Hi, I'm Reese.

Hi, I'm Reese.

I help Bay Area tech employees keep more of their equity compensation through real planning conversations before every

I help Bay Area tech employees keep more of their equity compensation through real planning conversations before every

Accepting New Clients

Enrolled Agent working exclusively with RSUs, ISOs, NQSOs, ESPPs, and pre-IPO equity, and with what happens tax-wise once that equity turns into cash. If part of your compensation is stock, this is what I do all day.

Your RSUs vested and the tax bill was bigger than you expected. You exercised some ISOs and now you're hearing the words 'AMT' for the first time. Your company announced a tender offer and nobody explained what it actually means for your taxes. You finally sold and now you're sitting on real money, facing decisions about real estate or a new venture that all carry their own tax consequences nobody's mapped out for you. These aren't edge cases, they're the normal experience of anyone with meaningful equity compensation, and most tax preparers aren't set up to handle them well.

Got a vest, exercise, or sale coming up? Let's talk through the tax side before you decide.

Book a planning call

What I Do

Planning

  • Quarterly check-ins timed around your vesting schedule

  • Withholding adjustments before year-end

  • Multi-year exercise planning, not just this year's decision

  • Coordination with your annual tax filing

Exercise & Sale Strategy

  • Exercise timing decisions between ISOs and NQSOs

  • Sell-vs-hold analysis in the weeks after each vest

  • AMT exposure modeling before you exercise

  • Coordinating sales across multiple vesting events

Pre-IPO & Liquidity

  • Tender offer participation decisions

  • Pre-IPO exercise timing and AMT exposure

  • Post-IPO lockup expiration and diversification timing

  • Equity conversion and restructuring tax treatment

Got a vest, exercise, or sale coming up? Let's talk through the tax side before you decide.

Book a Planning Call

About Me

I'm Reese McLaughlin, an Enrolled Agent and partner at McLaughlin & Weintraub Enrolled Agents in San Francisco. For most of my career I did what most tax preparers do, a little bit of everything for a lot of different clients. Over the past few years that's changed. The clients whose returns actually challenged me, and the ones I found myself thinking about outside of tax season, were almost always the ones with equity compensation. RSUs that vested at the wrong time. ISOs that triggered AMT nobody warned them about. Multi-state situations from a move mid-vest. Pre-IPO equity nobody had a real plan for, from PPU structures to tender offers to the exercise decisions that come before an IPO.

So I built reese.tax around that work specifically. I still practice at McLaughlin & Weintraub, where our team handles the full range of tax and advisory work for around 300 clients. But this site, and this part of my practice, exists for one reason: to be genuinely useful to people whose compensation includes stock, and who want an advisor who's actually spent time in the specifics instead of treating it as a line item.

How I Work

We start with a real conversation, your equity, your goals, the rest of your tax picture. I want to understand your full vesting schedule, what else is happening in your financial life, and what you're actually trying to accomplish, whether that's buying a home, planning around a liquidity event, or just not getting surprised every April.

A quick intake gets the basics squared away before we talk, but the actual work happens in the conversation, not on a form. We both use it to figure out whether working together makes sense before anything else happens.

Talk

Talk

Model

Model

Plan

Plan

Track

Track

We start with a real conversation, your equity, your goals, the rest of your tax picture. I want to understand your full vesting schedule, what else is happening in your financial life, and what you're actually trying to accomplish, whether that's buying a home, planning around a liquidity event, or just not getting surprised every April.

Not a form, an actual conversation. We both use it to figure out whether working together makes sense before anything else happens.

Talk

Talk

Model

Model

Plan

Plan

Track

Track

FAQs

Are you an Enrolled Agent or a CPA, and what's the difference?

I'm an Enrolled Agent, licensed by the IRS specifically to represent taxpayers on tax matters, nationwide, not state by state like a CPA license. A CPA's credential covers broader accounting work. An EA's is entirely tax-focused, which is exactly the specialization that matters for equity comp planning.

Do you only work with equity compensation clients?

How does billing work?

Can you work with me if I'm not based in the Bay Area?

Do you handle my full tax return, or just the equity comp piece?