How to think about your equity compensation
July 25, 2026
More and more people receive part of their salary in shares. And almost nobody explains to them how to think about it.
The usual outcome is one of two extremes: ignoring it completely, or watching the company’s stock price in an open tab every day. Neither is judgement.
First, the vocabulary
An RSU is a promise: the company will hand you shares on future dates if you are still there. Until each date arrives, you do not have the shares; you have the promise.
An option is a right: to buy shares at a fixed price. It is worth something when the real price exceeds the fixed one; it can be worth zero.
Vesting is the calendar by which promises become shares of yours. It usually spreads over years, with periodic deliveries.
Sell-to-cover is the common practice of selling part of each delivery to cover taxes: each vesting lands as less than the gross number says.
The principle that orders everything
What has vested is yours. What has not, is not yet.
Almost everything else follows from that sentence. Vested shares are net worth: they count in your view, at market value, like any other position. Unvested shares are conditional future: they depend on you staying at the company and on a price nobody knows. They deserve to be visible as context, not added up as if they already existed.
Treating the unvested as current wealth is the most common source of fragile decisions: budgets that depend on a stock price, commitments made against promises.
The uncomfortable question: concentration
If you work at a company and accumulate its shares, your salary and part of your net worth depend on the same place. If the company does badly, both suffer at once.
That does not mean selling is always right. It means concentration deserves to be seen clearly: what percentage of your net worth lives in the company that also pays your salary.
There are legitimate reasons to hold and legitimate reasons to diversify. Conviction, taxes, horizon, risk tolerance: the answer depends on your priorities. What does not depend on priorities is the first step: knowing the real weight. A percentage seen calmly informs better than any rule of thumb.
Taxes exist
The taxation of equity compensation depends on the country, the instrument and your situation. This essay is not tax advice, and be wary of any generic text that pretends to be.
Two ideas do travel well across jurisdictions: vesting is usually a taxable event, so what lands net is less than gross; and later sales usually have their own treatment. Recording the percentage withheld at each delivery avoids the recurring surprise of “less arrived than I expected”.
A calm framework
- Record grants with their calendar, as they are.
- Count as net worth only what has vested.
- Look at the company’s weight in your total net worth, a couple of times a year.
- If the weight makes you uncomfortable, reason the exit calmly: gradual usually beats heroic.
- Let the vesting calendar into your forecasts: the future you reason about should include what is on its way.
Prisvera is built for this framework: grants, vesting and sell-to-cover recorded as they are, the weight visible next to the rest of your investments, and all of it encrypted end to end.