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Remember to set up auto-sale folks. Your retirement returns will be less than selling at a lifetime high price of whoever you work for. But you will not sell

Remember to set up auto-sale folks. Your retirement returns will be less than selling at a lifetime high price of whoever you work for. But you will not sell at the lifetime high price. Please don't forget to sell at all.

madengr 8y ago
It took a lawsuit for my employer (Honeywell) to allow moving (out of Honeywell stock) of matched contributions. I still keep about 20% in company stock. It has done very well and pays a good dividend. To think that we were almost bought by GE years ago.
- froindt 8y ago
  >I still keep about 20% in company stock. It has done very well and pays a good dividend. To think that we were almost bought by GE years ago. I'm curious why you keep so much in Honeywell stock? For a very long time GE was a great company to have that would routinely give nice returns and dividends, and then things went downhill. Layoffs happened, and those people were faced with much lower portfolio valuations if they were heavily weighted in the company they work for.
  - ataturk 8y ago
    After watching GE flounder in Schenectady, NY for my entire lifetime, I'm not sure GE was ever a nice company. It's best days seem way behind it. Plus, Edison was an asshole.
  - madengr 8y ago
    $2.3k/year in reinvested dividends. $18.5k contribution + $10.5k employee match + $2.3k dividends. The dividends are like an additional 7% bump in contribution.
    - evanpw 8y ago
      I've never understood why people care so much about dividends. The stock price drops by the amount of the dividend on the ex-date, so a stock with dividends that are always reinvested is equivalent to a stock that never pays any dividends. (Unless you're holding it in a taxable account, in which case you have to pay taxes on the dividend and actually come out behind).
      - fibbery 8y ago
        I like dividend stocks because it is automatically increasing my number of shares in a stock I like, and thereby 'bakes in' the gains. A stock that doesn't have dividends must be sold in order to reap profits, and as a novice investor I never know when to sell.
- pg_bot 8y ago
  If you are a rank and file employee, I would suggest divesting entirely from your company's stock. From a risk perspective it's extremely dangerous as you are already dependent on your employer for your source of income. In the case that they do poorly you have the potential to lose both your income and your savings. Unless you have the ability to seriously affect the stock price, you are putting too many eggs into a single basket.
  - Retric 8y ago
    With matched contributions it's a hard choice. You are effectively buying stock at a huge discount, having up to say say 20% of your savings in the company stock is very likely to be a good idea. You just need to be selling it ASAP.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Not sure that's universally a good idea. Rank-and-file may still have inside information that makes holding stock advantageous (obviously adhering to any applicable insider trading rules). If your skillset is highly portable, you can probably consider your income decoupled from your employer. Your equity with your employer could then be considered high-risk moonshot investment. But I certainly agree that your core nest egg and growth investment be kept totally decoupled.
    - xiphias 8y ago
      Every employee has insider information. For me at Google the biggest change was from Eric Schmidt answering directly to questions at TGIF and looking at easy to fix things when he could and looking for great growth possibilities to Larry Page talking about working hard for the sake of working hard to finally Sundar who's looking at Larry for every question and make sure to answer as politically as he can and not upset Larry. Also even project level big meetings took more than 50% of the time to speak about respecting women. I respect women, but when the focus on them is bigger than the focus on users/customers, I know it can't be the growth company that it was before.
  - pmiller2 8y ago
ghaff 8y ago
Or, at a minimum, at least don't get too greedy. I got (somewhat) lucky with the dot-com crash. My prior employer's stock (which I had been accumulating over a decade from a previous employer who got purchased) lost about 95% of its value. Fortunately, I had sold some and the stock did end up recovering a bit.

madengr 8y ago

It took a lawsuit for my employer (Honeywell) to allow moving (out of Honeywell stock) of matched contributions. I still keep about 20% in company stock. It has done very well and pays a good dividend. To think that we were almost bought by GE years ago.

froindt 8y ago
>I still keep about 20% in company stock. It has done very well and pays a good dividend. To think that we were almost bought by GE years ago. I'm curious why you keep so much in Honeywell stock? For a very long time GE was a great company to have that would routinely give nice returns and dividends, and then things went downhill. Layoffs happened, and those people were faced with much lower portfolio valuations if they were heavily weighted in the company they work for.
- ataturk 8y ago
  After watching GE flounder in Schenectady, NY for my entire lifetime, I'm not sure GE was ever a nice company. It's best days seem way behind it. Plus, Edison was an asshole.
- madengr 8y ago
  $2.3k/year in reinvested dividends. $18.5k contribution + $10.5k employee match + $2.3k dividends. The dividends are like an additional 7% bump in contribution.
  - evanpw 8y ago
    I've never understood why people care so much about dividends. The stock price drops by the amount of the dividend on the ex-date, so a stock with dividends that are always reinvested is equivalent to a stock that never pays any dividends. (Unless you're holding it in a taxable account, in which case you have to pay taxes on the dividend and actually come out behind).
    - fibbery 8y ago
      I like dividend stocks because it is automatically increasing my number of shares in a stock I like, and thereby 'bakes in' the gains. A stock that doesn't have dividends must be sold in order to reap profits, and as a novice investor I never know when to sell.
pg_bot 8y ago
If you are a rank and file employee, I would suggest divesting entirely from your company's stock. From a risk perspective it's extremely dangerous as you are already dependent on your employer for your source of income. In the case that they do poorly you have the potential to lose both your income and your savings. Unless you have the ability to seriously affect the stock price, you are putting too many eggs into a single basket.
- Retric 8y ago
  With matched contributions it's a hard choice. You are effectively buying stock at a huge discount, having up to say say 20% of your savings in the company stock is very likely to be a good idea. You just need to be selling it ASAP.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Not sure that's universally a good idea. Rank-and-file may still have inside information that makes holding stock advantageous (obviously adhering to any applicable insider trading rules). If your skillset is highly portable, you can probably consider your income decoupled from your employer. Your equity with your employer could then be considered high-risk moonshot investment. But I certainly agree that your core nest egg and growth investment be kept totally decoupled.
  - xiphias 8y ago
    Every employee has insider information. For me at Google the biggest change was from Eric Schmidt answering directly to questions at TGIF and looking at easy to fix things when he could and looking for great growth possibilities to Larry Page talking about working hard for the sake of working hard to finally Sundar who's looking at Larry for every question and make sure to answer as politically as he can and not upset Larry. Also even project level big meetings took more than 50% of the time to speak about respecting women. I respect women, but when the focus on them is bigger than the focus on users/customers, I know it can't be the growth company that it was before.
- pmiller2 8y ago

ghaff 8y ago

Or, at a minimum, at least don't get too greedy. I got (somewhat) lucky with the dot-com crash. My prior employer's stock (which I had been accumulating over a decade from a previous employer who got purchased) lost about 95% of its value. Fortunately, I had sold some and the stock did end up recovering a bit.