Financial experts predicted Jeff Bezos’s move to Florida would pay off handsomely—and they were right. So far, the Amazon founder’s tax savings have been astronomical, worth an estimated $1 billion this year alone.
Financial experts predicted Jeff Bezos’s move to Florida would pay off handsomely—and they were right. So far, the Amazon founder’s tax savings have been astronomical, worth an estimated $1 billion this year alone.
To complete the picture on that, those that earn more than $533,400/year are subject to long term capital gains rate of 20%. Meaning to have a long term capital gain of $250,000 you would have had to sell long term assets that gained more than $12.5m.
Example: If you held stock of $30m for more than one year’s time, and it increased in value to $50m when you sold it a year later, the capital gain from that sale would be $20m. Because your annual income is almost certainly more than $533,400/year, you’d have to pay 20% tax, on the gain. That tax would be $4m to the federal government and in Washington state, you’d pay a 7% tax on the $20m capital gain of an additional $1.4m to the state of Washington. So a grand total of $5.4m in capital gains if you lived in Washington or $4m if you lived in Florida.
To those that say that rich people only get loans on assets instead of selling assets and getting capital gains this article disagrees with you. So much so that Bezos tried to escape them. So an increase in capital gains at a federal level would tax these billionaires.
That is not how this works, any capital gains (which IS the asset values increase) above $250,000 would be subject to the levy regardless of the individuals federal capital gains tax rate.
Your example mostly holds up so I’m not sure if you simply made an error here as you do seem to have a grasp of it.
You’re right. I changed my example numbers halfway through writing the post to make it more clear. I thought I got all the old references. I missed that one. I’ve removed that line now to make a fully accurate post.