Your Silicon Labs Benefits & Career: Financial Planning for Employees and Executives

Do you work at Silicon Labs? Get the resources you need and expert insights from financial professionals who specialize in helping Silicon Labs employees make the most of their compensation package and benefits.

Whether you’re a new Silicon Labs employee or you’ve moved up the ranks into a management or executive leadership role over a multi-year career, it’s important to make smart money moves with your income and employee benefits. For example:

✅ Do you know the right moves to make to get the greatest value from the Silicon Labs benefits available to you?

✅If you’re thinking about leaving Silicon Labs for another job or planning to retire from the company in a few years, are you taking the right steps today to ensure you will receive all of the compensation and benefits that you’ve earned?

Get the Most Value from Your Silicon Labs Benefits and Compensation Package

Throughout the year, Silicon Labs provides its employees and executives with updates about their benefits ranging from health insurance and health savings plans to retirement plans like a 401(k), deferred compensation plans, and stock options. While the company offers many useful resources and access to knowledgeable staff who can assist with questions, you’ll also find financial professionals not affiliated with Silicon Labs who specialize in helping Silicon Labs employees make the most of their income and benefits.

Whether you work in the Silicon Labs headquarters in Austin, Texas, another office location around the country, or remotely from home, you may have questions about your compensation package and benefits better suited for a financial professional who can offer unbiased advice and guidance.

For example, sensitive topics like discussing the steps you should take before quitting your job at Silicon Labs to work elsewhere, protecting yourself in advance of a corporate layoff, or deciding when you should plan to retire are all conversations that may be more comfortable with a trusted financial advisor.

💡 In the Q&A below, you’ll gain insights from financial advisors who work with Silicon Labs employees to help them make smart decisions to get the most value from their compensation and benefits, reduce their money stress, and prepare for a comfortable retirement.

🙋‍♀️ Do you have questions not yet answered? Use the form below to submit questions anonymously and watch this article for updates with answers to your questions. You can also reach out to the financial advisors below to set up an introductory call or contact them with your questions by email.

💸 Smart Money Insights for Silicon Labs Employees & Executives

This page is organized into sections to help you quickly find the information you need and get answers to your questions:

1. Q&A: Financial Planning Tips for Silicon Labs Employees & Executives
2. Get Answers to Your Questions About Your Silicon Labs Benefits and Career
3. Browse Related Articles

Q&A: Financial Planning Tips for Silicon Labs Employees & Executives

Answers to Silicon Labs Employee Questions with Britton Gregory, CFP®

Britton Gregory is a financial advisor based in Austin, Texas who specializes in offering financial planning services to Silicon Labs employees. Britton helps his clients get the most value from their Silicon Labs benefits and compensation package so they can enjoy life and feel confident about their financial future.

Q: As a financial advisor with experience helping Silicon Labs employees save for their retirement, how do you help them make the most of their employee benefits?

Britton: Silabs employees have a plethora of benefits, from megabackdoor Roth access to HSA’s to ESPP’s and RSU’s. These can be very useful tools, but like any engineering problem, there are tradeoffs to consider. Tax optimization is good, but liquidity is also important, particularly if you’re looking to retire before 60. Saving for retirement is good, but enjoying your life now is also good (particularly if you enjoy your work, as many Silabs employees do!). Seaborn helps systematically balance all of these tradeoffs in a way that appeals to an engineering mindset.

Q: Is there a particular benefit available to Silicon Labs employees you feel isn’t as well utilized or understood by employees as it should be?

Britton: I’d actually say there are three: the ESPP, HSA’s, and mega backdoor Roths.

• Silabs’ ESPP, used properly, provides extremely high expected risk-adjusted returns.
• An HSA, again used properly, is actually an excellent retirement savings vehicle, better than either a Roth IRA or Traditional IRA.
• Mega backdoor Roths allow you to contribute tens of thousands of dollars per year to an account that grows tax free forever.

All of these are most often underutilized and/or misunderstood because HR can’t give financial advice, and thus many Silabs employees are simply unaware of how to use them optimally.

