- Fee-onlyno commissions
- No account minimumfor investment management
- English & Spanishnatively
- Accepting new clientsIn person in Norwalk, by video, or at your Malibu business
- Fiduciaryin writing, always
- DFPI-registeredCRD #311270
- In business sinceDecember 2020
- Free 15-minute callno obligation
The defining financial fact in Malibu is not income, it is concentration. A great many households here hold most of their net worth in one coastal property, insured on terms that have changed sharply, in a city where the largest employer puts its people on a private-university 403(b) rather than a public pension. Both of those change what the rest of the balance sheet has to do.
Start with the honest part: we are 46.4 miles from Malibu
We do not have an office in Malibu, and we are not going to imply otherwise with a service-area pin. our principal office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 46.4 miles away. If a firm's Malibu 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 Malibu 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 Malibu
Malibu is 9,637 people arranged along Pacific Coast Highway between Topanga and the Ventura county line, with the canyons — Malibu, Latigo, Kanan Dume, Las Flores — running inland from it. Point Dume, the Colony, Big Rock and the Civic Center area around Malibu Country Mart are separate worlds joined by a single road, and when that road closes the city functions as several small towns. Pepperdine University sits above Malibu Canyon Road and is the largest employer within the city limits. The schools are Santa Monica-Malibu Unified. The working economy beyond the university is small and specific: hospitality and restaurants along the highway, retail at the Country Mart and the Village, and a large, permanent construction and trades economy serving a housing stock that is more or less continuously being rebuilt.
Here is the situation this page exists for. In most of California, a house is one asset among several. In Malibu it is frequently 70 or 80 per cent of everything a household owns, it cannot be sold in pieces, and its carrying cost is no longer stable. Insurers have withdrawn from high-brush and coastal-canyon addresses across this coast, and a great many properties now sit with the California FAIR Plan — the state's insurer of last resort, designed as a fallback and functioning for many addresses as the only option. FAIR Plan coverage is limited by design, which is why a separate difference-in-conditions policy is usually needed alongside it to cover what it excludes. Malibu has burned repeatedly over the past several decades and the market has repriced accordingly. None of that is a prediction; it is the present cost structure of owning here, and a financial plan that treats the annual carrying cost of the property as a fixed number is planning around a figure that has not been fixed for years.
Three things follow, and they are the whole of the work. The portfolio should not be built as though the house is diversifying anything — it is a single, illiquid, geographically concentrated position, and the liquid assets are the only counterweight there is. The cash reserve has a second job here, which is deductibles, temporary housing and the gap between a claim and a payment. And an estate consisting of one house plus a modest account forces the next generation into a sale at whatever moment it arrives; a long-held property with a low Proposition 13 assessed base only keeps that base for a child under Proposition 19 if the child makes it their own principal residence, and even then only up to a limit. That is a conversation for your estate attorney and the county assessor, and we will say so every time. What Proposition 19 changed · California estate basics.
The local employer base
Pepperdine University
The largest employer in the city, and a private university — so faculty and staff are in an employer-sponsored 403(b) with employer contributions, not CalPERS and not CalSTRS. There is no defined benefit floor underneath it, which means the contribution rate and the fund choices inside the plan are carrying the entire retirement. How a 403(b) works.
City of Malibu and Santa Monica-Malibu Unified
The city's own staff are CalPERS members. District certificated staff are in CalSTRS and classified staff in CalPERS. Policing and fire come from Los Angeles County, so the deputies and firefighters working this coast are LACERA members rather than city employees. LACERA.
Hospitality and retail along PCH
Restaurants, hotels, the Country Mart and the Village. Seasonal, tipped and hourly, with high turnover and small payrolls — which means the state retirement mandate reaches almost every one of these employers and a Roth IRA at the CalSavers limit is frequently the only account a worker has. Restaurants · Hotels.
Construction, trades and design
Rebuilding and remodelling is a permanent industry on this coast, not an occasional one: general and specialty contractors, architects, landscape and interior firms, most of them owner-operated and paid on progress draws. Income is lumpy, retention is held back, and the owner almost never has a plan. General contractors · Solo 401(k).
Public pensions and rollovers
Malibu's public systems are the ordinary ones — CalPERS at the city, CalSTRS and CalPERS at Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, LACERA behind county fire and sheriff. What makes the city unusual is that its single largest employer is not in any of them. A private-university 403(b) looks superficially like a teacher's 403(b) and behaves nothing like it, because the teacher has a pension underneath and the university employee does not: the account is the retirement, so the employer contribution, the deferral rate and the expense ratios inside the fund menu are the three levers that decide the outcome. If you have both — a 403(b) here and a pension from an earlier career — they should be read together. The systems compared.
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 Malibu 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.
Malibu questions
Most of our net worth is the house. What does that actually mean for the portfolio?
It means the portfolio is not the risky part of your balance sheet — the house is. One asset, one location, one hazard, no ability to sell a quarter of it. The practical response is to stop thinking of the liquid accounts as the speculative money and start treating them as the counterweight: broadly diversified, deliberately not concentrated in California real estate or in anything that moves with it, and large enough in cash and short-term holdings that nothing about the property ever forces a sale of the rest. How we invest.
Our insurance moved to the FAIR Plan. Does that change the financial plan?
Yes, in two places. The carrying cost of the house is now a moving number rather than a fixed one, so it has to be modelled as a range in any retirement projection rather than as a line item. And FAIR Plan coverage is narrower than a standard homeowner's policy, which is why a difference-in-conditions policy usually sits alongside it — whether yours is adequate is a question for a licensed insurance broker, not for us. We do not sell insurance and take no commission on any, which is exactly why we will tell you to go and get that reviewed.
I am on Pepperdine's 403(b). Is that the same as a teacher's 403(b)?
Same section of the tax code, completely different job. A public school teacher's 403(b) sits on top of a CalSTRS pension and is supplemental. A private university employee's 403(b) is the retirement — there is no pension underneath it. That changes what matters: the employer contribution and whether you are getting all of it, the deferral rate, the cost of the funds you are actually in, and what happens to the balance if you leave the university. Bring a statement and we will read the fund costs with you at no charge. The fee analyzer.
Do you actually meet clients from Malibu, or is this page just for search?
We meet them. Our office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 46.4 miles from Malibu — 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 Malibu 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.