- Fee-onlyno commissions
- No account minimumfor investment management
- English & Spanishnatively
- Accepting new clientsIn person in Norwalk, by video, or at your Hollywood business
- Fiduciaryin writing, always
- DFPI-registeredCRD #311270
- In business sinceDecember 2020
- Free 15-minute callno obligation
Hollywood's median household income is $61,454 and its span is enormous, which means the useful work here is mostly the unglamorous kind: a first Roth IRA, an old 401(k) nobody rolled over, and a union pension record that follows a crew member between employers and gets forgotten the moment they leave the industry. We work in English and Spanish and there is no account minimum.
Start with the honest part: we are 24.2 miles from Hollywood
We do not have an office in Hollywood, and we are not going to imply otherwise with a service-area pin. our principal office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 24.2 miles away. If a firm's Hollywood 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 Hollywood 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 Hollywood
Hollywood is 62,860 people packed between the 101 and Melrose, with Hollywood Boulevard and the Walk of Fame running through the tourist half and Sunset carrying the working one. Paramount Pictures is on Melrose, Sunset Bronson and Sunset Gower face each other across Sunset, and the streaming companies have taken a great deal of the office space around them. Kaiser Permanente's Los Angeles Medical Center and Children's Hospital Los Angeles sit a short way east on Sunset. The Metro B Line runs beneath Hollywood Boulevard with stations at Western, Vine and Highland, which is why a large share of this neighbourhood does not own a car. Most people rent, and much of the housing predates 1978 and falls under the City of Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance.
There are two economies here and they barely overlap. The first is below-the-line production work: camera, grip, electric, sound, art department, costume, transportation. Where a collective agreement covers that work, the pension and health benefits behind it come from the Motion Picture Industry plans, and how qualifying hours drive them is set out on our Studio City page. The Hollywood-specific point is different and it is about memory. The plan office holds your record, not the production that hired you, so the credit survives every employer change — and it survives you leaving the business altogether. People who worked crew for six or eight years in their twenties and then went and did something else frequently have a vested benefit sitting there. It does not start paying automatically, and the plan office cannot reach you if it does not have your current address. That is a phone call worth making.
The second economy is hospitality and service: hotels along Hollywood and Sunset, restaurants, bars, venues, tour operators, retail, building services. Hourly and tipped, with schedules that change weekly. Two things follow that ordinary advice skips. Tips that are reported are what builds your Social Security record and what a mortgage underwriter can see; tips that are not reported build neither, which is a real trade-off rather than a lecture, and the tax side of it belongs to a CPA. And where an employer offers nothing at all, the state's programme is a Roth IRA with a $7,500 annual limit — a start, and a ceiling. Atendemos en español, y el material está escrito originalmente en ambos idiomas. Todo en español · Why the minimum is $50 a month.
The local employer base
Paramount, Sunset Bronson and Sunset Gower
Union crew on these lots are covered by the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plans, whose records are kept by a plan office rather than by the studio that hired you. Salaried studio and streaming staff are on private 401(k) plans, frequently with restricted stock, and the two groups can work on the same stage with nothing in common on the retirement side.
Hotels, restaurants and venues
The tourist corridor along Hollywood Boulevard and the nightlife along Sunset and Cahuenga are a dense block of small employers with tipped, hourly and seasonal staff. All are inside the state retirement mandate, and turnover means a worker can accumulate several tiny accounts in a few years. Hotels · Restaurants.
Kaiser Permanente and Children's Hospital Los Angeles
The two large healthcare employers on Sunset. These are private and nonprofit employers rather than public ones, so staff are in employer-sponsored plans — and for some represented groups, a defined benefit plan negotiated by contract rather than a state pension. Kaiser plans · Healthcare.
City of Los Angeles employees
A great many city workers live in and around Hollywood, and the city runs its own systems: LACERS for civilian employees, and the separate Fire and Police Pension system for sworn staff. Neither is CalPERS, the tiers differ, and the 457(b) beside them is the piece almost nobody reviews. LACERS · Fire and Police Pensions.
Public pensions and rollovers
Three unrelated retirement systems run through this one neighbourhood, and nothing connects them. Crew are in multiemployer trusts governed by collective agreements, where credit is earned in hours and the record lives at a plan office. City employees are in LACERS or in the Fire and Police Pension system, neither of which is CalPERS. And a large share of the hospitality workforce is in nothing whatsoever. If your household contains more than one of those — and plenty here do — then no single statement shows you where you stand, and the exercise is to lay all of them on a table at once. How the systems differ · 457(b) plans.
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 Hollywood 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.
Hollywood questions
I worked union crew for eight years and then left the industry. Is there a pension sitting there?
Possibly, and it is worth ten minutes to find out. Multiemployer plans vest by credited years and the benefit does not disappear because you stopped working under the agreement — but it also does not start paying on its own, and the plan office can only write to the last address it has. Call the plan office, confirm what you are vested in, update your address and your beneficiary, and get the estimate in writing. Then bring it to us and we will read it against everything else you have. We charge nothing to look at a pension statement.
Most of my income is tips. What does that mean for retirement?
Two concrete things. Reported tip income is what generates Social Security credits, and those credits are what a benefit is calculated from decades later — a year of unreported income is a year that does not count. It is also the earned income that makes you eligible to contribute to an IRA at all. How you report is between you and your tax preparer and we do not give tax advice, but the retirement consequence is not ambiguous. How Social Security is calculated.
Half my work is W-2 on a production and half is 1099. Which retirement account can I use?
Both sides, and they stack in a specific way. On the W-2 side you use whatever the employer offers, plus any union plan you are covered by. On the 1099 side you are self-employed, which means a SEP-IRA or a solo 401(k) against that income. The catch worth knowing: your personal elective deferral limit is a single limit across every 401(k) you touch in a year, so if you have deferred into an employer plan already, the solo plan's employee portion is reduced — the employer contribution on top is not. Solo 401(k) · Plan types compared.
Do you actually meet clients from Hollywood, or is this page just for search?
We meet them. Our office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 24.2 miles from Hollywood — 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 Hollywood 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.