[thechat] Employee Share Purchase - opinions..?

[Martin Burns]

So now I'm an employee of a company which doesn't have egregious share
ownership rules, and I'm being offered discounted IBM shares.

Anyone got any opinions on whether this is worthwhile?

I can either:

1) get a 15% discount on the trading price on the day of purchase (ie
payday) or the offer price (whichever's the lower), paid out of post-tax
income

2) Buy the shares from pre-tax (gross) income at normal trading price and
get additional matching shares equivalent to a 15% discount, but there's a
lock-in of 3 years before I can really sell them without costing money.

Option (2) sounds sensible from a tax-relief PoV. In either case, I can
spend up to 10% of my gross salary, and I can mix and match between the 2.

If anyone can make head nor tail of
http://www.ibm.com/investor/stock/stockchart.html
they can see what the recent performance has been.

Cheers
Martin

--
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