IRA may help to ease taxes on stock gain

Question:

I'm in my 40s and work for a company that went private last year. I had been buying stock in the company, and because of the deal I ended up with a lot of cash. I'm worried about what this will do to my taxes. Is there anything I can do about it?

Answer:

There isn't much you can do now to reduce taxes because the 2007 tax year has ended.

Before the end of the year, you might have been able to sell a mutual fund or other investment that had declined in value. Then you would have been able to offset at least some of the gain on the stock with the loss on the other investment.

Perhaps you already did sell something at a loss. If so, that would cut the taxes you owe on the stock.

The one tool you have left to reduce your overall taxes would be to open a tax-deductible individual retirement account, or IRA, for the 2007 tax year. You can do this at a mutual fund company, broker or bank and deposit up to $4,000 by April 15. If you have a spouse, he or she might be able to open an IRA with an additional $4,000 by April 15. Together, you might be able to deduct $8,000.

You have to have income from a job to do this.

Depending on your gain on the stock, opening an IRA might not do much to help your overall tax bill. But you can see the effect by running the online "tax estimator" at turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools.

Not everyone is entitled to take a tax deduction for an IRA. There are income limits and rules that can stand in the way if you or your spouse has a pension or retirement-savings plan - such as a 401(k) - at work.

If you have such a plan at work, your adjusted gross income must be no higher than $62,000 if you are single or $103,000 if married for 2007. In 2008, the limits are $63,000 and $105,000. If you do not have a pension or retirement plan at work, you can plunge into an IRA without concern about your income. But there are rules that apply to couples, so check them and income limits at irs.gov, in Publication 590.

Depending on your tax hit, and the effect of opening a tax-deductible IRA, you might want to focus on cutting taxes for the long term rather than just 2007, IRA expert Ed Slott said.

You could open two Roth IRAs - one for the 2007 tax year and another for 2008. The maximum contribution for last year can be $4,000, and for this year $5,000. You still would have to pay taxes on the entire gain you made on the stock immediately, and you would get no tax deduction for your Roth IRA contribution this year. But after that you would never pay taxes on the $9,000 you invested in the Roth IRAs, or the money you earned on your investments, as long as you left the money invested until you turned 591/2.

If you have a spouse, he or she also could put $9,000 into Roth IRAs.

Roth IRAs are a fabulous creation for people who do not want to pay taxes. Let's say you open a Roth IRA this month and invest the $9,000 in a mutual fund that blends stock and bond investments - perhaps the Vanguard Balanced Index Fund. And let's say you average a 7 percent return a year on the fund - a typical return over many years in a balanced fund.

Your $9,000 would become about $49,000 in 25 years and Uncle Sam would not be entitled to a penny. You could remove the entire $49,000 when you turned 591/2, or you could leave it invested and it could double or triple.

This is not the case with traditional IRAs. Because you deduct the contribution you make to a traditional IRA during the year you make the deposit, when you remove money after age 591/2 you will have to pay taxes on it.

You have one other option to reduce your taxes using IRAs. You could open a traditional tax-deductible IRA for 2007 with $4,000 and help alleviate the sting from your stock windfall. Going forward, you could open Roth IRAs, provided your income stayed within the allowable limits.