Equity Simplified is a site dedicated to helping you understand, calculate, and plan for the taxes related to all parts of your company equity. It’s my hope this website can help save you money!
IPOs, RSUs, ISOs, NSOs, ESPP - the list goes on. There are so many parts to company equity that impact your total compensation and these parts are often poorly explained, even by your own company’s inhouse employees.
As an example, the way I found out about the Alternative Minimum Tax (which impacts those who exercise ISOs) was being told I owe money to the government after filing my taxes one beautiful day in April. No one at my company, whether in all hands or privately in online resources, informed us about this tax. After multiple google searches and even sifting through IRS documentation, I realized it was incredibly difficult to find information on:
- What is the AMT
- How to save on taxes, via our AMT Calculator AMT Calculator
- Or how to file your AMT (and regular taxes) completely for free
This obscure tax system rarely impacts the vast majority of people, so there are very few resources on the subject. Even the sites that write about AMT all seem to just copy and paste from one another - no one seems to go into any granular details about how it actually works. Working in Tech myself, this disproportionately affects a significant amount of my friends and colleagues. And in talking to those folks, everyone seems to have the same issues around lack of education and resources.
So I built this site. And as it’s grown, the different types of equity included have as well. Apart from AMT you can also now calculate your tax liability due to an upcoming IPO, including lesser known parts of the tax system like the Net Investment Income Tax and how FICA is calculated separately from your regular income tax!
I’m not a programmer by trade, nor am I a UI/UX designer (you can probably tell). So if you’ve found these resources useful, please share the site to your friends and family. And if you happen to be a programmer/designer, I could really use some guidance on what can be a better user experience, or how to structure my code. Equity Simplified is not the perfect website by any stretch of the imagination, but it gets the job done, and I hope it’s helped you in some way!
Financial literacy and education is my passion
I enjoy figuring out ways to optimize the use of tax-sheltered vehicles, building my own offline tax models on excel, and just planning out my financial health for a given year. If you know me personally you’ve probably gotten a copy of a ‘couples budget tracker’ or an offline tax calculator. I really enjoy sharing what I’ve learned to help my friends and family.
If you’d like to contact me, shoot me an email at dion@equitysimplified.com
And if you can support the site in any way, I would appreciate any and all donations!