GuideFiled September 15, 20264 min read

Building Your Note and Vesting Calendar

Part four of the 18-Month File. Two schedules decide when an advisor is economically free to do anything: the amortization on any forgivable note, and the vesting on deferred compensation. Most advisors carry a rough sense of both and are wrong by a year. Putting real dates on paper is the exercise that turns an open question into a window.

Filed by Tyler Noe

Guide

Your Note and Vesting Calendar: When Are You Economically Free to Move?

Key Takeaways

Two schedules govern the timing, and they rarely align. Note amortization and deferred compensation vesting run on separate clocks. The binding date is whichever leaves more money on the table, and it is often not the one an advisor assumes.
Most advisors are wrong about their own dates. The note start is the funding date rather than the join date, awards vest in tranches rather than all at once, and both facts move the real number by a year or more in practice.
The unamortized balance is a debt, not a discount. Leaving early means repaying it, and the tax treatment of the forgiven portion you already recognized does not reverse.
Cliffs make waiting rational in a way gradual vesting does not. A tranche vesting in eleven months is a concrete reason to consider eleven months. A smooth schedule rarely is, which is why the shape matters as much as the size.
Knowing the window is worth something even if you never use it. An advisor who knows their own dates is negotiating a retention conversation from a different position than one who does not.

The short answer: Two schedules decide when you can do anything without leaving money behind: the amortization on any forgivable note, and the vesting on deferred compensation. They run on different clocks, most advisors are wrong about both, and putting real dates on paper converts an open-ended question into a specific window.

This is part four of the 18-Month File.

If you do only one thing from this series, do this one.

It takes an afternoon, it requires no decision, and in our experience it changes how the advisor thinks about the question more than anything else on the list. Not because it produces an answer, but because it replaces a vague sense of being tied down with two specific dates.

The two clocks

The note. If you took a package to join your current firm, it was almost certainly structured as a forgivable loan: money advanced up front, forgiven in slices over a term, with the unforgiven balance repayable if you leave first. The structure is unpacked in what is in a forgivable promissory note.

The deferred compensation. Awards granted over years, vesting on a schedule, forfeited in whole or in part on resignation depending on the plan. The firm-by-firm behaviour is in what happens to deferred compensation when you leave.

They almost never align, and the binding constraint is whichever one leaves more on the table at any given moment. That is the date you actually care about, and it moves as tranches vest and the note amortizes.

The three places advisors get their own dates wrong

The note clock usually starts at funding, not at joining. Advisors count from their first day. The document generally counts from the day the money moved, and those can be weeks or months apart. On a nine-year note, a two-month discrepancy is not fatal; on the question of whether you are clear this calendar year, it decides it.

Deferred compensation vests in tranches, not as a block. Thinking of it as one pot with one date is the most common error, and it obscures the thing that actually matters, which is shape. Several small tranches vesting steadily is a different situation from one large tranche eighteen months out, even when the totals match.

The forgiven portion does not come back. The slices already forgiven have typically been recognized as income year by year. Leaving early does not reverse that; it makes the remaining balance a debt. Advisors sometimes reason as though the whole arrangement unwinds. It does not. Leaving before your forgivable loan is forgiven covers what actually happens, and the year-by-year tax picture is involved enough to walk through with your own tax adviser.

How to build it

Get the documents. The promissory note with its funding date and forgiveness schedule, and the plan documents plus award statements for every deferred compensation grant. Your firm can produce all of it and asking is routine.

Then make one table with one row per event. Date, what vests or amortizes, and the amount at risk if you were to resign the day before.

That is the whole exercise. What it produces is a picture with an obvious shape: usually a long stretch where the number at risk is large and falling slowly, and then one or two points where it drops sharply.

Those drop points are your windows.

What the picture is for

Not for setting a departure date. Most advisors who do this exercise are not leaving, and a good share conclude they should stay, which is a real answer covered in when does it make sense to stay at my wirehouse.

It is for three other things.

It tells you whether any conversation is even worth having yet. An advisor four years from a meaningful window has a different question in front of them than one who is nine months out.

It reframes retention offers. A firm making a case for you to stay is, in effect, bidding against a number you now know precisely.

And it prevents the worst version of this, which is discovering a cliff after resigning. That happens, it is expensive, and it is entirely avoidable with an afternoon and a document request.

Part five, what makes a book portable, turns from the money to the clients, and to the sorting exercise that predicts who actually follows.

Modelling this is standard work for us, years ahead of any decision and frequently for advisors who stay put. If you want your own two schedules mapped against each other properly, request an introduction. The advisor never pays.

Sources (4)

Frequently asked

When does an advisor become economically free to change firms?

When two conditions are met: any forgivable note from a prior move has finished amortizing, so leaving triggers no repayment, and the deferred compensation you would forfeit has either vested or become small enough not to govern the decision. Those two dates rarely coincide. The later of them is the real constraint, and mapping both is usually the first genuinely clarifying exercise an advisor does.

How do I find out exactly when my note finishes amortizing?

From the promissory note itself and the funding date, not from memory. The clock generally starts when the note was funded rather than when you joined, and those can differ by weeks or months. The note states the term and the forgiveness schedule. If you cannot locate your copy, your firm can produce it, and requesting it is routine.

What happens to the amount already forgiven if I leave early?

The forgiven portion has typically been recognized as income year by year as it was forgiven, and leaving does not reverse that. What becomes due is the unamortized balance still outstanding, which is a genuine debt. The year-by-year tax mechanics are involved enough to warrant walking through with your own tax adviser rather than estimating.

Should I wait for a vesting cliff?

It depends entirely on the size of the tranche and what waiting costs. A cliff is a real number with a real date, which makes the arithmetic unusually clean: compare the amount at risk against the value of moving sooner rather than later. What makes cliffs different from smooth vesting is that they create a specific, defensible reason to pick a month. Smooth schedules almost never do, because there is always something unvested.

Is this worth mapping if I have no plans to move?

Yes, for two reasons that have nothing to do with leaving. It is a material part of your own compensation and you should know its shape. And an advisor who knows exactly what they are holding is in a different position in any retention conversation than one working from an impression.

Filed

September 15, 2026