3251: Specific Identification of Shares by The Mad Fientist on How to Boost your Investment Returns

Optimal Finance Daily - Financial Independence and Money Advice

Optimal Living Daily LLC

Investing, Business, Education, Self-improvement

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3251: The Mad Fientist breaks down a powerful but often overlooked tax strategy that can significantly boost your investment returns: specific share identification. By choosing exactly which shares to sell, you can minimize capital gains taxes and optimize long-term wealth accumulation, a simple tweak with massive financial upside. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.madfientist.com/specific-share-identification/ Quotes to ponder: "Most brokerages default to FIFO (first-in, first-out), but that’s not usually the most tax-efficient method." "With specific share identification, you choose which shares you sell, which means you can control how much tax you’ll pay." "Taking a few minutes to choose which shares to sell can save you thousands of dollars over your investing lifetime." Episode references: Vanguard - Cost Basis Methods: https://investor.vanguard.com/investor-resources-education/taxes/cost-basis IRS Specific Identification of Shares: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p550#en_US_2023_publink100099023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:00.6	This is Optimal Finance Daily.
1:03.3	Specific identification of shares by the madfiantist of madfcientist.com.
1:10.0	A few months ago, I wrote a couple of articles about harvesting investment
1:14.2	gains or losses for tax purposes. In the tax loss harvesting post, I described how it can be
1:20.7	beneficial to sell investments for a loss in order to use that loss to reduce your taxable income.
1:27.2	Conversely, in the tax gain harvesting article,
1:30.2	I showed that in some situations,
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