<prompt> Human: Ok, so Im a noob in this arena.I work for a small private company in a managment position. I make approx. 82k annual plus an annual bonus which has been agreed upon as 10k annual.My boss and I were doing cost to complete reports on my projects this week and he brought up my bonus. He said he hadnt discussed it with the 2 other shareholders, but he was thinking of proposing a 20k bonus for me this year, 10k cash and 10k in stock.Now, i dont own any stock. I had previous been offered a chance to buy in, but we are not really in a financial position for me to do so, nor do i think I really necessarily want to with the current ownership.The company has 300,000 shares, valued at 8 per. There are apparently 100,000 treasury shares, of which my shares would come from.Anyways, Im looking for advice. Cash would be great as we are looking at purchasing a newer vehicle and have a second child coming in a few months. But am I being short sighted in seeing the bird in the hand? Im not really sure of the tax implications this year and going forward.The company has been profitable in the 10 yrs Ive been here, largely due to my work.  <response>: For a private company in Kansas that is already paying dividends, there isnt much upside in stock. If you were working for a startup and they offered you 130 of the company, that would have an outside chance of making you rich. As it stands, company stock is an asset that has no market value, might be hard to liquefy, and probably wont make you rich. So I would take the 150 over the 1010 cashstock ratio, purely from a financial standpoint.However, there may be other considerations. If holding stock is a ticket higher in the company where you can assume more ownership and control, and this is something you want, you might decide to take the stock instead. It sounds like the owners recognize that you are important to the company, so if you want to stay in the long term, they probably want you to have a vested interest. This is less of a personal finance rationale and more of a career rationale I have a few general comments on accepting company stock that dont necessarily apply to OP but might be helpful to anyone in a similar situation who may be lurking in this thread. Another problem with company stock is that if the company runs into significant problems or even fails, you lose both your job and your portfolio. For diversification purposes, holding your own employers stock is a bad deal. It can be made better if theres a lot of potential growth and you get a respectable amount of stock. One of my coworkers had an offer at Yelp that would have made him a millionaire post-IPO. Also, if you work for a publicly traded company and they give you stock, thats great! Just sell it as soon as you get it--the cost basis will be the sale price so that solves your tax problems, and you can dump it into better investments, like an IRA. Most stock brokers used by big companies to issue RSUs support this--you can set them up to sell all shares upon vesting and then just wait for the check to come in the mail or the EFT to hit your bank account. 