEO scammers, and I’ve already started encountering subreddits supposedly geared toward a particular class of product, but upon a closer look, every single post in the subreddit recommends a particular brand of product.
Is this person SEO scamming? I don’t know for sure, but the subject matter is the same that I frequently see frontpaged from /r/FluentInFinance by obvious bots, although the motive seems to be political rather than commercial.