About
About Progress Wealth Management
Progress Wealth Management is a small, independent publication. We write long-form, plain-English explainers on the parts of personal finance that technology employees disproportionately encounter — equity compensation, employer retirement plans, single-stock concentration risk, and the planning decisions that follow from a few high-earning years.
What we are not
We are not a registered investment advisor. We do not manage assets, sell financial products, or accept advertising or affiliate commissions on this site. We don't run a lead-generation business. There is nothing to sign up for here.
That has consequences. We can't tell you what to do with your specific portfolio. We won't email you a calendar link. If you came here looking for a fee-only fiduciary, we are not that — start with NAPFA's Find an Advisor directory or the XY Planning Network instead.
What we are
An editorial site. Each page is an article. Read it, understand the mechanics, and bring sharper questions to your CPA, your benefits team, or whichever advisor you eventually engage. The goal is to close the gap between the dense PDFs HR sends out at open enrollment and the kind of one-line summaries that show up in personal finance forums.
Who we write for
The reader we have in mind is a technology employee — engineer, designer, PM, operations, sales, recruiter — who is paid in some combination of salary, RSUs, ESPP, and a 401(k) match, and who has not had time to become an expert in any of those vehicles. The pieces assume basic numeracy and zero prior personal-finance vocabulary.
Most of our coverage centers on US tax and benefits rules because that's where the bulk of our readers are. Where a topic translates poorly across borders — capital gains treatment, RSU taxation, retirement vehicles — we'll say so explicitly rather than pretend the rules are universal.
How we write the pieces
Three principles:
- No company access. We don't have insider sources at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Oracle. Everything we say about an employer's benefits comes from public benefit summaries, SEC filings (proxy statements describe equity programs in detail), and what employees themselves report. We say so when we're inferring rather than citing.
- Plain prose over jargon. If a sentence requires three financial terms a reader might not know, we either define them in line or rewrite it. Acronyms get their first appearance spelled out.
- No urgency. Most personal-finance copy is engineered to make readers feel behind. We write the opposite way. Most decisions are not urgent; most fees are not catastrophic; most "tax-loss harvesting opportunities" are noise.
How we update pieces
Tax brackets, contribution limits, and employer benefit terms change every year. We mark each article with a "last updated" date in the header. If a piece references a specific dollar limit (401(k) deferrals, IRA limits, ESPP discount caps), we try to update it at the start of each calendar year — but the canonical source for the current year's number is always the IRS or your employer's benefits portal, not us.
If you spot something that is outdated, materially wrong, or written in a way that misleads, we genuinely want to hear about it. Editorial corrections take priority over every other queue.
Editorial independence
No sponsorships. No affiliate links. No paid placements. No "sponsored content" or "partnerships." If we mention a brokerage, custodian, robo-advisor, or tax-software product by name, it's because the article requires the comparison — not because anyone paid for the mention. We have no commercial relationships to disclose because there are none to disclose.
This isn't a moral position; it's a practical one. The minute a publication's revenue depends on convincing you to open a brokerage account or hire a particular advisor, the writing bends to serve that goal. Removing the revenue removes the bend.
What this site doesn't replace
Educational content is not advice. Three things this site cannot do:
- It cannot evaluate your specific situation. "Should I sell my RSUs at vest?" depends on your tax bracket, concentration in employer stock, time horizon, and twenty other facts we don't know.
- It cannot make tax filings or projections for you. Even our most numerically detailed pieces use round-number examples. Your actual numbers will differ. A CPA who has seen your return knows things we don't.
- It cannot substitute for fiduciary advice. A fee-only advisor with a fiduciary obligation to you can take responsibility for a recommendation. We can only describe how a system works.
Contact
Editorial corrections, requests for new topics, and reader questions about content go to: editors@ the site domain. We read everything; we cannot reply individually to every message and we do not provide personal financial advice over email.
One last thing. The single best financial decision most readers can make this year is the boring one — automate the 401(k) contribution to capture the full employer match, set the brokerage account to reinvest dividends, and stop checking the balance every week. Most of what we write here is downstream of that.