- Fee-onlyno commissions
- No account minimumfor investment management
- English & Spanishnatively
- Accepting new clientsIn person in Norwalk, by video, or at your Hidden Hills business
- Fiduciaryin writing, always
- DFPI-registeredCRD #311270
- In business sinceDecember 2020
- Free 15-minute callno obligation
Hidden Hills has no local economy to describe, so this page does not invent one. The work here is what wealth management means when the income arrives in irregular blocks rather than fortnightly: sizing a contribution to the year that can absorb it, keeping a trust matched to the family's actual intentions, and planning what happens to a business or a catalogue when the person who built it stops.
Start with the honest part: we are 46.6 miles from Hidden Hills
We do not have an office in Hidden Hills, and we are not going to imply otherwise with a service-area pin. our principal office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 46.6 miles away. If a firm's Hidden Hills page does not tell you where its actual office is, that is worth noticing — the August 2026 teardown of this market found out-of-area firms running dozens of city pages each, including one with a Norwalk page containing nothing about Norwalk.
So the question is not proximity. It is whether what we do is worth the drive, a video call, or us coming to you — because we do all three, and evenings run by video. Two things travel perfectly well over distance and are unusually hard to find at any distance: a fee schedule published on the website, and a fiduciary standard you can hold us to in writing. Neither requires us to be down the street.
Is your financial advisor in Hidden Hills actually a fiduciary?
Most people assume yes. The answer depends on how the person is registered. An investment adviser representative owes a fiduciary duty — care and loyalty, across the whole relationship, and it cannot be waived. A registered representative of a broker-dealer is held to Regulation Best Interest, which attaches at the moment of a recommendation and, in the SEC's own words, imposes no duty to monitor an account absent an agreement.
Both can be good at the job. They are not the same promise. You can check any firm in ten minutes: Form ADV at adviserinfo.sec.gov, individuals on BrokerCheck, and the Form CRS. Ours is linked here, and the standard is spelled out on our fiduciary page. Aduna Capital is fee-only: paid by clients, by nobody else, with no commissions and no proprietary products. The full comparison is here →
Who we work with in Hidden Hills
Hidden Hills was incorporated in 1961 and is residential end to end — large lots, private roads, bridle trails, gates with staff on them, and not one square foot zoned for business. It buys its policing from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and most other services from the county, and its children go to Las Virgenes Unified schools in Calabasas. The income figure on this page reads $250,000 because that is where the American Community Survey stops counting, not because it is a measurement of the place. When we built the employer-facing pages for the state retirement mandate, Hidden Hills was one of three cities left out of them entirely, for the straightforward reason that there is nobody here to comply.
What is here is a small number of households whose money arrives in a shape that ordinary planning tools do not handle. A production year, a tour, a licensing deal, a business sale or a single very large payment can make one tax year worth ten of the ones around it, and the conventional advice — contribute steadily, dollar-cost average, keep three months of expenses — is written for people whose income does not behave like that. The right answer runs the other way: put an outsized amount away in the year the money is there, using a plan that can actually absorb it, and hold a reserve sized to a long quiet stretch rather than to a tidy number of months. A defined benefit or cash balance plan sponsored by your own corporation will take a far larger deductible contribution than any 401(k) will, and it is the single most commonly unused tool at this income level. How cash balance plans work · Planning around irregular income.
The other half of the work is transfer, and it is mostly housekeeping that nobody has done. A trust drafted a decade ago that was never funded — assets still titled personally, so the document governs nothing. Beneficiary designations on old accounts that name a person from a previous chapter of a life, and which override the will regardless of what the will says. Ownership of a company, a catalogue or a partnership interest with no agreement covering what happens to it. The federal estate and gift exemption has moved several times in recent years and will move again; what it is in the year you act is a question for your estate attorney, and we will send you to one rather than guess. What we do is make sure the accounts, the titling and the beneficiary forms actually match the document you paid to have drafted. Working with trusts · California estate basics.
The local employer base
There is no employer base here, and we are not going to invent one
Hidden Hills has 1,738 residents and no commercial zoning at all — no offices, no shops, no light industry. Residents earn their income somewhere else entirely. Any page describing the Hidden Hills business district is describing a different city.
Entertainment, music and media households
Income paid through a loan-out corporation or an S-corp, arriving in blocks tied to a production, a release or a tour, with residuals and royalties behind it on their own schedule. The corporation is an employer, and an employer can sponsor a plan for the wages it pays. Solo 401(k).
