WEALTH MANAGEMENT FOR TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONALS

HELPING YOU TURN CAREER SUCCESS INTO LASTING WEALTH

Technology Professionals
LRVS Mountain Icon

You are paid the way successful people in technology are paid: a salary that would be the whole story in most careers, and equity worth several times more, spread across the company you are at now and one or two you have already left. The career keeps building. What has not kept pace is everything around it:

  • Retirement accounts left at former employers

  • Grants from an old job you never fully sorted out

  • An accountant who files in April and does not call in October
  • No single place where any of it is written down

None of it is urgent, so it stays undone until something forces the issue: an offer with a deadline, a vest in the wrong tax year, a parent who can no longer live alone. People call us then, because no one was looking at all of it together.

Financial Planning for Technology Professionals and Executives

We work with software engineers, engineering and product leaders, executives, and founders across the country, in artificial intelligence, cloud and enterprise software, semiconductors, e-commerce, gaming, and medical technology.

We design and manage the financial side of a technology career so that it answers to what you want from the rest of your life. For some people that is the freedom to take a role that pays less. For others it is starting something of their own, or reaching the point where working is a choice. Our work is to help you make the most of that success, year after year, as the grants, the roles, and the numbers keep changing.

As your family CFO we look at all of it together and keep the specialists in your life working from the same plan. As your trusted advisor, we would rather hear about an offer while you are still deciding than after you have signed.

At a large public company, compensation often includes restricted stock on a rolling refresh, which raises a decision every quarter about what to hold and what to sell. At a private company, selling usually depends on a liquidity event, and where options are involved, the exercise decisions carry deadlines of their own.

Most technology careers pass through more than one of these, and the financial plan has to survive the move. LRVS provides continuity as your employer and compensation change, so decisions about equity, taxes, investments, and retirement accounts remain part of the same financial strategy.

How Much of Your Life Depends on One Employer?

The answer is usually more than the stock. Add it up:

Your salary and bonus

Your health insurance and retirement benefits

Your unvested grants

The vested shares you continue to hold

Concentration is usually what success looks like on paper: the company did well while you were there, and the grants kept coming. For many technology professionals one company represents a significant share of both household income and accumulated wealth. Refresh grants increase that exposure over time, even when holding more company stock was never a decision you made.

professional employee

LRVS helps turn that concentration into a deliberate strategy. We give you the real number for what share of your household depends on one employer, and work out how much company stock belongs in your plan. From there we set the pace at which the rest comes down, around your tax year and your trading windows:

  • Sell each tranche on the day it vests, so there is no decision to make each quarter

  • Direct appreciated shares to charity instead of writing a check, so the gain is never realized at all

  • Spread sales across tax years, so one year does not push you into a higher bracket

  • Adopt a 10b5-1 plan if you are an insider or trade inside blackout windows

  • Set a tiered limit order, so shares sell at prices you chose in advance

You decide once, not every quarter. Whichever mix of these you choose, we write it into one schedule and keep it current as your equity and your career change.

Equity and Deferred Compensation Planning for Technology Professionals

Your pay arrives in several forms, and each is taxed differently. The open questions are what to sell, what to defer, what to hold, and what each choice costs. Our article on equity-based compensation covers the ground in more depth.

Restricted
Stock Units

The shares your company withholds at vest often do not cover what you will owe, because the default withholding on supplemental wages sits below the bracket most people at this income level land in. The shortfall shows up at filing.

We set the sell-or-hold rule in advance, and size the tax payment as each tranche vests.

Employee Stock
Purchase Plans

How much to fund is one decision, and what to do with the shares afterward is a different one. We set both in advance. The contribution level follows your cash flow, and whether the shares are sold at purchase or held through the qualifying period depends on how much of your employer you already own.

Stock
Options

With incentive stock options we plan the exercise around the alternative minimum tax, rather than leaving it to be discovered at filing. Non-qualified options are taxed as ordinary income at exercise, so we work out the timing as a cash-flow question as much as a tax one.

And whichever kind you hold, leaving the company starts a short window to exercise or forfeit, commonly around three months, though your plan document controls it.

Deferred
Compensation

Deferring income moves it into a year you choose, and it leaves that money with your employer until the payout date, which carries a risk your 401(k) does not. The election has to be made before the year begins, and the schedule is difficult to change afterward.

We model what deferring does to your tax across several years and weigh it against the credit risk of your employer. The distribution schedule is set alongside the rest of your plan, not in a benefits portal in November.

Your 401(k) and the
Accounts Around It

The easiest part of the package to leave on default settings for a decade. The allocation should reflect the risk you are already carrying in company stock, and the after-tax contribution room many technology plans allow is usually unused.

