INVESTING FOR AFTER-TAX RETURNS

Tax Center for Advisors

Taxes can drag down investment returns and are just as important as risk & fee considerations. Explore solutions, tools and insights to help you build portfolios with taxes in mind.

Monitor estimated capital gains distributions

chart showing monitor mid-year capital gains

Source: Morningstar as of 12/31/23.

More distributions doesn’t have to mean more time spent monitoring taxes. Leverage BlackRock’s Tax Evaluator to see estimated capital gain distributions across 3,500+ funds this mid-year season.

3 ways to optimize for after-tax returns

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Tax-loss harvest your Core bond funds
Tax-loss harvesting year-round instead of seasonally can help identify more ways to add after-tax value to clients throughout the year.
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Avoid capital gains distributions
0% of iShares U.S. Style box ETFs have paid out a gain over the last 5 years vs. 81% of U.S. active equity mutual funds.1
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Get your cash off the sidelines
Don’t let the allure of higher yields fool you – even at today’s higher yields, cash alternatives may not keep up with inflation, especially after taxes.

Explore tax-efficient portfolio solutions

Seek after-tax growth with iShares ETFs

Think index means average? Think again. Discover how iShares ETFs offer low cost, tax efficient & competitive performance potential for taxable accounts.

Municipal bond solutions

As one of the world's largest municipal bond managers, benefit from our trading scale & credit research across mutual funds, ETFs & SMAs.3

Concentrated stock strategies

Holding a large position of one stock can be risky, but selling & diversifying can result in a large tax bill. Explore our strategies to help reduce concentrated stock positions over time.

Direct indexing SMAs

Aperio SMAs employ active tax management strategies such as tax-loss harvesting to help create losses that may be used to offset capital gains outside of your portfolio, allowing your clients to potentially reach their goals faster.4

529 savings plans

Help your clients invest and save for their education with tax-advantaged, flexible, and convenient BlackRock 529 plans.

Learn more: maximizing after- tax returns

Help clients keep more after taxes

BlackRock's Tax Evaluator tool tracks capital gain estimates for 7,000+ funds to help reduce your client’s tax bill.
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Earn CE with our Tax Foundations course

Optimizing for after-tax returns can help investors keep more of what they earn. See why managing taxes matters and how to adapt your investment process.
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Insight: focus on price returns

Since bond funds tend to distribute the bulk of their return in income distributions, their price return is usually well below their total return. This is the critical insight that can unlock big tax loss harvesting opportunities.

price returns chart

Source: Bloomberg, cumulative returns as of 6/30/23. Index performance is for illustrative purposes only. Index performance does not reflect any management fees, transaction costs or expenses. Indexes are unmanaged and one cannot invest directly in an index. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

The latest insights on taxes

When building portfolios, many investors focus on risk and fees, but that’s only part of the picture. What about taxes? They can drag down investment returns and remember, 'It’s not what you make. It’s what you keep'.

Investors are increasingly focused on structuring their accounts for what really matters, after-tax returns – returns they can actually spend.

This is where BlackRock’s Fill First strategy can help you keep more of what you earn. Here’s how it works - think about filling buckets with pitchers of water. The buckets are your accounts – your tax-deferred IRA and your traditional taxable account. And the pitchers are your assets – bonds, equity ETFs and equity mutual funds.

So, how do you best fill the buckets?

Let’s start with bonds.

Now, on to stocks.

To diversify, investors can choose from ETFs or active mutual funds or both, depending on your needs – but where you put each matters.

ETFs tend to distribute capital gains far less frequently than active mutual funds, making them more tax efficient. Anchor your taxable accounts with ETFs to help minimize capital gains taxes.

Active mutual funds seek to outperform the market but trade a lot to do so. This leads to capital gains distributions for fund shareholders, which means taxes. Give your active managers their best chance to shine by overweighting them in your IRA.

Don’t bank on pre-tax returns. Get the full picture using the “fill first” framework to help optimize for after-tax returns and consider BlackRock for tax-smart investing strategies.

See our framework to build tax-efficient portfolios

When investing for after-tax returns, it's important to take a holistic view across qualified and taxable accounts. Use BlackRock's "Fill First" framework to help you re-position your portfolio for after-tax returns.