In today's episode, Ready for Retirement, we're going to go over what restricted stock units are,

as well as what you need to be doing and what you must know, in order to avoid what could be some costly mistakes with your RSUs.

This is another episode of Ready for Retirement. I'm your host, James Cannell, and I'm here to teach you how to get the most of the life with your money.

And now, on to the episode.

Today's episode comes from a listener question. This listener's name is Chris. Chris says the

following. Next year, I'm investing in a large company restricted stock unit or RSU. The company is

doing very well, but I'm wondering how I should handle the individual stock. Do I keep 100% and

expect to

beat average market returns? Or should I sell some or all and reinvest a better balance and

de-risk my portfolio? Thank you, Chris. Well, pretty straightforward question here, but one with

enormous implications, whether you're doing it correctly or incorrectly or anything in between,

it is really important to know that if you do

have equity compensation, how should you treat those grants? How should you treat stock as a vests?

And there are multiple different kinds of equity compensation. You can have non-qualified stock options.

You can have incentive stock options. You can have restricted stock units. You can have performance

stock units. You can have employee stock purchase plans. So every single one of those has a lot of nuances that are important

to understand with regards to your planning. But today specifically, we're going to be talking

about RSUs, which stands for restricted stock units. Let's use an example here to start out of

how do RSUs actually work. For this example,

let's use someone who works at Google. And let's assume that at Google, they have restricted

stock units. They have RSUs as part of their compensation package. Let's assume that this

individual, let's call this person Chris. Now, Chris is the name of the person to submit this question.

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