We also bring in the accounts left behind at previous employers, and our article on getting more from a 401(k) sets out what the plan allows.

Private Company
Shares

Here the questions change again: double-trigger vesting on shares you cannot sell yet, and whether early exercise makes sense in your situation. There is also the qualified small business stock exclusion, where the holding period decides how much of the gain is excluded and the clock cannot be restarted later. At the private companies building AI, everything moves faster. A valuation can reset between rounds, and a tender offer can open a selling window measured in weeks. Those decisions are worth making before the window opens, not inside it.

We work through those decisions with you in the years before a liquidity event, which is when they are worth the most and when they can still be changed. Our explanation of what a pre-IPO stock is covers how these shares work.

Each of these is a different tax problem with a different deadline, and none of them is decided well on its own. We set the rules in advance, so a vest, an exercise, or an election is carried out when it arrives instead of being reconsidered from scratch.

If some of your grants are still unsorted, one meeting will show you what they are worth and what each choice costs.

Financial Planning for Technology Professionals and Executives

Equity usually prompts the first call. It is rarely the only thing on the list. A few of the questions we work through, whether you are a tech employee at a large public company, a founder at a private one, or at an AI company whose valuation moved faster than your plan:

They are hard because the answer to any one of them moves the other four. We answer them together, in one plan, and revisit them as your equity and your career change.

1

How do you plan around a number that changes every year?

2

Could you stop working if you wanted to, or if the company decided for you?

3

Who is looking at your taxes in October, while you can still do something about them, rather than in April when the year is already closed?

4

How do you get out of a single stock without handing most of the gain to the tax bill?

5

How do you get out of a single stock without handing most of the gain to the tax bill?

What We Handle as Your Family CFO

Your equity is one line on a longer list. Here is the rest of it.

The rest of it, insurance and education funding and the cash reserve you need when part of your income arrives as equity, is covered in our wealth services. You will not have to become an expert in any of it. You see the model and the assumptions inside it, you push back where you disagree, and we execute.

We run the financial side. You run your career.
  • Equity and deferred compensation, and the tax treatment of each
  • Concentrated stock positions and a diversification strategy you decide in advance
  • Investment management built around what you already hold, rather than a model portfolio
  • Tax planning through the year, coordinated with your accountant, and estate planning coordinated with your attorney
  • Retirement projections that account for variable pay and a finish line that may come earlier than most careers allow

Job Offers, Company Changes, and Liquidity Events

An offer arrives with a deadline measured in days and consequences measured in years. So does a reorganization, an acquisition, or your own decision to leave.

As your trusted advisor, we work through those weeks with you.

  • 1
    We read the offer against what you already hold, including the unvested equity you would leave behind and what it would take to be made whole
  • 2
    We tell you what an acquisition does to grants that have not vested yet
  • 3
    We work through the severance and the gap in health coverage
  • 4
    We watch the exercise window that opens the day you resign
  • 5
    We move the retirement plan before it becomes one more account you have lost track of

The weeks around a change are when the largest and least reversible decisions get made. Because we already know your position, you decide with the numbers in front of you, inside the days you have.

Tax Planning and Estate Coordination for Tech Employees

Tax planning for tech employees and executives is a calendar problem before it is a filing problem. Your accountant reports what already happened. Your estate attorney drafts your documents and files them away. The decisions in between are where the tax gets decided: when you exercise, when you sell, what you defer, what you give away, and whose name is on what.

We bring those decisions to your accountant and your attorney early enough to matter, so the three of us work from the same plan.

That includes the items that sit unresolved for years:

A beneficiary designation still naming someone from a previous decade

A trust that was signed but never funded

A beneficiary designation still naming someone from a previous decade

Each of these is quick to fix once someone is looking for it. What makes them expensive is that nobody is, and the year closes before anyone checks.

Your Plan Changes as Your Career Does

What you need from us changes as your career does. Early on it is the savings rate, the allocation, and the coverage that protects your family. In your peak earning years it is the tax work and the order in which accounts are funded. Later it is who this passes to, and how much of it survives the transfer.

The moves between those stages are where the expensive mistakes happen. We plan for them in advance rather than react afterwards. The same team carries the history forward, so a change of employer or a change of stage does not send you back to the beginning.

Our legacy and family business page covers estate planning and business succession in more depth.

Financial Independence, Often Earlier Than Planned

Technology pays well and asks a lot. Many of the people we work with want the option to stop long before a traditional retirement age, and a good number take it.

A longer retirement is a different problem than a shorter one. Four things get harder at once.

