This is for below-the-line crew — IATSE and Teamsters, camera, grip, electric, art department, post, hair and makeup — and for anyone working through a loan-out corporation. Eligibility in the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plans is earned in hours, so a thin year threatens coverage and pension credit together. Residuals arrive years after the work, income can swing threefold, and the loan-out is an employer that could sponsor a plan and almost never does.
What is actually different about your money
Here is the fact that separates this audience from every other one on this site. Under the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plans, what you earn is largely irrelevant to your benefits; what counts is hours. Health eligibility is earned by working a qualifying number of hours within a six-month qualifying period — commonly around 600 hours to become eligible in the first place and around 400 hours in each period afterwards to stay covered — with hours beyond that going into a Bank of Hours you can draw on to carry a gap. Pension credit runs on a separate clock: roughly 400 credited hours in a year makes one qualified year, and five qualified years generally vests you. These thresholds are set by the Plans and by the agreements behind them, they have changed before, and yours should be confirmed with the plan office rather than with this page. But the shape never changes, and the shape is the point. Two clocks, running separately, so a difficult year can cost you a health period while still earning a pension year, or the reverse. And a twelve-hour day at scale and a twelve-hour day at double scale count exactly the same.
What that does financially is unusual. Every other audience's slow-year problem is income. Yours is income, plus insurance for your household, plus a year of pension credit, arriving together — and it is the insurance piece, not the income, that actually keeps people awake. It also creates a decision no ordinary financial plan contains: near the end of a qualifying period, a lower-paying job that carries qualifying hours can be worth more to you than a better-paying one that does not. Whether you are in a position to make that choice depends entirely on knowing your hours position in month three or four rather than discovering it in month six. The record is kept by the plan office, not by whoever hired you, and it is readable at any point.
Then the two things that make the cash flow strange. Residuals arrive years after the work that produced them, in amounts nobody forecasts, and they feed the trusts on their own lag as well — so a payment can turn up long after you stopped associating it with a job. And the swing is genuinely large: a strong year and a slow or strike-affected year in this business can differ by a factor of three. That has two consequences worth building around. An emergency reserve here has to be sized to a plausible period without work rather than to a generic three-month rule, because the gaps in this industry are longer than that rule was designed for. And the strong year is the only year in which the larger retirement structures are reachable at all, which makes what you do in it disproportionately important.
What you are usually sold
Two patterns, plus a silence. The first is insurance and annuity product sold on the union hall and conference circuit, pitched directly at the fear described above — guaranteed money that does not depend on hours. The fear is entirely legitimate and the products are real. The mismatch is that a fixed premium is close to the last obligation you want against an income that can halve, and the guarantee is not free; it is priced into the product, and the price is rarely quoted in dollars. The second pattern is the business-management relationship. A great many people in this industry have someone doing bookkeeping, loan-out payroll and bill payment, and that is a genuinely valuable service done well. Whether the same person is a registered investment adviser acting as a fiduciary on your portfolio is a separate question with its own answer, and asking it directly is entirely reasonable.
The silence is the expensive part. A single-member loan-out corporation paying its owner a W-2 salary is an employer with one employee, and an employer can sponsor a retirement plan. Nobody sells that conversation, so most people who could have one have never heard it described. It is the single most under-used structure in this audience.
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 plan from your hours calendar rather than from the tax year. That means we want your qualifying period dates and your current hours position on the table at the first meeting, and we build the cash reserve around a thin period rather than around a quarter. The reserve that carries you through a gap is separate money from the money that is invested, and keeping them separate is what stops a slow spring from liquidating a retirement account at the worst possible moment. Why the order of bad years matters.
If a loan-out already exists, the plan question is squarely ours and it is usually unanswered. That corporation can sponsor a 401(k) that accepts both your deferral — up to $24,500 for 2026 — and an employer contribution on the wages it pays you, against a $72,000 combined limit for 2026. Where a loan-out's income has been high and steady for several years, a cash balance plan on top becomes worth pricing. What we will not do is tell you whether to form a loan-out, what salary it should pay, or how to structure it. That is work for your CPA and an entertainment attorney, and it carries payroll, franchise tax and California employer obligations that have nothing to do with investments — including the fact that a loan-out paying a W-2 is a one-employee employer in this state, with the state's own requirements attached. The owner-only 401(k) and cash balance plans explain what each one does.
The slow year gets used rather than endured: it is when converting money into a Roth costs least, and we model that before December. Residuals go through the same rule as everything else — a fixed percentage leaves the account the week it arrives, before it becomes part of the household's spending. And because so much of this audience lives in a handful of neighbourhoods, the local pages carry the rest: Studio City, North Hollywood, Hollywood and Encino.
The retirement structures that actually apply to you: Motion Picture Industry Pension & Health Plans, loan-out corporation plans, Solo 401(k), SAG-AFTRA / IATSE plans. 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 entertainment industry crew 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
My period ends in six weeks and I am short on hours. What do I actually do?
First, get the real number. Call the plan office and ask where you stand and what your Bank of Hours holds, because the bank exists precisely to carry a period like this one and a great many people do not know they have hours in it. Second, look at what is available between now and the period end with hours rather than rate as the first filter — a few days of lower paid covered work can be worth more than a better job that carries nothing. Third, find out from the Plans what the options are if you fall short, because there are usually some and they have deadlines. None of that is investment advice and none of it comes from us. What we do is make sure there is cash sitting ready for exactly this, so the answer is never to sell investments in a bad month.
Should my loan-out corporation have a retirement plan?
If it already exists and pays you a W-2 salary, this is the question most worth asking. That corporation is an employer, and it can sponsor a 401(k) that takes your deferral and an employer contribution on those wages — potentially far more than an IRA allows, in a structure the loan-out is already paying an accountant to maintain. Where the income has been consistently high, a cash balance plan on top is worth modelling. What we will not advise on is whether to have a loan-out, what it should pay you, or how it should be structured; those are questions for your CPA and an entertainment attorney and they carry real employer obligations. Bring us the structure that exists and we will tell you what plan fits it.
A residual cheque arrived. Do I invest it all at once or spread it out?
Both approaches are defensible and anyone who tells you one is guaranteed to win is selling. Investing the whole amount immediately puts more time in the market; spreading it over several months reduces the chance of committing everything on an unlucky day and, more practically, reduces the odds you abandon the plan if it drops in the first month. What matters more than either is that the money leaves the checking account quickly. A residual sitting in checking in February is a residual that has been spent by April. The comparison in full.
Last year was $210,000 and this year is $70,000. What should the low year be used for?
Conversions, primarily. Moving money from a traditional IRA or an old employer plan into a Roth is taxed at the rate your income puts you in, so a low year is the cheapest year to do it, and the amount converted can be sized to fill a bracket rather than overshoot it. It is also the year to check whether direct Roth contributions are available again, since the phase-out that closed at $168,000 for a single filer in 2026 is nowhere near a $70,000 year. Do the arithmetic in autumn, not in April. The estimator.
Is the MPI pension enough on its own?
We cannot tell you that, and neither can anybody who has not seen your statement — any firm that answers that question in the abstract is guessing. What we can describe is how the arithmetic works. A multiemployer defined benefit pension pays a benefit built from your credited service and the plan's formula, it generally requires five qualified years to vest at all, and it is set by the plan rather than by markets. That makes it a floor, and floors are valuable. Whether it covers the life you intend to live depends on what that life costs and what else you hold, which is a calculation rather than an opinion. Get your statement, and we will read it alongside everything else you own.
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.