Q: Beyond Silicon Labs employee benefits for retirement savings, are there other types of benefits offered by the company that you find valuable to discuss with your clients?

Britton: Employer stock is a tricky conversation; analysis paralysis makes it difficult to determine how or when to diversify out, and thus my Silabs clients sometimes end up accumulating SLAB stock through simple inertia. We have a very systematic, Modern Portfolio Theory based approach that seeks to balance taxes on one hand with risk-adjusted returns on the other.

Q: For Silicon Labs employees approaching retirement age, how do you recommend they prepare to make the transition from living off their salary to relying upon other sources of income?

Britton: I personally love the optimization problem of retirement distributions, particularly as it relates to retiring before 65 (or even 60). Do you roll your 401(k) into an IRA? (Have you considered the Rule of 55?) Can you pull your distributions from taxable investments until you’re eligible to pull from retirement accounts penalty-free? If not, can you set up a Roth conversion ladder or 72(t) distributions? Does the 4% rule make sense, if you’re retiring before Social Security age? Should you take Roth conversions, and if so, how much?

Q: For Silicon Labs employees who have managed their finances on their own to this point, what would you suggest they consider to help them decide if they should begin working with a financial advisor at this stage in their lives?

Britton: There are three inflection points I strongly recommend Silabs employees consider:

1) If you’re just starting out, many financial planners (including Seaborn) offer a Quick-Start or 1:1 Office Hours service, where for a few hundred dollars you can sit down with a fee-only fiduciary advisor for 1-2 hours and they can get you pointed in the right direction on a variety of subjects, from investment fundamentals to employee benefits to cash flow management.

2) On the tax planning side, if you find yourself with the liquidity and/or income to potentially take advantage of backdoor/megabackdoor Roths, your ESPP, HSA’s, maxing out your 401(k), and other strategies, but you’re not sure whether you should or how you go about doing it, then I strongly recommend that you find a fee-only fiduciary financial planner who specializes on working with folks in tech; the return on investment for a comprehensive plan in terms of taxes saved alone is quite high!

3) On the investment management side, if you find yourself with over $100K outside of your 401(k), in particular, in a taxable brokerage account or in investable cash — and you’re not sure how to take advantage of tax-efficient asset location (including 401(k) optimization within a portfolio-wide asset location framework), tax-loss harvesting, and opportunistic rebalancing, consider looking for a fee-only fiduciary firm that does financial planning and investment management. They will likely charge a percentage of AUM, but the aforementioned strategies combined with an efficient asset allocation alone could be a net win, as the benefit of those strategies are also proportional to AUM!

Q: What are some of the unique financial planning challenges you commonly see among your clients who are Silicon Labs employees and how do you help them overcome these obstacles?

Britton: To be frank, Silabs folks can have a hard time finding a financial advisor who’s a good fit – a lot of financial advisors don’t like working with clients who ask detail-oriented questions, and Silabs employees tend to fall into that category! As I’m a former Silabs engineer myself, I love answering detail-oriented questions, which I find can be extremely helpful in making sure we build a plan that a Silabs employee can trust.

Q: What questions do you recommend Silicon Labs employees ask financial advisors they’re considering hiring to help them decide if they’re a good fit?

Britton: As a baseline, I recommend all Silabs employees make sure that their financial advisor works for a fee-only fiduciary firm; while you can never completely eliminate conflicts of interest, this is a great way to knock out a lot of them.

Beyond that, ask them to explain their financial planning process and investment management philosophy, and to send you articles that outline both in detail. Look for research- and evidenced-based planning and investing; good keywords to watch for are “Monte Carlo simulations” and “Modern Portfolio Theory” (bonus points for “factor investing”).

Q: Is there anything that comes up frequently in your initial meeting with Silicon Labs employees that surprises you?

Britton: It’s not a surprise, but by far the most frequent thing that comes up in the initial meeting is that either (a) they have a lot of uninvested cash, or (b) they have a lot of unsold stock. Dealing with both of those is in the center of our wheelhouse!

Get to Know Britton Gregory, Financial Advisor for Silicon Labs Employees:

View Britton’s profile page on Wealthtender or visit his website to learn more.

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