I have completely forfeited my salary, and donated ~$300k to Lightcone at the end of last year myself to keep us afloat
If you had known you were going to do this, couldn’t you have instead reduced your salary by ~60k/year for your first 5 years at Lightcone and avoided paying a large sum in income taxes to the government?
(I’m assuming that your after-tax salary from Lightcone from your first 5-6 years at Lightcone totaled more than ~$300k, and that you paid ~$50k-100k in income taxes on that marginal ~$350k-$400k of pre-tax salary from Lightcone.)
I’m curious if the answer is “roughly, yes” in which case it just seems unfortunately sad that that much money had to be unnecessarily wasted on income taxes.
I could have saved a bit of money with better tax planning, but not as much as one might think.
The money I was able to donate came from appreciated crypto, and was mostly unrelated to my employment at Lightcone (and also as an appreciated asset was therefore particularly tax-advantageous to donate).
I have generally taken relatively low salaries for most of my time working at Lightcone. My rough guess is that my average salary has been around $70k/yr[1]. Lightcone only started paying more competetive salaries in 2022 when we expanded beyond some of our initial founding staff, and I felt like it didn’t really make cultural or institutional sense to have extremely low salaries. The only year in which I got paid closer to any competetive Bay Area salary was 2023, and in that year I also got to deduct most of that since I donated in the same year.
(My salary has always been among the lowest in the organization, mostly as a costly signal to employees and donors that I am serious about doing this for impact reasons)
I don’t have convenient tax records for years before 2019, but my income post-federal-tax (but before state tax) for the last 6 years was $59,800 (2019), $71,473 (2020), $83,995 (2021), $36,949 (2022), $125,175 (2023), ~$70,000 (2024).
(My salary has always been among the lowest in the organization, mostly as a costly signal to employees and donors that I am serious about doing this for impact reasons)
If you had known you were going to do this, couldn’t you have instead reduced your salary by ~60k/year for your first 5 years at Lightcone and avoided paying a large sum in income taxes to the government?
(I’m assuming that your after-tax salary from Lightcone from your first 5-6 years at Lightcone totaled more than ~$300k, and that you paid ~$50k-100k in income taxes on that marginal ~$350k-$400k of pre-tax salary from Lightcone.)
I’m curious if the answer is “roughly, yes” in which case it just seems unfortunately sad that that much money had to be unnecessarily wasted on income taxes.
I could have saved a bit of money with better tax planning, but not as much as one might think.
The money I was able to donate came from appreciated crypto, and was mostly unrelated to my employment at Lightcone (and also as an appreciated asset was therefore particularly tax-advantageous to donate).
I have generally taken relatively low salaries for most of my time working at Lightcone. My rough guess is that my average salary has been around $70k/yr[1]. Lightcone only started paying more competetive salaries in 2022 when we expanded beyond some of our initial founding staff, and I felt like it didn’t really make cultural or institutional sense to have extremely low salaries. The only year in which I got paid closer to any competetive Bay Area salary was 2023, and in that year I also got to deduct most of that since I donated in the same year.
(My salary has always been among the lowest in the organization, mostly as a costly signal to employees and donors that I am serious about doing this for impact reasons)
I don’t have convenient tax records for years before 2019, but my income post-federal-tax (but before state tax) for the last 6 years was $59,800 (2019), $71,473 (2020), $83,995 (2021), $36,949 (2022), $125,175 (2023), ~$70,000 (2024).
Very helpful reply, thank you!
I appreciate that!