Reuters Money

Tax-saving ETF strategies to use before end of 2011

The final quarter marks the traditional time of year when kids dive into leaf piles, heating bills rise and investors with taxable accounts sell underwater stocks to help lower their tax bills.

They shouldn’t have too much trouble finding candidates this year. Despite a recent uptick, most major indexes remain in negative territory for 2011, and with market volatility in high gear more dips could be on the way.

Tax loss harvesting helps ease the pain of a down market by allowing investors to use the losses to offset gains and up to $3,000 of ordinary income on their tax returns. But you have to wait at least 30 days after the sale of a losing stock to buy back the same security. Otherwise, the IRS calls it a “wash sale” and you can’t deduct the loss.

While someone might use a similar stock as a placeholder in case the market bounces back, that option isn’t ideal because performance can vary significantly among stocks in the same industry. Mutual funds covering similar investment turf don’t always move in sync either.

Exchange-traded funds adapt to the strategy more easily. Since there are more than 1,300 of them, it’s fairly easy to find one that has the look, feel and performance of another security but is different enough to use as a substitute, either temporarily or for the long-term, without drawing IRS scrutiny.

“ETFs have made tax loss harvesting a lot simpler than it used to be,” says Charles Zhang of Zhang Financial in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “It’s not that hard to find one that’s a good stand-in.”

Zhang and some other advisers say using two ETFs or mutual funds based on the same index would probably violate the wash sale rule. To be sure, you might not want to sell iShares S&P 500 or a mutual fund based on the index, for example, and immediately replace it with SPDR S&P 500.