Coordinating Your Equity Compensation, Taxes, Investments, and Long-Term Financial Decisions
Executive compensation can create substantial wealth, but it also connects decisions involving taxes, investment risk, cash flow, retirement, and estate planning.
Stock options, restricted stock, deferred compensation, and company benefits are often reviewed separately. Strata helps executives evaluate these decisions together and coordinate them within one financial plan
EXECUTIVE PLANNING REQUIRES COORDINATION
Executive compensation involves more than income. Each decision affects the next.
Equity awards, stock options, deferred compensation, retirement benefits, and company stock each come with their own timing, tax treatment, and risks.
These decisions should be evaluated together. We help you understand how each choice may affect your cash flow, taxes, investments, retirement plans, and family.
Executives often face decisions with no single right answer. Exercising an option may create an immediate tax obligation. Holding company stock may provide additional upside while increasing concentration risk. Deferring compensation may reduce current income but introduce future liquidity and employer risk.
We model these choices before action is taken. This allows you to compare how different strategies may affect taxes, cash flow, portfolio risk, financial independence, and long-term wealth.
Our goal is not to predict the future. It is to help you make informed decisions with a clearer understanding of the potential outcomes.
Stock options, restricted stock, RSUs, and performance awards each have different rules, timelines, and risks. We organize your awards and model exercise, sale, and withholding strategies so each decision supports your broader financial plan.
Executive income and tax exposure can vary significantly from year to year. We compare decisions across multiple years and coordinate with your CPA on timing, withholding, estimated payments, charitable gifts, and other planning opportunities.
A concentrated position can tie your income, benefits, and investment portfolio to the same company. We help you evaluate concentration risk and develop a thoughtful strategy for holding, selling, diversifying, or gifting shares.
Executive benefits may include deferred compensation, pensions, supplemental retirement plans, and insurance programs. We evaluate elections and distribution choices in the context of your cash flow, taxes, retirement plans, and exposure to your employer.
We bring salary, bonuses, equity awards, deferred compensation, and investment assets into one clear financial picture. This helps you understand what your wealth can support and prepare for retirement, a career change, or another major transition.
Compensation and investment decisions can have lasting implications for your family and legacy. We coordinate with your estate attorney and CPA so ownership, beneficiary designations, gifting strategies, liquidity, and tax planning remain aligned with your intentions.
Many executives already work with a CPA, estate attorney, benefits team, and investment advisor. Each may provide valuable guidance, but decisions can fall out of alignment when no one is responsible for seeing the complete picture.
Strata serves as the central point of coordination. We organize the issues, model the alternatives, and work with your other advisors so financial, tax, estate, benefit, and investment decisions support one another.
We call this IQ Compounding®. By bringing decisions and expertise together, we can uncover opportunities and help prevent important details from being missed.
Executive planning is not a one-time exercise. Compensation changes, awards vest, tax laws evolve, and family priorities shift.
Through the Strata Wealth 360 Planning Process®, we regularly revisit your plan, track upcoming decisions, and adjust your strategy through career transitions, retirement, and the transfer of wealth.
This approach is particularly well suited for:
Corporate executives with equity compensation or concentrated company stock
Professionals making deferred compensation and retirement benefit elections
Executives preparing for retirement, a career change, or a corporate transaction
Individuals and families with $3 million or more in investable assets and more complex planning needs
While headquartered in Dallas, Strata Wealth Advisors serves executives and families across the country who value coordinated planning for compensation, taxes, investments, retirement, and estate decisions.
If your compensation, taxes, investments, and long-term plans have become increasingly interconnected, we would welcome a conversation about how Strata can help bring them together.