Forbes explains the gig
…[Romney’s] low rate is due to the fact that almost all of his income was in the form of dividends and capital gains, which are currently taxed at only 15%. (As he pointed out in the last debate, he would have paid almost nothing under his opponent Newt Gingrich’s proposal to not tax investment income at all.) He then used large charitable contributions and other deductions to further reduce his taxable income.
While this doesn’t apply much to those of us with earned income (which is taxed at higher ordinary income tax rates plus the FICA tax), there are lessons for how we can similarly minimize our taxes on our investments. Specifically, we can take advantage of the differences in how various investments are taxed. Qualified dividends and long-term capital gains are taxed at a maximum 15% rate while cash and bond interest are taxed at ordinary income tax rates, which can be as high as 35%. By keeping as many of our tax-inefficient investments like bonds and cash in retirement accounts as possible, we can pay more of our investment taxes at the 15% capital gains and dividend rate and less at the higher ordinary income tax rate.
Let’s take an example. Imagine you have a total investment portfolio of $500k and you want to have $300k of that in stocks and $200k in bonds and cash. Let’s say that you have a pre-tax 401(k) with $300k. To minimize your taxes, you would have the entire $200k of bonds and cash in the 401(k) plus an additional $100k of the money in the stocks. The remaining $200k in taxable investments would all be in stock so that most of your taxable investment income would be at the 15% rate for long-term capital gains and qualified dividends.
There’s another advantage of having stocks and stock funds outside of retirement plans. In this case, you can actually make the volatility of the stock market work for you. That’s because when we have an investment that loses value (and who didn’t have at least one over these last few years) we can sell it at the end of the year and write the loss off of our taxes. These capital gain losses can offset gains we have that year or even better, up to $3k of regular income tax if we don’t have any capital gains. You can carry losses over $3k to future years.
Sen. John Campbell explains the issue with how the press twists Romney’s tax return info to suit their needs: