“Apple vests quarterly. I was repatriating every time. The cost was invisible.”
About half. I sell roughly 50% of each vest shortly after it lands and repatriate the proceeds. The rest I hold. My thinking is that the sell-half covers the lifestyle and the hold-half builds the portfolio. It's worked okay.
Fidelity, sell within a week of vest, international wire to my Indian account. It felt clean and simple. I wasn't tracking the FX rate in detail — I'd see the USD I sent and the INR that arrived and assume rounding explained the gap.
A colleague who had done the math. He showed me that Fidelity's wire spread was about 45–50 paise per dollar. On my amounts, that was roughly ₹38,000 a year. He'd switched to Rovia six months earlier. I switched the following quarter.
Continue the sell-half approach but more deliberately. I want to start holding Apple shares past the 24-month mark before selling the hold half — I've been lazy about LTCG optimisation. The repatriation efficiency from Rovia frees up enough bandwidth to actually think about this properly.
Conservative-moderate. My salary is already in tech — I'm inherently exposed to the sector's cycles. I want my investment portfolio to be a bit more balanced. AAPL is a reasonable anchor but I don't want to keep adding to it indefinitely.