Refinance the loan with another loan or just use a revolving credit account with no fixed term.

If your stock holdings are growing faster than inflation and the interest rate at which you are borrowing, it’s an easy way to monetize unrealized gains without a taxable event. If you have a huge stock portfolio, brokers will lend you money against your stock at very low rates, a few bps above what Treasuries yield.

You know, every time this is brought up, a small part of me dies.

People bring up a loophole that does exist, and assume that everyone uses it. Welp, like most of these "1%" discourse, its pretty damn rare.

https://taxprofblog.aals.org/2026/06/16/fox-and-liscow-the-r...

> If buy-borrow-die were the dominant playbook, the rich would be leveraging aggressively against their ballooning portfolios. They aren’t. Borrowing against unrealized gains is, if anything, more of a middle-class habit than a billionaire one.

What about a trillionaire habit?

Here's a different quote from the same article:

> Buy-borrow-die is a real loophole, and in absolute terms the rich borrow a lot...

If you are a good customer of the bank and the LTV of the collateral is very low, then you will get a very low interest rate. If the collateral pays dividends (which are also taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income), then the dividends can service the interest. Meanwhile capital gains keep accumulating tax-free.

With post covid interest rates this strategy very rarely makes sense. Even people like zuck getting fully collateralized loans against their stock will still have to pay close to 5%. There are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to take a 5% loan, but they are few. It does not make sense to just roll loans over forever anymore. Thats why all the big tech stocks pay dividends now. Founders dont want to sell and they dont want to take loans.