Grow · 22-page PDF
The Equity Compensation Planning Guide
How much of your financial life depends on one company?
What you own, what happens next, and the decisions worth understanding before you move anything, with every piece of your company stock on one page.
On paper, things may look great. The hard part is that the company may now sit in several parts of your financial life at once: your salary and bonus, the future stock it may owe you, the shares you already own, and options, deferred compensation, or employer stock inside a retirement plan.
Why start by counting all of it?
Your brokerage statement may show the shares you already own. It probably doesn't show the rest of the exposure sitting around them. The point isn't to add every future dollar to your net worth as if it were already yours. It's to see how many parts of your financial life can move with the same company.
Your investment risk and your career risk can be connected.
What should you check before a rollover?
If your workplace retirement plan owns employer stock, don't treat the rollover paperwork as automatic. Net unrealized appreciation, or NUA, can allow certain qualifying distributions of employer stock to receive different tax treatment than a routine IRA rollover, so have the alternatives reviewed before the shares move.
What this is, and is not
Twelve short sections, with sourced tables of the tax mechanics and the trading rules, and worksheets you can fill in on screen or print.
It is education, not advice. It doesn't tell you how much stock you should own, and it makes no prediction about where the stock goes next.
Inside the guide
- Every place the company shows up. Salary and bonus, vested shares, future grants, options, ESPP shares, retirement-plan stock, and deferred compensation, counted on one worksheet.
- The four things to put on the map. What you own, what happens next, the tax question it creates, and the rules that decide when a sale is available.
- The tax mechanics, in plain language. RSUs, nonqualified and incentive options, ESPP shares, and deferred compensation, each on its own clock.
- Holding is a decision too. The cash question to ask about the shares you kept from years of automatic grants.
- Before a rollover, check the employer stock. Two ways the shares can leave a workplace plan, and what to settle before the paperwork.
- Your company stock on one page. What you own, what happens next, when, and the question to answer, then the questions worth bringing to the table.