Gary, I am usually more in agreement with the pain/gain adage when I'm not actually feeling the pain. Right now it looks like 'gain' served me with divorce papers, and 'pain' just parked its 50-foot RV on my driveway and hooked up the utilities.
I keep saying it, and people keep ignoring me, but now is the time for those of you who have too much IOM in their IRA's, like me, to convert their regular IRA to a Roth IRA. If you use Datek, they will be allowing conversions some time in February. I am not sure of the details yet, but I assume you owe taxes on the market value of the IRA on the conversion date. Whatever you owe, you can pay over 4 years. IOM should fully recover by then :(
At least the conversion will occur after IOM's cratering. It would be awful to owe taxes on the pre-crater market value. I know it's not exacty a silver lining, but it's something. To non-IRA holders, there isn't even that much. Just a fat tax loss. Which combined with the wash sale rule, probably means IOM is doomed for a month at least. Maybe I will take Truff's tack, sell tomorrow at the dead cat bounce and buy back in 3 weeks. There's no wash sale nonsense on an IRA. |
