This page is for the owner, not the payroll department. If you employ people in California you already have a compliance problem, and the site covers that elsewhere. This is the other question, the one nobody asks you: your net worth is one illiquid asset you also work at, the Roth IRA door has probably already closed on you personally, and the retirement plan is "sell the business" — which is a plan with a single point of failure.
What is actually different about your money
Take the household balance sheet and cross out the business. What is left? For most California owners the honest answer is a house, a retirement account that has not been funded properly since the second location opened, and the cash in the operating account that is not really yours because payroll is Friday. If a prospective client walked in with eighty per cent of their net worth in one small, unlisted, unlisted-for-a-reason company, we would call that a concentrated position and spend an hour on it. Almost nobody frames an owner's position in those words, because the asset is also the job, the identity and the thing you built. It is still a concentrated position. Worse, it is a correlated one: the recession that halves the value of the company is the same recession that cuts the distributions you were living on, empties the receivables and makes the building harder to lease. Diversification means owning things that do not all fail in the same week. Most owners own one thing, twice.
Then the part that catches successful owners specifically. Every CalSavers account is a Roth IRA, and Roth IRAs have income limits: for 2026 the ability to contribute phases out between $153,000 and $168,000 of modified AGI for a single filer and between $242,000 and $252,000 filing jointly, and above the top of the range nothing is permitted at all. So the owner who registers the business, runs the payroll deductions and answers the staff's questions about the state programme is frequently the one person on the census who cannot legally use it. That is not a criticism of CalSavers; it was built to reach people with no plan at all, and it does. It simply means the state's answer is not your answer. The arithmetic, with the phase-out table.
What is available to you is a ladder, and most owners stop on the first rung. A one-participant 401(k) covers a business owner with no employees, or that owner and a spouse, and it is superb while it lasts — but the IRS is blunt that the no-testing advantage vanishes the moment you hire someone who becomes eligible. At that point the plan has to pass nondiscrimination testing, which is what safe harbor exists to solve: a defined employer contribution, immediately vested, in exchange for being deemed to pass. And above that sits the rung almost nobody climbs. A cash balance plan is a defined benefit pension, so its limit is set by the benefit it promises rather than by an account cap — $290,000 of annual benefit for 2026 under section 415(b), against the $72,000 that section 415(c) allows one person across all defined contribution sources. For an owner in their fifties with stable profit and a younger staff, that difference is the largest legal deduction available in the tax code to somebody who is not a corporation, and it is genuinely under-used. It also has teeth: mandatory funding, an enrolled actuary, real employee cost, and a multi-year commitment. The honest version is here.
What you are usually sold
Owners are a well-covered market, and most of the people covering it are competent and sincere. Two products dominate. The first is permanent life insurance — whole life or indexed universal life — presented as a private pension, a tax-free income stream, or the funding vehicle for a buy-sell agreement you do need to have. There are real uses for it, including genuine buy-sell funding and estate liquidity. It is also a commission product, and the commission is paid by the insurer out of the policy rather than invoiced to you, which is why the meeting is free and the illustration is sixteen pages long. The second is the bundled plan that arrives with the payroll service: cheap, fast, and structured so that nobody in the arrangement is your fiduciary and the cost is collected from your employees' balances through fund expenses rather than billed to the company.
The third pattern is not a product at all. It is the exit-planning seminar, the free business valuation, and the succession workshop — all of which are perfectly legitimate ways to meet an owner and most of which end in the same place. Ask the two questions that cut through all of it: how are you paid if I say yes, and what is the plain alternative worth? What a plan actually costs.
None of that is illegal and not all of it is wrong. But you are entitled to know how the person recommending it is paid, and to compare. Our standard · our fees, published · the difference between an RIA and a brokerage.
What we do instead
We run two balance sheets, not one. The business has its own, and your household has another, and our job is the second one. In practice that means the household portfolio is deliberately built to not resemble the company: if the revenue depends on construction starts, the portfolio does not need more construction; if the customers are three national accounts in one sector, the account outside the company is where breadth comes from. It means a cash reserve sized against payroll cycles and seasonal receivables rather than the generic three months. And it means money leaving the business on a schedule, in the good years, into accounts the company's creditors and the company's bad quarter cannot reach.
Then the plan ladder, in order, with arithmetic rather than a brochure. While it is just you and possibly a spouse, a one-participant 401(k) is usually the answer and the deferral is $24,500 with no income limit of any kind at any level of income. When the first non-spouse employee becomes eligible, we run the census — ages, salaries, headcount, turnover — against safe harbor designs and tell you what the employer contribution actually costs before you commit. If the profit is high, stable and several years old, and you are meaningfully older than your staff, we model a cash balance layer with your third-party administrator and actuary, and we will tell you when the geometry does not work. We are fee-only: no recordkeeper, fund company, insurer or TPA pays us anything, so the recommendation costs us nothing to make honestly. How the plan work runs · your industry's guide.
