HACKER Q&A
📣 shaburn

How do you hedge your personal financial exposure to tech working tech


How do you hedge your personal financial exposure to tech working tech


  👤 lawlorino Accepted Answer ✓
This is a bit open to interpretation, but I’ll bite and give an answer in terms of investment strategy.

I simply sell all equity immediately upon vesting and have a monthly direct debit setup for investing in some global diversified ETFs (roughly VWRL). For fun I keep 10% of my portfolio in handpicked individual tech stocks that I like (which has gone extremely bad for me recently).

This is a great topic to discuss though, in my experience I think financial literacy for tech workers is poor. My company IPOd a few years back and the value has fluctuated dramatically. Sadly I’ve seen a lot of people run into avoidable issues, two common problems are

1) they get burned for income tax because they didn’t sell immediately and the stock dropped, but they didn’t realise they owe tax on the initial vested amount

2) they didn’t sell their equity at all and became over leveraged in the company that employs them. They didn’t diversify, so when the stock dropped their net worth plummeted. This seems to be a common bias, I think it’s useful to reframe any equity vesting as “if I were to receive this money in cash, would I invest this amount in my company”.


👤 shaburn
The exceptional risk tends be both income and investments are extremely overweighed to the volatile tech sector