Vested RSUs sitting in your brokerage account and a home down payment coming up creates a genuine decision: sell the shares to fund it, or finance the down payment separately and keep the equity position intact. Both are reasonable, and the right answer depends on factors beyond just "which is cheaper."
Selling RSUs to fund a down payment has a real, calculable cost: capital gains tax on the appreciation, and the opportunity cost of exiting a position you may have wanted to hold. If your company's stock has appreciated significantly since vesting, the tax hit alone can be a meaningful chunk of the proceeds, worth calculating precisely rather than assuming the sale price is what you'll actually net.
Financing the down payment instead and keeping your RSUs preserves your equity position and its potential further upside, at the cost of taking on debt with a real interest rate. This is essentially a leveraged bet that your company's stock will continue performing well enough to justify paying personal loan interest rather than simply cashing out now.
Concentration risk is worth being honest about, regardless of which path you choose. If a meaningful portion of your net worth is tied up in your employer's stock, keeping that concentration intact by financing the down payment instead of diversifying through a sale is a real risk decision, independent of the tax and interest cost comparison, worth weighing on its own terms.
A middle path a lot of people land on: sell enough RSUs to cover a portion of the down payment, reducing concentration and tax-optimising the sale over time if possible, and finance the remainder with a personal loan, rather than an all-or-nothing choice between the two extremes.
Timing matters too, particularly around your company's trading windows and any blackout periods if you're at a public company, since RSU sales are often restricted to specific windows, which may or may not align conveniently with your home purchase timeline, a real logistical constraint worth checking well before you need the funds.
If you land on financing part or all of the down payment, it's worth comparing options specifically, and checking your credit score beforehand tells you the realistic rate you'd be working with as you run the full comparison against the RSU-sale alternative.
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