Google RSUs: Why High Income Still Does Not Feel Like Control

True Root Financial is a fiduciary financial advisor in San Francisco, CA, specializing in equity compensation and tax planning for tech professionals. If you are a Google employee navigating a concentrated stock position and rising income, book a no-obligation consultation.

 

A Google employee I spoke with had built over $7 million in investable assets.

His income this year was expected to be close to $1 million. RSUs vest every month. Cash flow is strong. On paper, everything is working.

And yet, when we discussed selling stock, his answer was immediate:

“We should not sell anything this year.”

Not because he did not want to. Because at that level of income, it did not feel like an option.

This is one of the most common patterns I see with Google employees who have built meaningful wealth. The numbers are large. The decisions feel heavier. And the default becomes: do nothing.

This guide is for Google employees in the $6M to $8M or higher range who are watching RSUs vest every month, income pile up, and concentration grow, and who feel like every option carries a cost they are not ready to pay.

What The Situation Actually Looks Like

If you have been at Google for several years, your picture may look something like this:

• $6M to $8M or more in total investable assets
• $2M to $4M of that tied to Google stock (GOOGL)
• $700K to $1M or more in annual income, the majority from RSUs
• Ongoing monthly vesting that arrives on a fixed schedule regardless of market conditions

You have already done the hard part. You have built real wealth. But the decisions that come next feel harder than they should.

That is not a coincidence. It is a structural feature of where you are.

What RSUs Actually Create At This Stage

At this stage, RSUs do not just create income. They create timing you do not control.

In the situation above, roughly $60,000 was vesting each month. Annual income was tracking toward $1 million or more. That income is not discretionary. It arrives on a fixed schedule and is taxed immediately as ordinary income, at the full value of the shares on the vesting date.

This is different from stock options, where you choose when to exercise. With RSUs, the taxable event happens whether you are ready for it or not. The income shows up. The withholding runs short. And your exposure to a single stock quietly grows.

Where It Gets More Complicated

At lower income levels, the tradeoffs are simpler. At this level, something shifts.

Every decision starts to carry compounding weight.

If you sell Google shares:

• You are realizing capital gains in one of your highest-income years
• Federal and California taxes are both at their peak, and combined rates can exceed 50%
• Any sale feels expensive on paper, even if the underlying logic is sound

If you do not sell:

• Your concentration in a single stock continues to increase
• A large and growing share of your balance sheet stays tied to one outcome
• The position compounds, not just in value but in how difficult it becomes to unwind later

So the default becomes: do nothing. Not because it is the best decision. Because it feels like the least costly one at the moment.

What Most Google Employees Get Wrong

Waiting for a Better Year

The most common instinct is to defer. This is a high-income year. Maybe next year will be lower. Maybe the stock dips and I sell them. Maybe I wait until a vesting cliff passes and things look different.

The problem is that next year often looks just as constrained as this year. RSUs keep vesting. Income stays elevated. The decision gets postponed again. By the time you step back, the position is larger and the decisions feel even more consequential.

There is no perfect year to sell. There are only years where you have a plan and years where you do not.

Treating Taxes as the Only Variable

Taxes matter enormously at this level. But they should inform your decisions, not paralyze them.

Holding a concentrated position indefinitely to avoid a tax bill is not tax planning. It is risk accumulation dressed up as patience. The tax cost of diversifying is real. The cost of not diversifying, meaning a meaningful drawdown in a stock that represents 40% or 50% of your net worth, can be far larger.

The goal is not to minimize taxes in any single year. It is to minimize their impact across the full arc of your financial plan.

Ignoring the Most Important Constraint: Google’s Restrictions

This matters specifically for Google employees: unlike some other tech companies, Google does not allow current employees to use options strategies on their GOOGL shares or to borrow against their company stock. This eliminates a common set of hedging tools, including collars, exchange funds, and margin loans against concentrated positions, that advisors might otherwise recommend.

This is not a minor detail. It narrows the toolkit significantly and makes structured selling the primary lever available to most Google employees who want to manage concentration risk.

