A personal investment policy statement, written like you'd write one for the company

Two things are true for a lot of finance leaders at the same time. The equity concentration from employer stock keeps getting flagged, mentally, and never actually addressed. And the tax moves that would meaningfully help — loss harvesting, giving vehicle timing, sale timing against the tax year — stay theoretically known and practically unscheduled. Both are usually treated as separate problems, worked on, if at all, in separate moments of good intention.

They're not separate. They're two symptoms of the same missing artifact: a written policy that makes both decisions in advance, instead of re-deriving them, under pressure, every time a vesting date or a tax deadline forces the question.

The document you've written for someone else, never for yourself

Anyone who has managed company cash or overseen an investment committee knows the first step before a dollar moves: a written investment policy statement. Allocation ranges, concentration limits, rebalancing rules, who's authorized to act and under what conditions. Nobody debates whether the company needs this document — it's step one, done before the portfolio exists.

That same person's personal portfolio usually has no equivalent. Not because the discipline is unfamiliar — it's applied professionally all the time — but because applying it to your own money has never been treated as a real step, just an eventual good idea that keeps losing to whatever's more urgent this week.

Building it in an afternoon

This isn't a financial-plan-sized project. It's four decisions, written down once, each one already familiar from managing money professionally:

• Allocation targets and a concentration ceiling. The percentage of net worth you're willing to hold in any single employer's stock, written down on a calm day — the exact number this newsletter walked through for RSUs specifically, now made permanent instead of re-litigated at every vest.
• A rebalancing trigger, not a calendar reminder. The same shift from calendar-based review to threshold-based triggers that works for a company's currency exposure works here too — rebalance when an allocation drifts past a set band, not on an arbitrary date that may catch the position mid-swing.
• Tax-lot and harvesting rules, pre-decided. Which lots sell first, when losses get harvested, which giving vehicle gets used and in what year — the exact checklist from the tax-review habit, written once so it's a lookup instead of a re-derivation every spring.
• A written exceptions process. Not "no exceptions ever," but a specific, named condition under which the policy can be overridden, and by what reasoning — so a departure from the plan is a logged decision, not a quiet erosion nobody notices until it's the new normal.

An investment policy statement isn't a forecast. It's a pre-commitment device — the rule you wrote when you were calm, for the moment you won't be.

Why this matters more as the equity grows

A small RSU grant and a simple tax picture rarely punish the absence of a written policy — there's not much to get wrong yet. The risk compounds with every additional vesting cliff, every year of rising income, every new account or giving vehicle added piecemeal because it solved a problem that year. Each addition made sense on its own. None of them were checked against a standing policy, because no standing policy existed — which is exactly the condition under which a decade of reasonable decisions adds up to a concentrated, tax-inefficient position nobody chose on purpose.

What this doesn't require

• A wealth manager. The first version of this document is something to write yourself, in the format you already use professionally — a managed relationship can refine it later if you want one, not replace the act of writing it down.
• New accounts or products. This governs decisions inside the accounts you already have. It's a policy, not a shopping list.
• Predicting markets. None of the four components above depend on knowing where any stock is headed — they're the same process discipline applied regardless of what the market does next.

As with the two specific problems this document is built to solve, it's a framework for the decisions to make, not individualized investment, tax, or legal advice — the actual numbers belong in a conversation with an advisor who can see your full picture.

The concentration problem and the tax problem, under one page

The equity ceiling and the tax-review habit are both the right instinct on their own. What turns them into something that actually holds under pressure — the week the stock is up 40%, the week a tax deadline arrives faster than expected — is writing them down together, once, in the same format you'd insist on for any treasury you were responsible for. The discipline was never missing. It just never got pointed at your own name.