When I was taking my first accounting classes in college, my dad casually mentioned that years earlier he had owed this crazy thing called the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). He couldn’t understand why and nothing about his income felt unusual, yet he ended up with a much bigger bill than expected. As I learned more, it hit me: it must have been tied to the Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) he received when he worked at AOL (a bygone era of dial-up tones and CDs in the mail, righ