Any advisor working with a Google employee on equity planning must start here. Strategies that work for Oracle or Meta employees may not be permissible for you.

Making Decisions One Year at a Time

Most decisions get evaluated in isolation. Is this a good year to sell? Are taxes too high right now? Should I wait for the stock to hit a certain price?

When decisions are made year by year, the answer is almost always not now. And that answer repeats itself, year after year, while the position grows and the concentration deepens.

Five Strategies That Actually Help

1. Build a Structured, Multi-Year Selling Plan

Rather than trying to pick the optimal moment, define in advance how much you will sell and when. A systematic exit plan removes emotion from the equation and creates a consistent path toward diversification regardless of market conditions or your income in any given year.

For example, decide now to sell a fixed percentage of your Google position each quarter over the next six to eight quarters. Write it down. Follow it. Adjust only for truly material changes in your circumstances, not because the stock moved or your instincts are telling you to wait.

The specific amounts matter less than the discipline of having a plan at all. Consistent, planned diversification over multiple years will almost always produce better outcomes than waiting for a perfect moment that never arrives.

2. Coordinate Selling With Your Vesting Calendar

Because RSUs vest monthly, you have more flexibility than you may realize. You do not have to sell a large block at once and absorb a concentrated capital gain. You can sell a portion of each monthly vest immediately upon vesting. These shares have a cost basis equal to the vesting price, so there is no additional capital gain at all, just ordinary income that was already recognized.

For shares you have held longer and that carry embedded capital gains, spreading sales across tax years reduces the peak impact of any single transaction. A multi-year plan allows you to smooth the tax hit in a way that a single large sale never could.

3. Fix Your Withholding Before the Tax Bill Arrives

At income levels above $700K, the default 22% supplemental withholding rate on RSUs is dramatically insufficient. At a combined federal and California rate that can exceed 50%, the gap between what is withheld and what you actually owe can easily run $150,000 to $300,000 or more in a single year.

This is not an abstract risk. If you are not making estimated quarterly tax payments or adjusting your withholding, you may face an underpayment penalty on top of a large April bill. Model your full-year income now, every vesting event, salary, and bonus, and set your withholding or quarterly payments accordingly before year-end.

4. Use Tax-Aware Investing to Offset Future Gains

Every share of Google you sell will generate either a capital gain for shares held longer than a year, or ordinary income for shares sold immediately at vest. One of the most effective ways to reduce the net cost of diversification is to build offsetting tax losses elsewhere in your portfolio.

Direct indexing is the most practical tool here for most investors at this level. Rather than buying an S and P 500 ETF, you hold the individual stocks that make up the index. This creates hundreds of separate tax lots that can be selectively harvested for losses whenever positions decline, and those losses directly offset gains from your Google stock sales.

For employees with multi-million dollar positions, the cumulative tax savings from a well-run direct indexing strategy over five to ten years can be substantial. The key is to start building the strategy now, before you begin systematic diversification, not after.

5. Align Every Decision With a Full Financial Plan

Your Google stock decisions should not exist in isolation. They need to reflect your total net worth, your timeline, your liquidity needs over the next three to five years, and how much concentration risk your financial plan can actually absorb.

The right framework is a gap analysis: model your plan twice. First, assuming Google performs well and everything stays on track. Second, assuming a significant drawdown of 30% or more in your concentrated position. The gap between those two scenarios tells you exactly how much you need to diversify now versus how much you can afford to hold without threatening your long-term security.

Without this framework, every decision is a guess. With it, every decision has context.

When Your Next Large Vest Is Approaching

If you have a significant RSU vest coming in the next one to two quarters, you face a forced decision. Those shares will vest. The income will be recognized. The taxes will be owed. You will own more Google stock whether you want to or not.

Here is what proactive planning looks like before that vesting event:

• Model the tax impact now. Know what your bill will look like at different stock prices and different withholding rates. Do not be surprised in April.
• Decide in advance what you will sell and what you will hold. Write it down before the vesting date. If you wait to decide on vesting day, you will almost certainly make a reactive decision rather than a considered one.
• Understand the holding period. Shares sold immediately at vest generate no additional capital gain. Shares held longer than a year qualify for long-term capital gains rates. Know which category you are dealing with before you act.
• Consider whether holding a large block fits your plan. If the answer is no, a systematic schedule is almost always better than a large, one-time sale later.

