I was wondering if I'm one of the few XOM long career of 33 years stock holders who never traded or sold their stock mainly for NUA reasons. Invested only in XOM, S&P 500, and extended markets index. With the 170 dollar stock price I finally gave in and sold most of my XOM stock. I did the NUA and flipped 1.7 million into a Fidelity concentrated stock limited partnership for diversification purposes. Should give me close to the same returns as the S&P 500 without paying most of the taxes on XOM stock. I just paid taxes on the XOM stock with a very low cost basis, as low as 14 dollars a share.
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The weakness of the NUA strategy is that capital gains tax rates are no longer that much lower than ordinary income rates in retirement due to the Obamacare tax. Once that money comes out of a qualified account, you can never get it back in. So you’ve lost a lot of tax flexibility, which may be a problem as the tax code evolves to more and more means testing and phase outs. IRMAA for example.
But now that it’s out, assuming you do have a remaining qualified bucket, you should consider aggressively Roth converting your remaining qualified accounts using some of the money you just pulled out by NUA.
Well played at this price, but I think you got lucky with the current geopolitical situation. I think there very few who held onto xom over the last 2 years. I'll hav3 to check into concentrated stock limited partnership, but anytime you can save from playing taxes, it's a good thing.