And the exit, which is where most of this ends. If your retirement plan is the sale of the business, it is a plan that depends on one buyer, one market window, one set of financials, one key employee not leaving and one owner staying healthy long enough to run a process that takes a year. We do not value businesses, we do not draft deal documents and we do not advise on structure — valuation belongs to a CPA or an accredited appraiser, and the purchase agreement, the earn-out and the entity questions belong to an attorney. What we do is the part that has to work if the sale is late, smaller or never: money moved out of the company and invested, every year the profit exists, so that the sale becomes the upside rather than the whole plan.
The retirement structures that actually apply to you: Solo 401(k), Safe harbor 401(k), Cash balance, SEP-IRA, SIMPLE IRA, CalSavers. Which of those fits depends on how you are paid and whether anyone else is on your payroll — the plan chooser walks through it, and this guide compares them honestly.
A first conversation, at no cost
Fifteen minutes on the phone. If your question has a short answer you get it on the call, and if we are not the right firm for you we will say so.
Where business owners are in Los Angeles and Orange County
We work across both counties from a principal office in Norwalk. These are the county guides, each naming the cities where this audience actually concentrates:
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.
Questions
I registered the business with CalSavers. Doesn't that cover me too?
It covers your obligation as an employer. It very often does not cover you as a saver. CalSavers accounts are Roth IRAs, so the federal Roth income limits apply to every participant, and in 2026 a single filer is fully locked out above $168,000 of modified AGI and a joint filer above $252,000. Owners cross those lines constantly. Being locked out personally does not exempt the business — you must still register or sponsor a qualified plan and certify the exemption. The owner income trap · certifying the exemption.
I am about to hire my first employee. What happens to my solo 401(k)?
It stops being a solo 401(k). The IRS describes a one-participant plan as covering a business owner with no employees, or that person and their spouse, and states plainly that the no-testing advantage vanishes once the employer hires. An employee who meets the plan's eligibility terms has to be included, and the plan becomes subject to nondiscrimination testing unless it is designed as a safe harbor. This is not an emergency, but it is a deadline-shaped problem: eligibility, the plan document and the payroll integration all need attention before the employee crosses the threshold, not after. Solo 401(k) mechanics · what safe harbor buys and costs.
Is a cash balance plan realistic for a business my size?
It depends on three things and no others: whether your profit is high and genuinely stable, whether you are meaningfully older than your staff, and whether you can commit for several years. The plan is a pension — an enrolled actuary certifies the contribution annually, the funding range is largely mandatory rather than discretionary, employees get real contributions as the price of your deduction, and the IRS expects a pension to be permanent rather than a two-year manoeuvre. Practices, firms and established family businesses with a stable owner-to-staff age gap are the classic fit; a business with swing years is the classic non-fit. The full comparison, including what it costs.
How much of my own money should be outside the business?
There is no percentage we can print here that would be advice to you, because the honest answer depends on how correlated the rest of your life is to the same risk — whether the building is also yours, whether your spouse works there, whether you have personally guaranteed the line of credit. What we can say is the principle: the money outside should be enough to make the sale of the business optional rather than compulsory, and it should not be invested in more of what you already own. Getting from principle to number is the conversation. How allocation decisions actually get made.
My plan is to sell in about five years and retire on the proceeds. Is that wrong?
It is not wrong. It is undiversified. Everything depends on one transaction happening near one price in one window, and the things that move that price — a recession, a lost account, a key employee leaving, your own health, an interest-rate move that changes what buyers can borrow — are mostly outside your control. Treat the sale as the best case rather than the base case, and fund a retirement that survives its absence. We do not value businesses or structure deals; that is CPA, appraiser and attorney work, and you should have all three engaged well before a letter of intent. Our half is the money you take out along the way.
What does this cost, and is there a minimum?
There is no minimum to open an account. We ask for $50 a month of continuing deposits, because a plan you do not fund is not a plan. Investment management is 1.5% to 2.0% of assets per year, billed quarterly, and it is published on the site — which is more than most firms in this market will tell you before a meeting.
Do I have to have a lot saved already?
No, and that is deliberate. Most firms set a minimum precisely to avoid people at the start of this. We built the opposite: $0 to open, and the same fiduciary standard whether the account is four figures or seven.
¿Atienden en español?
Sí. Atendemos en español, y buena parte de nuestro material existe en español, escrito originalmente, no traducido por máquina.