It’s Time to Review Your Company Stock
In most cities, concentrated stock is something that happens to founders. In Houston, it happens to employees.
Stock compensation, purchase plans, a company match paid in shares, and fifteen or twenty years of tenure will quietly do it. Nobody decides to bet the family's future on one company. The position just grows while everyone is busy working, until one day the ticker you check in the morning is also most of the retirement, most of the college funding, and most of the margin for error.
The question is not whether the company is good
This is where the conversation usually stalls. Someone points out that the company has been good to the family, which is true, and that selling feels disloyal, which is understandable. But the real question was never about the company. It is about the household. How much of your family's next ten years should depend on any single company's next ten years, including a good one. Loyalty is a fine reason to work somewhere. It is a poor reason to concentrate a net worth.
What a way out actually looks like
Unwinding a concentrated position is rarely one decision. It is a sequence: what to sell, in what order, across which tax years, coordinated with vesting schedules, trading windows, and everything else the plan is trying to do. Done gradually and deliberately, the tax cost and the disruption both shrink. Done in a panic after a bad quarter, neither does. The best time to build the sequence is when nothing is wrong, which is exactly when it feels least urgent.
The fall is the window
Between now and December there is still room to spread decisions across two tax years and to fit them into open trading windows. By late October that room starts closing. If a single position has become most of your net worth, September is the month to talk it through. Let's talk.
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