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Today, in 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

• 🚀 How Andre managed and sold his vested Meta RSUs (exactly!)

• 🏦 RSU tax implications you must know as a tech worker

• 🏖️ A semi-FIRE retiree’s strategies for financial independence, biggest mistakes, and advice

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🔥 FIRE and RSU strategies for tech workers | Andre Nader

Andre Nader writes Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) from the perspective of a tech worker who is living through it. He worked over 15 years in tech, with 9.5 years at Facebook on the Product Growth team. After getting laid off from Meta in May of 2023, he realized that he didn’t need to go back to work thanks to his years of high income and diligent savings.

He’s now a semi-retired 36 year old living in San Francisco with his partner and their 5 year old. He spend his time doing things that energizes him, like helping more tech workers reach their “enough” number, spending time with his family, or fishing in the piers around San Francisco.

Tell us about your career journey going from FAANG product growth to helping tech workers achieve financial independence.

My career isn’t at all how I planned. I originally wanted to get into banking, but being in college during the Great Recession meant that wasn’t going to be an option.

I ended up getting really lucky and interning at two tech companies in Austin learning digital marketing. Both companies approached things from a very data-driven way that helped push me into a nice blend of digital marketer and data analytics. I later joined Indeed.com which really accelerated my technical skills, going from Excel, to SQL, to Python.

The other big thing with working on marketing at Indeed was that they let me move my marketing team to physically sit with the product team that was building the products that marketing was driving conversions for. This helped me build a deep understanding of the full end-to-end user funnel.

Bringing that digital marketing, conversion optimization, and data analysis lens into a product team turned out to be exactly what Facebook was doing with their Product Growth team (called Growth Marketing when I joined). It was all about using data, a deep understanding of how users actually use your products, and a creative marketing conversion rate optimization lens to things you could do to improve the product funnel.

While I was at Meta, I also became active in their internal 10k+ employee FIRE community. I created custom compensation dashboards to help me understand my own compensation, since it got complicated due to being tied with the company stock price. I received really positive feedback from my co-workers and realized that if so many of us were having this problem, then tech workers outside of Meta must be struggling with this too.

That is when I started writing FAANG FIRE. I discovered a weird stigma out there that just because you earn a lot of money, you instantly know what you should be doing with it. In addition, our LinkedIn inboxes were flooded with advisors trying to sell us something. I wanted to provide a free resource for my fellow tech workers from someone they can trust and who has walked in the same shoes they are currently walking in.

Writing has also been really helpful for me to understand and articulate my own motivations. I realized that how we approach our personal finances is heavily rooted in how we were raised. I am certainly no exception. I grew up in a household that experienced some extreme fluctuations in wealth. It caused a tremendous amount of instability for me growing up. That experience shaped my approach to personal finances, and understanding this has been key in helping me define my own financial strategy.

After being laid off in May 2023, I decided to explore what FIRE could look like. For now, I am embracing life as a semi-fired, stay-at-home dad to a 5-year-old, and partner to my amazing wife Corin (who is still working in tech). We have spent the last decade in San Francisco while also spending time researching our escape. After all, having enough to retire early in San Francisco is very different from nearly anywhere else.

Given the recent bull run for FAANG companies, tech workers are wondering what to do with their vesting RSUs. How do you approach managing and selling vesting RSUs?

During my 9.5 years at Meta, and after more than 30 different RSU vesting periods, I nearly always sold my shares within a few weeks of vesting.

Do I regret selling all my Meta shares now that Meta is closing in on $500? Nope. I don't regret it. I sold as high as $366, and as low as $80.  I sold because I asked myself after each and every vest whether I would buy more shares of Meta if I was given a cash bonus instead of RSUs.

Never once did I say I would use cash to buy more shares. Because of that—I sold.

I also felt confident selling because I had a plan on what to do with the money after. It also has to do with my goals. I felt like I was on third base, just about to win the game. I didn't need to beat the market to win. All I needed was to be consistent, try to match the market through investing in low fee index funds, and stick to the game plan.

I certainly wouldn’t have minded one more vest though :).

Many tech workers are confused about the US tax implications related to selling vested RSUs. What are the must-know tax implications? How should you plan accordingly?