What Your Current Advisor Is Probably Not Telling You

If your advisor runs a model portfolio, charges an asset management fee, and checks in once a year, you are getting a fraction of what you need at this stage.

A financial advisor who genuinely understands equity compensation for Google employees should be doing the following:

• Modeling your full-year income, including every RSU vest, salary, and bonus, to set withholding and estimated tax payments correctly
• Proactively recommending selling strategies that account for Google’s specific restrictions on hedging and borrowing against company stock
• Discussing direct indexing and other tax-aware strategies for offsetting gains from future diversification
• Coordinating with your CPA on donor-advised fund timing, Roth conversion opportunities in lower-income years, and any estate planning implications of a large concentrated position
• Looking at the whole picture and telling you what to do, not waiting for you to ask the right questions

In many cases, advisors focus primarily on managing investments rather than helping you structure decisions across taxes, equity compensation, and long-term planning. At this level of wealth and complexity, the difference between those two approaches matters enormously.

From Accumulation To Control

There are two distinct phases of wealth for Google employees.

The first phase is accumulation. Show up, do good work, let the RSUs vest, let the stock perform. This phase rewards patience and inaction. The less you overthink it, the better it tends to go.

The second phase is different. It is about reducing dependence on a single outcome, coordinating income, taxes, and investments across multiple years, and making decisions intentionally rather than reactively.

The instincts that served you well in the first phase, patience, inaction, faith in the long-term story, can actively work against you in the second. Not because Google is a bad company. But because no single stock should represent the entirety of your financial security, regardless of how well it has performed.

The institutional investors I worked with earlier in my career believed in every company they owned. They just understood the difference between conviction and concentration. You can believe in Google and still diversify. Those two things are not in conflict.

The Real Question At $6m To $8m And Beyond

At this level, the question is no longer: Am I building wealth?

It is: Do I actually have control over it?

High income alone does not create flexibility. Without structure, it can just as easily create constraints, a position that is too large to ignore and too consequential to act on impulsively, year after year, while the decisions compound in the background.

The goal is not to optimize for any single year. It is to build a system where income, taxes, and investment decisions work together across time, so that the wealth you have spent years building actually translates into the flexibility and security it should provide.

 

If you are at Google and have built meaningful wealth but feel like your decisions are increasingly constrained by income, taxes, and timing, I am happy to walk you through how we approach this with clients in a similar position. We will review your full equity picture, model the impact of your upcoming vesting schedule, and show you what a structured, multi-year plan actually looks like. Book a No-Obligation Consultation.

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About True Root Financial

I am Roshani Pandey, founder of True Root Financial, a fiduciary financial advisor based in San Francisco, California. I started my career at Goldman Sachs and later worked at BlackRock advising families whose wealth had lasted for seven or eight generations. I saw what well-structured wealth looks like, the disciplined risk management, the proactive tax planning, the integrated systems where everything works together.

I founded True Root Financial to bring that same institutional-level strategy to tech professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationwide who are building wealth in real time.

We specialize in helping employees at companies like Google, NVIDIA, Anthropic, and SpaceX navigate equity compensation, concentrated stock positions, and complex tax situations.

We focus on three core principles: risk reduction without disruption; tax awareness as a core discipline; and integrated simplicity, where investments, equity compensation, estate planning, and major life transitions all work together with intention.

Money is simply a tool. The real goals are control over your time, security for your family, and the freedom to choose what comes next.

 

True Root Financial is a fee-only fiduciary financial advisor based in San Francisco, CA. We serve clients across the country. We do not sell products or earn commissions. Our only compensation is the fee you pay us directly.

 

True Root Financial is not affiliated with Google LLC or Alphabet Inc. True Root Financial has financial planning relationships with clients who are employees of various technology companies.