I have a relative who inherited stock in a closed corporation from her deceased spouse. She’s not too good with technical matters (including finance) and made some spectacular mistakes with her stock that resulted in couple of lawsuits from an aggrieved co-investor. The anxiety associated with these lawsuits lowered her quality of life for a couple of years although she could afford the lawyer fees. Her lawyer drafted an elaborate defense that totally missed obvious and elementary aspects of her case for a cool $120k in fees. Her case ended up being dropped just before going to trial each time. The first case was by a pro se plaintiff. I was impressed how in the U.S. you can walk up and punch someone and be charged with assault and also walk up, slap someone with a lawsuit, cost your victim a small fortune in legal fees, and not be charged with assault. What’s the difference? (BTW: the complaint filed by the pro se plaintiff was a hilarious rambling mess. How can such a document even be allowed to enter the U.S. legal system?)
I’m in the same boat as my relative. I was gifted stock in a private corporation, and it’s driving me crazy. My quality of life would be so much higher if I could find a way to get rid of my stock. What’s the problem? Well, I’m the only technically-trained stockholder who has held a technical / managerial position in a corporation so 95% of the operating responsibility is mine with a right to only a small fraction of the income / assets. Actually, the money is not the issue, it’s just that I don’t respect my co-investors (all of them are relatives; some are spoiled, entitled brats) and don’t want to be in business with them.
There are various options: sell my stock back to the corporation (not going to happen), sell my stock to another stockholder (might happen), gift my stock to other stockholders (might happen), sell my stock to an outsider (don’t have any candidates). I googled looking for an e-bay-like marketplace where I could list my stock for sale, but didn’t find anything. All of the websites I found are for the pre-IPO private stock of companies that have registered with the secondary market platform. Purchasing my stock on an e-bay-like website would be extremely risky for a buyer, so I would expect a huge discount from liquidation value.
It would be so much easier to decide what to do if my stake in the company weren’t so darn valuable. If I gifted my shares (avoiding the restrictions of the stock purchase agreement) my post-gift net worth would still be quite high, but I have a residual nagging greed impulse that I can’t quite shake. I’m working on it, though.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant.
I’m in the same boat as my relative. I was gifted stock in a private corporation, and it’s driving me crazy. My quality of life would be so much higher if I could find a way to get rid of my stock. What’s the problem? Well, I’m the only technically-trained stockholder who has held a technical / managerial position in a corporation so 95% of the operating responsibility is mine with a right to only a small fraction of the income / assets. Actually, the money is not the issue, it’s just that I don’t respect my co-investors (all of them are relatives; some are spoiled, entitled brats) and don’t want to be in business with them.
There are various options: sell my stock back to the corporation (not going to happen), sell my stock to another stockholder (might happen), gift my stock to other stockholders (might happen), sell my stock to an outsider (don’t have any candidates). I googled looking for an e-bay-like marketplace where I could list my stock for sale, but didn’t find anything. All of the websites I found are for the pre-IPO private stock of companies that have registered with the secondary market platform. Purchasing my stock on an e-bay-like website would be extremely risky for a buyer, so I would expect a huge discount from liquidation value.
It would be so much easier to decide what to do if my stake in the company weren’t so darn valuable. If I gifted my shares (avoiding the restrictions of the stock purchase agreement) my post-gift net worth would still be quite high, but I have a residual nagging greed impulse that I can’t quite shake. I’m working on it, though.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant.