Thanks for pointing this out Eric. Let me know if you agree. I want to make sure I'm giving out accurate info.
I can believe that this is correct, but I don't know. I didn't know about the option of adding the loss to the later basis. I think of a wash sale as affecting the tax accounting of something that has already happened, not corrupting your basis calculation for the future. But I don't know all of the details.
I'll be asking my own tax person, because I blundered into a wash sale last year. One of my aggressive mutual funds soared in the first half of 2021, then plummeted, so that it finished in the red for the year. Even so, it made a massive capital gains distribution toward the end of the year. A few weeks later, I decided to offset some of the gain by selling a chunk of it at a loss.
So why was that a wash sale? Because the capital gain distribution had been automatically reinvested in new shares. That purchase, which I was aware of but hadn't initiated, was less than 30 days after my sale. Had I been clever enough to specify lots, I could have avoided the wash sale, but the issue wasn't on my radar, and now it's too late, probably.
So maybe this trick about adding the wash loss to my basis for a later sale will come in handy. Thanks for alerting me to it.