Owners of closely held companies
The largest asset is usually the company, and its value depends on a person who eventually stops. What is missing is generally a buy-sell agreement that is funded, a valuation somebody has actually done, and enough liquidity outside the business to settle an estate without forcing a sale of it. Planning around a business.
Las Virgenes Unified and contracted county services
The few public employees connected with the city are county staff in LACERA, or district staff in CalSTRS and CalPERS at the Las Virgenes schools the city's children attend. The city itself employs almost nobody. LACERA.
Public pensions and rollovers
There is essentially no public-pension exposure in Hidden Hills. Where a pension exists in one of these households it is usually a fragment left over from an earlier career — a small vested benefit from a guild plan, a frozen corporate plan, or a few years of public service a long time ago — and it has generally been forgotten rather than planned around. Those fragments are worth finding: they pay for life, they do not start automatically, and a plan office cannot send you anything if it does not have your current address. The retirement systems explained.
If you are leaving a job, the rollover decision is where the most money is quietly lost — the 20% mandatory withholding under IRC § 3405(c) catches people who take the cheque themselves. The four options, step by step · Seven costly mistakes · Run the numbers. For public employees: CalPERS, CalSTRS, LACERA and OCERS explained.
A first conversation about Hidden Hills money, at no cost
Fifteen minutes on the phone. If your question has a short answer you will get it on the call, and if we are not the right firm for you we will say that too.
Our fees, published
No competing advisor page in this area publishes its fees. Here are ours.
| What | Fee |
|---|---|
| Investment management | 1.5% to 2.0% of assets per year; Advisers may set a rate below the standard schedule, as low as 0%, at their discretion — and whatever rate applies to you is disclosed in writing before you engage. Our Form ADV Part 2A, Item 5, states the fee as up to 2.00% of assets per year, subject to negotiation; the firm may waive all or part of it. Generally billed quarterly in arrears |
| Account minimum | No minimum account balance |
| Commissions and product fees | None — we are fee-only |
| Solicitor compensation | May be received or paid under disclosed arrangements |
| Initial conversation | Free, 15 minutes, no obligation |
Complete fee details in our Form ADV Part 2A, Item 5.
Hidden Hills questions
One year the income was ten times a normal year. What should have happened?
The plan should have existed before that year did. In a year like that the useful moves are a retirement plan large enough to absorb a serious contribution — which for most people at that income means a defined benefit or cash balance plan alongside a 401(k), not instead of it — gifting appreciated assets rather than cash if charity is part of the picture, and deliberately not converting anything to Roth in a year when your bracket is at its highest. The deadlines for establishing and funding these plans differ by plan type and have changed in the last few years; get the date from your CPA rather than from a website, including this one.
Our trust was drafted years ago and nobody has looked at it since.
Then the first question is whether it was ever funded. A revocable trust only controls what has been retitled into it; anything still held in your own name passes as though the trust did not exist. The second question is what your beneficiary designations say, because retirement accounts and life insurance pass by that form and ignore the trust and the will entirely. Redrafting is your attorney's work. Reconciling the account titling and the beneficiary forms against what the document intends is ours, and it is usually an afternoon.
Most of what we own is the house and the company. Is that a problem?
It is a liquidity problem before it is anything else. Neither asset can be sold quickly, partially or quietly, and an estate that consists of two illiquid things tends to force a sale of one of them at whatever moment it is least convenient. The work is building a third pile — marketable, diversified, in your own name and reachable — over years rather than in a hurry, and making sure whatever agreement governs the company says what happens to it. How we invest.
Do you actually meet clients from Hidden Hills, or is this page just for search?
We meet them. Our office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 46.6 miles from Hidden Hills — clients come to us, we come to them, or we meet by video, and evening appointments can be arranged. What we will not do is claim an office in Hidden Hills that does not exist. Call (657) 571-2607. We are registered as an investment adviser in California.
What is the account minimum?
There isn't one to open. We ask for $50 a month of continuing deposits, because a plan you do not fund is not a plan. Our fee is 1.5% to 2.0% of assets under management per year, billed quarterly, and it is published — which is more than most firms in this market will tell you before a meeting.
¿Atienden en español?
Sí. Atendemos en español, y buena parte de nuestro material existe en español, escrito originalmente, no traducido por máquina.