If you’ve been keeping tabs on your stock market investments and seeing a lot of red lately, you’re not alone. While we still have over six months before the end of the year, it doesn’t hurt to brush up on your capital gains and losses rules now, rather than in the last few weeks of the year.

Short term and long term capital gains are taxed at two different rates. Short term capital gains are taxed at your marginal tax rate. Long term capital gains are taxed at either 0%, 10% or 15% depending on your capital gains rate. You can have significant tax savings by waiting at least a year to sell your profitable positions.

When it comes short term and long term capital losses, you apply the loss against the same type of gain when you can, then you move towards short term. For example, if you have a long term capital gain of $1000 and a short term capital gain of $1000 and a long term capital loss of $1000, you reduce the long term gain by the amount of the long term loss. If you had the same gains but a short term capital loss of $1000, then you deduct it from your short term loss. If you had, instead, a short term loss of $1500, then the first $1000 goes against the short term gain with the last $500 going towards the loss.

If you don’t have enough gains for your losses, you can deduct up to $3000 of loss against your personal income. If you have more than $3000 of loss, you can push that forward indefinitely year after year.

When you decide to work with a financial planner of any certification, it’s important to know how they are paid. When you understand how they are paid, you better understand their motivations for recommending particular products. The three most common payment structures are: fee-only, fee-based, and commission-based.

Fee-Only planners don’t get a commission, they are paid based on the advice they give and not the products they get you to buy.

Fee-based planners will receive commission on some of the financial products they sell but mostly they are paid out of the fee you pay for their advice.

Commission-based planners are paid entirely based on the products they get you to buy.

Obviously, the closer to the fee-only side of the spectrum you can get, the better. That’s not to say all commission-based planners are bad, but you can see how they may be biased.

If you have been thinking about laddering CDs, whether it’s just for your savings or if it’s for an emergency fund, here’s a pretty straightforward CD laddering tutorial detailing all the specifics of doing so.

Don’t get hung up on the rates of return or the use of ING Direct as the example, you can buy CDs from any bank or from multiple banks. ING Direct was simply used because it’s easy to get to their rates of return and they have great CD laddering online features.