FINANCIAL PLANNING FOR HIGH EARNERS
High income isn’t wealth. Wealth is what you keep.
Earn a million dollars and spend a million dollars, and you’re not a millionaire.
You’re just tired.
A bigger salary, bonus, or equity package creates opportunity. It also creates more decisions about taxes, benefits, investing, company stock, and what should happen with the money before lifestyle quietly absorbs it.
Capstone helps you turn income into something that lasts.
HIGH INCOME ≠ WEALTH
Making more only works if more of it becomes yours.
You can spend an entire career focused on generating money:
the next promotion, the bigger bonus, the next vesting date.
But without a structure for what happens after the money arrives, it’s easy to fall into the same cycle:
Earn → Spend → Repeat
Do that for twenty years and you may have earned millions without building the wealth those earnings should have created.
The difference isn’t just income.
It’s what happens to the income once you have it.
THE NUMBER YOU MAY NOT BE TRACKING
Do you know your keep rate?
You probably know your salary, bonus target, and next vesting date.
But do you know what percentage of what you earn actually becomes yours?
Your keep rate is the portion of your income that moves toward building long-term wealth instead of disappearing into taxes, spending, and unplanned decisions.
A household earning $400,000 and keeping 4% is building wealth more slowly than a household earning $125,000 and keeping 15%.
Income is flow. Wealth is accumulation. Your keep rate connects the two.
And it’s one of the first numbers we look at together.
HOW WE BUILD IT
Build the structure before you ask it to grow.
Weatherproof
Protect the engine first.
Before focusing on growth, we look for the places where your financial structure may be exposed.
That can include:
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Cash reserves that actually match your lifestyle
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Income and risk protection
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Tax withholding and estimated payments
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Employer stock becoming too large a piece of your net worth
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Benefits and insurance decisions
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Major cash-flow obligations
Compound
Put what you keep to work.
Once the structure is sound, we focus on intentionally converting income into assets.
That may include:
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RSU, ISO, and NSO strategy
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Bonus deployment
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Roth and mega backdoor Roth opportunities
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Tax-efficient investing
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Retirement contributions
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Concentrated stock decisions
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Guardrails around lifestyle creep
Making the jump from public service to the private sector?
