Anything I can or should do with realized long-term capital losses this year?

Factual Questions
1

Due to some companies going private and some other long shots not working out, I have realized LTCL of about $10,000 this year. The rest of the portfolio, like most of America’s, is green but unrealized. I’ve also received some small number of thousands of dividends and bank interest this year.

The question is about strategizing before end-of-year for those capital losses that have already been realized. It seems most Internet advice is for the inverse of my situation - realized gains and unrealized losses, leading to tax loss harvesting. Is there anything I can do in this final week and a half of 2025 that would make better use of those LTCL than just deducting $3000 from income and carrying the other $7000 into next year? Is there any benefit to selling other stock, even if I don’t want to, just to realize gains to offset and raise my cost basis?

I thought about selling some index funds to try to balance the scales, but the way I figure it, that’s just going to write off now what could’ve just been written off in the future. Why take $7000 in gains just to write it off this year when I can do that 5, 10, 15 years from now instead? It doesn’t seem to benefit me at all. Am I thinking about that correctly?

I’m not seeing anything I can do to improve my position, given where I already am today. I just have to take the loss and carry it forward. Am I missing anything?

2

The carryover represents an asset of sorts. A 100% safe asset. But it earns no return and in fact it shrinks at the rate of inflation.

That IMO is the only reason to accelerate using it up; to prevent inflation from eating it. Given it’s only ~3 years worth, you’ll have used it up on your 2027 tax return if nothing else changes and you have no future realized gains. If it was e.g. $30K that would take a decade to eat $3K at a time, I might be more antsy about trading deliberately to use it up sooner.


A different way to look at this is you now have $10K of appreciated assets in your non-qualified account that you can trade just like the assets in your tax-deferred accounts. That is, trade freely with zero tax drag. Depending on how appreciated some of those assets are, this might represent $20K or $50K of assets you could trade tax-free.

So I’d be looking at my non-qualified holdings to see whether there’s any rebalancing I need to do, or maybe trim my fund X position and put that money into fund Y. Being able to make these changes without the tax drag is nice.

3

How would inflation affect the “asset”? Wouldn’t inflation also be eating into the capital gains tax I’d owe at an equal rate? Or are you saying, like, I could transfer 30 shares today from fund to fund but only 20 shares after some time, so now is better?