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Comment by bn-usd-mistake | Hacker News Reader

Any source for not being liable for income taxes at the time of receiving stocks? That seems like a very obvious gap (which is not present in many EU countries at least, here we are definitely liable for income tax when RSUs vest).

I thought the reason for delaying selling of stocks is to avoid capital gains tax, not income tax.

I did a quick google, and most sources seem to support that taxes are due at RSU vesting time, e.g.

> With RSUs, you are taxed when the shares are delivered, which is almost always at vesting. Your taxable income is the market value of the shares at vesting.

https://www.schwab.com/public/eac/resources/articles/rsu_fac...

Why would this be different for the salaries of rich people? Isn't it more that they usually get large amounts of stocks at low prices if they stick with the company for a long time?

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> Any source for not being liable for income taxes at the time of receiving stocks?

Depends on the details.

For founders and early employees, the 83(b) election[1] can make a huge difference. Basically, you have the option to pay taxes on the value of the stock portion of your compensation at the time of granting, rather than when it vests. For an early stage company, that's basically $0.

I'm not 100% clear on the details, so if you're interested that's 1 good place to look.

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1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/83b-election.asp

There are different types of stock options.

> ISO – no tax liability for exercising the option. You pay capital gains tax when you sell your contract or sell the stocks in your option.

> As you can see, there are tax benefits to going with the ISO – you don’t pay any ordinary income tax at any point.

ISO = Incentive Stock Option

https://www.vectorvest.com/blog/options/how-are-stock-option...

Makes sense with ISOs. Until you sell the contract or the shares from exercising the options, you don't have any actual money, and those options or shares can go to zero tomorrow (let's say extremely unlikely to happen, but that's not relevant to the point). So there isn't really any actual money to take from you until then.

The second you convert it to actual money by selling, you get hit with taxes (or Nintendo standing behind your shoulder), and you pay off your responsibilities using a chunk of money you've just received.

> Makes sense with ISOs.

I agree.

> Until you sell the contract or the shares from exercising the options, you don't have any actual money

There are other ways of converting them into money, like lending against them. And that is what billionaires are often doing, as it is financially much more attractive. With how things currently are, it would be stupid not to.

That is what I am trying to get across: If we managed to invert the incentives, billionaires might actually sell their stocks, and get taxed on that, rather than finding creative workarounds.

Then the state could profit, instead of banks.

> There are other ways of converting them into money, like lending against them

Isn't that essentially the same as reverse-mortgaging a part of your equity in your house (i.e., borrowing money against a chunk of ownership of your house) to get some liquid cash and then paying that off over time (which would make any income used towards paying off that loan also untaxed)? I was under an assumption that this was something that non-billionaire normal people do as well fairly often (disclaimer: i don't own any property myself, so I am not speaking from my own experience with it).

Of course you need to own a property to make use of that, so that would exclude plenty of people (i.e., non-homeowners), but it can be literally any property you own in any location (from California to Oklahoma to wherever else in the US). And the number of homeowners in the US is significantly larger and is more accessible than just billionaires and other megarich people.

Note: my comment talks about this in the context of the US-only, since that's what the rest of the comment chain is discussing + you can probably write a thick book if you tried answering it comprehensively in the context of all countries in the world.

If you received the stocks from someone who died and devised them to you, your basis will be the fair market value at the time of death and you will not owe taxes.

(They might have if they were over the $12.02m lifetime gift limit but they probably weren’t if they had $12.02m to give away).

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