Lessons from my first TBSZ transfer

I have now entered my sixth year as an investor, which meant that my 2020 TBSZ account — I only had one — had to be moved to a new account. This turned out to be a little more difficult than expected. The first obstacle was that K&H had no settlement during the final four days of the year, so by December 29 it was no longer possible to sell securities on the TBSZ; trading only resumed on January 5. In the end this did not cause a major problem, because my gold ETF, for example, actually rose a little on the first trading day. Still, I will have to keep this in mind in the future, because it left me with a tax liability of a few tens of thousands of forints on the one-day gain.

Moving the money itself was somewhat harder. I held both euro- and dollar-denominated ETFs, so I ended up paying the HUF 20,000 transaction fee for each currency. That is another thing I will need to plan for in the future. After that came the transfer from Wise to IBKR, which was easier, although it still took another day. The bottom line is that six trading days passed between selling the ETFs and being able to reinvest the positions. Or, more precisely, I did not reinvest everything in the same way: I moved part of the money into Hungarian government bonds, hoping that a Tisza victory would strengthen the forint. I never expected to be exchanging dollars at around HUF 330, but apparently that can happen too.

The main lesson is that I need to budget for some additional costs when transferring TBSZ accounts and reinvesting the proceeds. But all of this is still nothing compared with the actual tax liability, which would have been HUF 1.5 million on this account alone. So as long as the Hungarian TBSZ rules remain this favourable, I would recommend that anyone investing for the long term hold their investments within a TBSZ.