Earlier this year, after years of not doing much in either my brokerage or IRA accounts, I started putting idle cash to work. By the end of this year, I wanted my Roth IRA (the only IRA that has a balance; the TIRA is empty and only used for backdoor Roth purposes) to be 70% in the ETF ticker “RSP”, 20% in the ETF ticker “FNDF”, and 5% in the ETF ticker “SCHZ”. The remaining 5% would remain as cash. I then planned to rebalance to that allocation as I put new money into the account in subsequent years, or by trimming here and adding there as needed.

That seemed simple enough, and I set about putting the cash to work (usually executing 1 trade per holding per pay cycle). But to get to my target Roth IRA allocations, I knew I would have to sell some other holdings along the way. I started the year owning CVX, GE, MCD, and T. I also had money in mutual funds (UMBIX and ARTIX). And I also had money in DIA and IVV.

I’m totally out of the CVX, GE, and MCD holdings. I’m out of UMBIX too. I still have some T but sold some too. And I still have the rest (ARTIX, DIA, IVV) with no sales yet.

Because all of this was happening inside of a IRA, I didn’t worry about cap gains (short-term versus long-term). By the same reasoning, I didn’t worry about wash sale considerations.

But I have a brokerage account too, where I sold all my GE (at a profit) and UMBIX (at a loss I believe) held in that account earlier this year too. Was that ill-considered on my part? Do I now have to go back and tease out what was bought within 30 days before and after each sale regardless of the account, teasing out where a loss was and where a “similar” purchase was made within the restricted window? Including auto-reinvested dividends/distributions? Can any of these tickers even be considered “similar” to one another per the wash sale requirements?