By Veerraju Chitturi — IIM Calcutta, 4 years at Walmart
I've been at Walmart for almost four years. For most of that time, my RSUs just sat there.
Part of the reason was that Walmart stock is stable. It's not a meme stock, it's not going to triple overnight, it's not going to crash. It felt almost like a glorified FD — safe, predictable, quietly doing its thing. There was never an urgent reason to touch it.
But that's only half the truth. The other half is that the legacy portals make it genuinely painful to do anything with your stock.
I work in tech. I'm not the kind of person who is supposed to get stuck on a UI. And still, I found Fidelity's interface so confusing that I had to get on a call with a friend just to figure out how to navigate it and move my own money. Think about that for a second — I had to ask another human being to help me click through screens to access something I already owned. If that's the experience for a tech employee, I don't want to imagine what it looks like for someone outside the industry.
So most of the time, I just… didn't do anything. Inertia wins.
The realization that actually changed my mind
When I finally tried Rovia, the experience was a total 180. The flow was guided. The numbers were where I expected them to be. I wasn't fighting the tool to understand my own position.
But the bigger thing — the thing that actually got my attention — was the tax situation.
Fidelity labels everything you've held for over a year as "Long Term." That feels reassuring. You see the label, you think, fine, I'm in the long-term bucket, I'll get the better rate when I sell.
Here's the catch: that "1 year" threshold is the US rule. For Indian tax residency, the long-term capital gains window on foreign-listed equity is 24 months, not 12. So a stock you've held for, say, 18 months shows up as "Long Term" inside Fidelity's UI — and "Short Term" in the eyes of the Indian Income Tax department.
If I hadn't switched, I would very likely have sold a chunk thinking I was in the safe zone and ended up with a tax bill I wasn't expecting. Not a small one, either.
This is the kind of thing that should be loud and obvious on any platform serving Indians with US RSUs. It wasn't. Rovia treats it like the first-class problem it is.
What actually changed after the switch
The shift hasn't been dramatic in terms of activity. I'm not suddenly day-trading my RSUs. What changed is that I finally have optionality.
I can hold if I want to hold. I can diversify gradually into global ETFs. I can move into other US stocks. I can do all of it from one dashboard, without forex friction, without wrestling a legacy interface, and without accidentally triggering a tax event I didn't plan for.
For four years, I had real wealth tied up in stock and almost no ability to make decisions about it. Now I do.
If you're in a similar spot
If you're a tech employee in India sitting on US RSUs you haven't really touched — Walmart, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whoever — a few things worth checking before your next vest:
- ✓Look up what your actual long-term capital gains window is under Indian tax residency, not whatever your US broker labels it as. For most of us holding US equity, it's 24 months.
- ✓Add up what you're losing to forex spread every time you move money out. It compounds over years in a way that's easy to ignore until you total it up.
- ✓Honestly ask yourself whether you've avoided touching your RSUs because the strategy is right, or because the tools are too painful to use. There's a difference, and only one of those is a real decision.
Shoutout to the Rovia team for building something that actually works for employees with stock-based wealth. Took longer than it should have for someone to do this.
