I'm having a hard time understanding the various fund statistics on the vanguard website. This is for money saved for early retirement: the plan is to take money out of this account during years when I have little or no other taxable income, so the first $75,900 (between my wife and I) would not be subject to capital gains tax. Therefore I'm trying to avoid paying any capital gains tax before withdraw.
Here is one fund as an example which reports that last year it paid a dividend of $0.12100 and a LT Capital Gain of $0.32040. Below that on the same link, it is reported that the fund had a realized capital gain of $1.28, and an un-realized gain of $12.35.
I'm trying to figure out what all of those numbers mean. The total gain (sum of realized and unrealized gain) was $13.63. The share price is $36.68, so if the reported realized/unrealized gains were for the past year that would mean that the share price one year ago was $23.05 and the gain would have been 59%! But that's much less than the reported 1-year return of 19.95%. Even if I neglect the realized portion (do re-invested realized gains result in additional shares of the mutual fund, not an increase in the value of each share?), the numbers still don't add up.
Basically I'm just looking for an explanation of what these four numbers (Dividend, LT Capital Gain, Realized Gain, Unrealized Gain) relate to each other, and to the share price and capital gains tax owed each year. I think I understand what each of the numbers mean conceptually (Dividend is cash that the stock pays to investors, Realized Gain is a gain reported by the fund for selling stares of stock for a profit) but I would like to better understand the math so I can better compare funds.
Submitted October 09, 2017 at 07:13AM by uuuucnklaign http://ift.tt/2yT2xC7
