- Fee-onlyno commissions
- No account minimumfor investment management
- English & Spanishnatively
- Accepting new clientsIn person in Norwalk, by video, or at your Lake Forest business
- Fiduciaryin writing, always
- DFPI-registeredCRD #311270
- In business sinceDecember 2020
- Free 15-minute callno obligation
Lake Forest is where south Orange County actually makes and ships things, so the questions here belong to owners as often as to employees: a manufacturer with thirty people and a 401(k) nobody has benchmarked since it was opened, a founder whose retirement plan is really the sale of the company, a professional practice with room for a plan design far better than the one it has. The engineers and managers inside those buildings have their own set.
Start with the honest part: we are 36.2 miles from Lake Forest
We do not have an office in Lake Forest, and we are not going to imply otherwise with a service-area pin. our principal office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 36.2 miles away. If a firm's Lake Forest 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 Lake Forest 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 Lake Forest
Lake Forest incorporated in 1991 out of what everyone had called El Toro, then annexed Foothill Ranch and Portola Hills at the turn of the century, and it kept something its neighbours never had: industrially zoned land. The blocks bounded by Bake Parkway, Rockfield Boulevard, El Toro Road and the 5 are dense with light manufacturing — medical devices and instruments, electronics and contract assembly, plastics, machining, auto aftermarket, and the distribution operations that feed them. Up the hill in Foothill Ranch, Oakley's headquarters sits on its own campus off Portola Parkway. The two lakes the city is named for are private association water in the middle of all of it.
That business base changes who we are useful to. A company with twenty-five or fifty people on payroll almost always has a retirement plan, and the owner almost never knows what it costs. Sponsoring a plan makes you a fiduciary under ERISA whether or not anyone told you so, and the duty is procedural — you are required to have a process for choosing and monitoring the investments and for knowing what the record-keeper, the adviser and the funds are each being paid. Most plans in these buildings have never had that process written down. Benchmarking one is a couple of hours' work and it is frequently the highest-return hour in the business. What a 401(k) actually costs · Plan fiduciary services · Fee analyzer.
The other owner conversation here is the exit. When most of a family's net worth is a privately held company and a house in the same city, that is a concentration problem with a deadline attached. The planning that matters happens two to five years before a sale, not after — how the proceeds will be taxed in California, what the buyer's structure does to the seller, whether a cash balance plan in the last profitable years shelters income that would otherwise be taxed at the top rate, and what the money is supposed to do once it exists. We do the money side and coordinate with your CPA and your attorney on the rest. Cash balance plans · Capital gains in California.
The local employer base
The Bake Parkway and Rockfield business parks
Medical device, electronics, plastics, machining and distribution firms, most between ten and two hundred employees. Plan quality ranges from a well-run safe-harbor 401(k) to a bundled product with revenue-sharing buried in the fund line-up. Safe harbor · Medical device · Machine shops.
The Foothill Ranch corporate campus
Oakley is headquartered there, and the surrounding buildings hold corporate and technical staff on private-employer plans. Large-employer 401(k)s are usually cheap and usually mis-allocated; the useful review is what you hold inside it and how it lines up with everything you own outside it.
Saddleback Valley Unified School District
The district's schools serve most of the city. Credentialed staff belong to CalSTRS and the rest of the payroll belongs to CalPERS. The supplemental 403(b) options offered on campus are a separate decision from the pension, and the cost difference between them is not disclosed in any way a busy teacher would notice.
Owner-operators and specialty trades
Contractors, fabricators, freight and service businesses run out of the same corridors, mostly with fewer than ten employees. For an owner with no staff or a spouse only, a solo 401(k) usually beats anything a payroll provider will sell. Solo 401(k) · Business plans.
Public pensions and rollovers
This is a private-plan city with a public exception. The school district accounts for most of it — CalSTRS on the credentialed side, CalPERS on the classified side — with city hall in CalPERS and county workers in OCERS, a 1937 Act system separate from CalPERS. Everyone else — which is most of the working population — is relying on a 401(k) balance, which means the fees inside it, the allocation and the order it gets spent in are the whole retirement. OCERS · CalSTRS · Why the order of returns matters.
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 Lake Forest 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.
Lake Forest questions
I sponsor a 401(k) for twenty-five people. Am I a fiduciary, and what does that actually require?
You are, from the moment you signed the plan document, and it is one of the few responsibilities in a small business that carries personal exposure. What it requires is a process: a written statement of how investments get chosen, a periodic review that is actually documented, and a clear-eyed look at every fee being paid out of participant assets — record-keeping, advice, the funds themselves, and any revenue-sharing flowing between them. An adviser can take on part of that duty in writing, either as a 3(21) co-fiduciary or a 3(38) discretionary manager. The difference between the two · ERISA basics.
I want to sell the company in about three years. When should we start planning?
Now, and the reason is that almost everything with real leverage has to happen before the deal is signed. How the sale is structured changes what you keep. Whether you can shelter a final couple of high-income years through a cash balance plan depends on setting it up in time. What the proceeds should own afterwards is a question worth answering before the wire arrives rather than while you are staring at a bank balance you have never seen before. We are not your tax counsel and we will not pretend to be — we work alongside your CPA and your transaction attorney and handle what happens to the money.
Everything we have is the business and the house, both in Lake Forest. Is that a problem?
It is a concentration, and concentration is not automatically wrong — it is usually how the wealth got built in the first place. It becomes a problem when the same local economy drives both assets and there is nothing liquid behind them. The practical work is unglamorous: build a genuinely independent pool outside the company, make sure the business is not the only thing funding your retirement, and check that the buy-sell agreement and the insurance behind it still reflect what the company is worth today rather than what it was worth when the lawyer drafted it.
Do you actually meet clients from Lake Forest, or is this page just for search?
We meet them. Our office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 36.2 miles from Lake Forest — 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 Lake Forest 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.