- Fee-onlyno commissions
- No account minimumfor investment management
- English & Spanishnatively
- Accepting new clientsIn person in Norwalk, by video, or at your Silver Lake business
- Fiduciaryin writing, always
- DFPI-registeredCRD #311270
- In business sinceDecember 2020
- Free 15-minute callno obligation
Silver Lake's distinctive client is the owner who crossed a line without noticing it: the moment a creative business takes on employees, the solo plan is off the table, the state mandate becomes an obligation, and the useful question turns into how to save seriously for yourself while controlling what covering everyone else costs. That is a design problem with a good answer.
Start with the honest part: we are 20.9 miles from Silver Lake
We do not have an office in Silver Lake, and we are not going to imply otherwise with a service-area pin. our principal office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 20.9 miles away. If a firm's Silver Lake 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 Silver Lake 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 Silver Lake
Silver Lake is built around the junction where Sunset and Santa Monica meet and around the reservoir north of it — still a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power facility, with the path around it doing duty as the neighbourhood's town square. Sunset carries the shops and restaurants, Rowena and Hyperion carry more of the same toward Atwater, and the hillside streets between them are 1920s to 1950s houses, a fair number of them architecturally significant and most of them on lots that are half staircase. Ivanhoe and Micheltorena are the elementary campuses. As in Los Feliz, much of the apartment stock predates 1978 and sits under the City's Rent Stabilization Ordinance, and the ownership picture splits three ways: people who bought decades ago and are sitting on a Proposition 13 base bearing no relation to the market, people who bought recently and are carrying a mortgage to match, and a large renting majority.
What makes this page different from its neighbour's is employees. The Sunset Junction economy is not freelancers, it is small operators: restaurants, coffee, bars, bakeries, boutiques, fitness and yoga studios, salons, design and production shops. Three to fifteen people, often a partnership rather than a sole proprietor. That crosses a line the freelancer never crosses. A solo 401(k) is unavailable the moment you have an eligible employee who is not your spouse. Registering with the state programme stops being optional. And the plan design question becomes a real one, because a safe-harbour 401(k) with profit sharing lets an owner put away a large amount for themselves while setting, in advance, what covering the staff will cost — which is precisely the number owners want to know before they will consider any of it. Safe harbor explained · The state programme against a 401(k) · What a plan costs.
One local detail worth stating because it is routinely got wrong. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employees are not in CalPERS and are not in the city's civilian system either — the department has its own, the Water and Power Employees' Retirement Plan, with its own board, its own tiers and its own retiree health arrangements. If that is your household, the paperwork comes from the department rather than from the city, and anybody comparing your situation to a CalPERS member's is comparing the wrong things. The same neighbourhood also holds a lot of county employees commuting downtown, who are in LACERA, and a smaller number of city civilian staff in LACERS. Three public systems, one hillside, no overlap. LACERA · LACERS.
The local employer base
Sunset Junction and Sunset Boulevard small business
Restaurants, coffee, bars, boutiques, fitness studios and salons, mostly owner-operated with small payrolls and thin margins. All are inside the state retirement mandate. For the owner the question is never whether to comply but whether to comply in a way that also builds something. Restaurants · Fitness studios.
The Department of Water and Power
The Silver Lake Reservoir Complex is a DWP facility, and DWP employees are in the Water and Power Employees' Retirement Plan — separate from CalPERS and separate from the city's civilian system, with its own tiers and its own retiree health benefit. Read your plan's documents, not a CalPERS guide. How the systems differ.
Design, production and creative studios
Hyperion, Glendale Boulevard and the Sunset corridor carry small S-corps and LLCs doing design, post-production, branding and music. Staffing is usually mixed — a few W-2 employees, a rotating set of 1099 contractors — which changes who has to be covered by a plan and who does not. Plan types compared.
County of Los Angeles employees commuting downtown
The county is the largest employer in the region and a great many of its professional staff live on this side of the river. County employees are LACERA members, with a 457(b) beside the pension that is very often left at its default from the day of hire. LACERA · 457(b) plans.
Public pensions and rollovers
Silver Lake's public-pension picture is unusually fragmented for one neighbourhood: LACERA for county staff, LACERS for city civilian staff, the Water and Power Employees' Retirement Plan for the department, CalSTRS and CalPERS at the Los Angeles Unified campuses, and nothing at all for the large self-employed and small-business population. None of these are interchangeable, the tiers differ within each of them, and advice written for one is frequently wrong for another. The common thread across the public ones is the deferred compensation account sitting beside the pension, which is the piece you control and the piece almost nobody has revisited. 457(b) plans · All the systems.
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 Silver Lake 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.
Silver Lake questions
I have six employees at my restaurant. Can I still use a solo 401(k)?
No. A solo 401(k) is only for a business with no employees other than the owner and a spouse; once you have eligible staff, that plan is unavailable and keeping one open would be an operational problem rather than a saving. What replaces it is a safe-harbour 401(k), where the employer contribution is set in advance and the plan automatically passes the tests that otherwise limit what an owner can defer. It costs more than nothing and considerably less than owners assume. How safe harbor works · Estimate the cost.
We bought here years ago and the house is most of our net worth on paper. Should we borrow against it?
Borrowing to invest turns a paper gain into a leveraged position with a monthly payment attached, and it goes wrong in exactly the scenario where you can least afford it: a market fall and an income interruption arriving together. There are narrow cases where a line of credit is a sensible piece of a plan — a genuine liquidity bridge, not a bet — and there are a great many more where the honest answer is that the house has already done its job and the sensible next step is building liquid assets out of income instead. How we think about it.
I work for DWP. Is my retirement the same as a City of Los Angeles employee's?
No, and this trips people up constantly. The department administers its own retirement plan rather than participating in the city's civilian system or in CalPERS, with its own governing board, its own benefit tiers and its own retiree health provisions. Anything you read about CalPERS tiers or LACERS formulas does not describe your benefit. Bring the plan's own documents and your most recent statement and we will read them against the rest of what you hold — we charge nothing to look at a pension statement.
Do you actually meet clients from Silver Lake, or is this page just for search?
We meet them. Our office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 20.9 miles from Silver Lake — 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 Silver Lake 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.