If you've spent the better part of your career at Google, there's a good chance your biggest financial challenge isn't building wealth anymore.

It's deciding what your wealth is actually for.

Earlier this year, a client asked me a question I've heard many times over the years:

"How is the market doing this well with everything going on?"

It was a fair question.

A Googler sent me an article recently about Anthropic’s infrastructure deal with Google Cloud.

The headline was about AI- the part I think actually matters for googlers (and xooglers) holding RSUs  was about something else entirely.

Let me explain:

I’ve heard versions of this question repeatedly from employees holding Google stock.

The details vary:

~$800K in Google stock

~$1.5M in Google stock

Refresh grants layered on top of earlier grants

Conviction to hold versus action to take: 

Don Hilario, CFP®, Hilpan Moxie Wealth Management, LLC - an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

One of the most common questions I get from Google employees after they leave the company is surprisingly simple:

“Should I do my Roth conversion now?”

My answer usually isn’t.

Instead, I ask a question of my own.

“Did you receive a severance?”

Most people expect the conversation to begin with tax brackets. I don’t.

Most financial mistakes I see aren't wrong decisions.

They're right decisions made in the wrong order.

I've sat across from enough Google employees to know that the people doing this best aren't the ones with the most information. They're the ones who run their decisions in sequence. That's the whole game in financial planning for Google employees, and almost nobody is taught it.

Because the problem usually isn't a knowledge problem.

Most Google employees think RSUs are a compensation event.

The IRS agrees.

The problem is that the IRS is only describing the tax treatment. It isn't describing what actually happens.

One of the interesting things about Google is that it has probably created more accidental investors than almost any company in history.

Most employees don't join Google because they want to become investors. They join because they're engineers, product managers, designers, operators, or executives.

Then RSUs start vesting.

Doing nothing with your Google stock is still a decision. It just doesn’t announce itself.

There’s no trade confirmation. No tax event. No moment where you consciously chose to let a concentrated position keep growing. It happens quietly, month after month, vesting cycle after vesting cycle, until the number is large enough that the question of what to do with it becomes genuinely uncomfortable.

That’s where most Google employees find themselves.

Not because they made a bad decision. Because they deferred making one at all.

At some point the position stopped feeling like compensation. It started feeling like a decision you've been putting off.

For a lot of Google employees, the million-dollar threshold is where that feeling gets loud.

The shares accumulated quietly,  monthly vesting, stock price appreciation, refresh grants layered on top of older grants. You didn't consciously decide to build a seven-figure position in a single stock. It just became one.

And now the question that was easy to defer suddenly has real stakes attached to it.

If you've worked with a financial advisor for any length of time, you've probably brought something up that you read about or heard about; be it a trend, an asset, or a strategy that caught your attention.

What happens next tells you a lot about the relationship.

A client and I were coming up on ten years together. One of those reviews that naturally invites a look back as much as a look forward. About halfway through, she asked about silver.

Should we allocate 5%? Physical bars or ETFs? How does it affect portfolio risk?

In Jurassic Park, the scientists didn’t fail because they lacked intelligence.

They solved every problem in front of them. The system worked exactly as designed.

And then the problem showed up all at once.

Not because they built it wrong.

Because they never stopped to think about what happens after it works.

*Google just reported its strongest quarter ever - 22% revenue growth,

Search queries at an all-time high, Google Cloud up 63%.

The headline numbers look extraordinary.

What Actually Matters When the Charts Are Saying "Stay"

If you're a Google employee with RSUs or a concentrated stock position, this is the decision you're actually facing.

A client asked me this recently, not hypothetically. She'd been at Google for five years, stock had done well, and she'd just seen the AI compute chart everyone was sharing. The one showing Google with more H100 infrastructure than any single competitor.