Equity comp is a system,
not a windfall.
If 40% or more of your compensation is RSUs, ISOs, ESPP, or private-company shares, your financial plan has to be built around the equity grant calendar — not retrofitted to it.
Plan the next vestMost planning advice assumes a steady salary.
Generic financial planning treats compensation as a number that arrives every two weeks. Equity comp doesn’t. It arrives in lumps, gets taxed at ordinary rates the moment it vests, concentrates your net worth in one ticker, and creates AMT exposure most calculators miss.
The Supernova System treats your equity comp the way a portfolio manager treats a position: with a thesis, a horizon, and an exit discipline. That changes what you sell, when, and what you buy with the proceeds.
Each decision compounds — or compounds against you.
Each item below is a decision you make, by default, every quarter. The default is rarely optimal. The system makes each one deliberate.
Equity comp differs by company. So does the plan.
San Diego’s tech and biotech employers — Qualcomm, Illumina, Dexcom, Halozyme, Cubic, ResMed, Thermo Fisher, ServiceNow, plus the Bay Area / Seattle commuters at Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon — each have a distinctive equity-comp posture. RSU cadence, ISO availability, ESPP terms, post-IPO holding restrictions, secondary windows.
Knowing the comp plan is the floor. Building a plan around it is the work.
Build the plan around the grant calendar.
If you have a vest in the next 90 days and no plan for what to do with it, that’s the place to start. We’ll map your grants, tax exposure, concentration position, and what changes if the next decision is deliberate instead of default.