- Fee-onlyno commissions
- No account minimumfor investment management
- English & Spanishnatively
- Accepting new clientsIn person in Norwalk, by video, or at your Stevenson Ranch business
- Fiduciaryin writing, always
- DFPI-registeredCRD #311270
- In business sinceDecember 2020
- Free 15-minute callno obligation
We work with Stevenson Ranch households in their highest-earning decade: engineers and managers at the Valencia industrial employers, hospital and college staff, and long-distance commuters to Burbank, the Valley and the Westside. Incomes here are high and so are the fixed costs. The planning question is almost always concentration — one house, one employer, one plan nobody has ever written down.
Start with the honest part: we are 55.6 miles from Stevenson Ranch
We do not have an office in Stevenson Ranch, and we are not going to imply otherwise with a service-area pin. our principal office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 55.6 miles away. If a firm's Stevenson Ranch 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 Stevenson Ranch 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 Stevenson Ranch
Stevenson Ranch is unincorporated Los Angeles County, not part of the City of Santa Clarita, even though it shares the valley's schools, shopping and sheriff's station. There is no city business licence and no city council; the Board of Supervisors and the county departments govern it. The neighbourhood was master-planned and built out largely from the 1990s onward, which shows in the housing stock, the association structures and the demographics: a median household income of $158,434, the highest of the thirteen places on these pages, and a population weighted heavily toward families with school-age children.
Work is nearby and far away at once. The Valencia industrial centre across the freeway carries medical device manufacturing, aerospace supply, biotech and distribution; Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, College of the Canyons and the William S. Hart district employ a substantial local professional workforce. But a large share of Stevenson Ranch earners commute down the 5 to Burbank, the Valley or over the hill, which is why the household calendar and the household budget are both organised around a drive. Long commutes have a financial cost people never write down: two vehicles, fuel, and an hour a day that is not available for anything else.
The recurring planning issue is that success has been concentrated. The house is large and appreciated, the employer's stock plan has been vesting for years, and the retirement accounts sit in whatever the plan's default fund happened to be. None of that is a mistake. It is simply undirected, and undirected works fine until the decade before retirement, when the sequence of returns starts to matter far more than the average one. Why sequence risk matters · What rebalancing actually does.
The local employer base
The Valencia industrial centre
Medical device manufacturing, aerospace supply, biotech and distribution across the freeway. Where the employer is a subsidiary of a listed company there is usually restricted stock or an employee stock purchase plan on top of the 401(k), and the position grows unmanaged. Equity compensation.
Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital and area practices
A private hospital with its own 403(b) or 401(k) rather than a public pension. Clinical staff who move between hospital systems mid-career accumulate stranded accounts that should be consolidated by direct transfer. Rollovers · Healthcare.
College of the Canyons and the Hart district
Community college and school district employees are CalSTRS or CalPERS members depending on classification, with 403(b) and 457(b) options beside the pension. Part-time and adjunct faculty are often in neither system and should verify what they are in. CalSTRS.
Commuters to Burbank and the Westside
Studio, media, aerospace and professional employers an hour south. The plans are private 401(k)s, sometimes with deferred compensation for senior staff, and the household frequently has four accounts across three former employers. Consolidation is the first useful step.
Public pensions and rollovers
Stevenson Ranch is mostly a private-plan community. CalSTRS and CalPERS reach the school and college employees; LACERA reaches the county staff and sheriff's personnel who live here; the hospital and the industrial employers are entirely private. In a two-earner household with one pension and one 401(k), the planning trap is treating the pension as a floor that removes the need to think about the rest — a pension is a fixed income stream and inflation, not markets, is what erodes it. The systems compared · Pension versus lump sum.
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 Stevenson Ranch 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.
Stevenson Ranch questions
We're unincorporated rather than in the City of Santa Clarita. Does that change anything financially?
For a household, very little — the property tax base and state income tax are the same either way. For an owner it can matter: your licensing, permits and any local business tax run through Los Angeles County rather than a city, and county rules apply to home-based businesses. It also means your local representation is a county supervisor, not a council member. If you run a business.
Most of our wealth is home equity and my company stock. How much is too much?
There is no single threshold, but there is a useful test: if a bad year for your employer and a flat decade for local housing happened at the same time, what would the household have left that is liquid? If the honest answer is 'not much', the concentration is doing more work than you intended. Reducing it is a tax question as much as an investment one, so we sequence it with your CPA. Tax-loss harvesting · California capital gains.
I commute ninety minutes each way and we have never written any of this down.
Then the first deliverable is a single page: what comes in, what is committed, what is saved and where it sits. Most households at this income level have never seen those four numbers together, and the exercise usually finds either a savings rate lower than expected or a cash pile earning nothing. We meet by video in the evening for exactly this reason. What planning involves.
Do you actually meet clients from Stevenson Ranch, or is this page just for search?
We meet them. Our office is at 12838 Rosecrans Ave in Norwalk, about 55.6 miles from Stevenson Ranch — 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 Stevenson Ranch 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.