Independent

Health coverage has to be solved for the years between your last paycheck and the year Medicare begins

Your Trusted Advisor

Money has to come out of the right accounts in the right order, because the years between your last paycheck and required withdrawals are often the lowest-tax years of retirement

Our Team

A weak market early in retirement does more damage than the same market later, so the plan has to hold up against a poor sequence of returns

Our Team

A concentrated stock position that was survivable while you were earning is a different risk once it is paying your bills

The work shifts from accumulating to converting, and the mechanics of drawing an income are set out under retirement planning.

We build the spending strategy that turns what you have into income you can rely on. Then we keep testing it against a long retirement, poor markets early on, and the plans you change along the way.

Independent Financial Advisors for Tech Professionals

LRVS Advisory Group is an independent registered investment advisor. We are not owned by a fund company, there is no product line we are expected to sell, and we sit on your side of the table.

We are a national wealth management practice with advisors on both coasts, working with high-net-worth engineers, technology executives, founders, and their families across the country. We manage the whole financial plan, year after year.

We also know the decisions a technology career brings. Equity vests every quarter. A layoff arrives without warning. An offer has to be weighed against what you would leave behind.

Case Study: Concentrated Stock, Unused Benefits, and No Estate Plan

75%

more than 75 percent of her net worth in her employer’s stock

A client came to us with more than 75 percent of her net worth in her employer’s stock, a benefits package she had never used, and no estate plan at all. She knew the concentration was a risk. What stopped her was the tax bill she expected if she sold.

Her return was prepared each April with no planning behind it, so the amount owed arrived as a surprise. She sold shares to cover it on whatever date the money was due, which more than once meant selling into a falling market.

We set a multi-year schedule to bring the position down, timed around her company’s trading windows. Selling on a set schedule spread the tax across years and took the decision out of the month she needed the cash.

We also put her benefits to work. We funded the employee stock purchase plan, set the deferred compensation election, and added a Roth 401(k), so part of her retirement income will not be taxed when she draws it.

The larger gap was the one she had not asked about. She had built a multimillion-dollar balance sheet with no will, no trust, and beneficiary designations that had not been reviewed in 15 years. Her estate would have gone through probate, in public, at her family’s expense. We brought in an estate attorney to draft the documents, then checked every account title and beneficiary designation against them.

The concentration now comes down on a schedule instead of in one decision. The benefits she was not using fund her retirement. The documents say the same thing her accounts do.

Getting Started
With LRVS

Working with us begins with three conversations:

  • An introductory meeting, to see whether we are a good fit
  • A discovery meeting, to understand your financial life, priorities, and goals
  • A plan presentation, to review our recommendations and assumptions

After that we meet regularly to review the plan, and we are available in between whenever something comes up. The introductory meeting is confidential and carries no obligation.

If an offer or a vest has put a clock on this, say so when you book, and we will meet inside your deadline.

Equity Compensation FAQs for Technology Professionals

Restricted stock units are taxed as ordinary income when they vest, on the full market value of the shares that day, whether or not you sell them. Your employer withholds at the default rate for supplemental wages, which sits below the bracket most people at this income level land in, and the difference is owed at filing. What the share price does afterward is a separate capital gain or loss, measured from the vest-date value.

You cannot change the tax at vest, but you can change nearly everything around it. When you sell, which lots you sell, what offsets the gains, how much you defer through retirement and deferred compensation elections, and what you give to charity in a high-income year are all open. Those decisions have to be made before December, not at filing.

The discount is an immediate return that does not depend on the share price rising, which is why an employee stock purchase plan is usually worth funding when your cash flow allows it. The harder question is what to do with the shares afterward. Selling at purchase locks in the discount and is taxed as ordinary income. Holding through the qualifying period changes the tax treatment and adds more of your employer to a portfolio that likely holds a great deal already.

Private-company shares usually vest on two triggers: a time-based schedule and a liquidity event such as an initial public offering or an acquisition. Until the second trigger occurs, the shares are not yours to sell. That gap is why decisions about early exercise are worth making years before an exit. The same is true of the qualified small business stock exclusion: eligibility is mostly a question about the company rather than about you, and your holding period determines how much of the gain is excluded.

There is no universal pace. The right one depends on your tax year, your trading windows, and how much of your household already depends on that employer. What matters more than the speed is that the schedule is written down and decided in advance.

It is a selling schedule set in advance, which keeps working even during a blackout window. You need one if you are an insider. It is useful either way if you would rather make the decision in a calm month than a volatile one.

Financial planning at LRVS is typically a flat annual fee. Investment management is charged on a tiered schedule based on the assets we manage. Every relationship is different, so the numbers for your situation are set out in the introductory meeting, before you have committed to anything.

Yes, and most clients do. We work alongside the professionals you already have and bring them into the same conversation, so the equity decisions, the tax work, and the estate documents rest on the same facts. Where you do not have someone, we can introduce you to people we work with regularly.