This is for career firefighters, engineers, captains and paramedics in California — municipal departments, county departments and the joint authorities. Your gross income and your pensionable compensation are two different numbers. Your career has a physical end date rather than a chosen one. And the disability and survivor elections in front of you sit against a set of statutory presumptions that most private-sector financial advice has never encountered.
What is actually different about your money
Fire schedules do not fit the arithmetic the rest of the economy runs on. A 48/96, a 24-hour rotation, a Kelly day — these push you past 40 hours in most weeks, which is exactly why fire and law enforcement are governed by a separate federal rule, the section 207(k) work period, instead of the ordinary weekly overtime standard. That distinction then reappears inside your pension. PEPRA excludes overtime from pensionable compensation but carves out overtime as defined in 29 U.S.C. § 207(k), and how much of your pay lands inside that carve-out is decided by your retirement system's pay-code schedule rather than by your paycheque. LACERA, to take one example, publishes a line-by-line list of which fire pay codes are pensionable and which are not. Find yours and read it. It is probably the single most useful hour you will spend on your own money this year.
The second structural fact is that this job has a physical end. Safety retirement ages exist because the work does not tolerate a forty-year career, and a meaningful number of firefighters leave on a disability finding rather than on a date they picked. California workers' compensation law also carries statutory presumptions for firefighters and peace officers covering certain cancers, heart trouble, particular infectious conditions, and — under a section currently scheduled to sunset — post-traumatic stress disorder. We are not doctors and this page will not speculate about anyone's health or odds. The financial point is narrower and it is real: because those presumptions exist in law, the disability and survivor elections attached to your pension carry more weight in this job than in nearly any other, and each of them is made once. Your union representative knows the claims landscape and an attorney handles the contested parts. Our job is making sure the household's money works whichever way it goes.
Meanwhile the finances have a shape every firehouse would recognise. The gross is strong, sometimes remarkable, and a large slice of it is overtime, callback, strike-team assignments and a second occupation on the days off. The pension underneath it is computed on the base rate. A firefighter who budgets on the gross and saves whatever survives the month is planning, in effect, for a retirement income far below the life the paycheque describes — and the account that would fix that, deferred compensation, is the one that got set during academy paperwork and has not been opened since.
What you are usually sold
Fire stations get visitors. Some are association-endorsed representatives, some sell life insurance, some sell annuities, and most know the job well and genuinely like the crews. The product that comes up most is permanent life insurance presented as a tax-advantaged retirement supplement; the second is a fixed indexed annuity for money leaving the department. Neither is illegitimate. Both pay the person presenting them a commission that will never appear as a line on your statement, and both deserve to be compared against the plain alternative before the application is signed rather than after the surrender period starts.
There is also a quieter default nobody sold you: deferred comp parked for twenty years in the most conservative option on the menu because that is where it sat on day one. No commission was paid on that. It still 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
The first job is separating base from everything else. We rebuild the household budget on the base rate and the benefit it will actually produce, then treat overtime, callback and mutual-aid pay as the funding source for the accounts you control. That is not a lecture about spending; it is just matching the plan to the formula that will pay for it.
The second is the deferred-comp account, which for a career that can end at 50 or 53 is structurally the right home for supplemental money. Once you separate from the department, governmental 457(b) deferrals come out without the 10% federal early-distribution penalty, at any age — ordinary income tax still applies, but the penalty does not. That one feature is why the reflexive advice to roll everything into an IRA at retirement can be the most expensive thing a firefighter does on the way out. We also look at the special three-year catch-up well before you are inside the window, and we decide pre-tax against Roth on purpose rather than by inertia.
The third is the paperwork nobody enjoys: beneficiary designations that actually match the will, a survivor election modelled with your spouse in the room and the system's own figures on the table, and a straight answer to what the household would need if a disability retirement arrived next year. We do not provide legal or tax advice, and we will send you to your association representative, an attorney and your CPA for their parts of it. The investment side is ours, and we publish what it costs.
The retirement structures that actually apply to you: LAFPP, LACERA safety, OCERS safety, CalPERS safety, 457(b) deferred comp. 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 firefighters and paramedics 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
Does my overtime count toward my pension or not?
It depends on which overtime and which system. PEPRA excludes overtime from pensionable compensation for new members, with a carve-out for overtime as defined in 29 U.S.C. § 207(k) — the work-period rule your schedule already runs on. Each retirement system decides how that carve-out maps onto its own pay codes and publishes the result. So the answer is knowable and specific: get your system's pensionable pay-code list, and read your earnings statement against it line by line. Do not take the answer from a colleague hired in a different year.
I am on a 48/96 and my pay changes every month. How do I budget any of this?
Two accounts and one rule. The household runs on base pay, deposited to a checking account, and everything else lands in a second account it does not spend from. From there, a fixed monthly transfer funds the plan whether the month was heavy or light. Payroll deferral into deferred comp does most of that work automatically. The point is not discipline for its own sake — it is that a pension built on your base rate cannot support a life built on your gross.
The presumptions exist. What should I actually do about them financially?
Three concrete things, none of which requires predicting anything. Know what your system's service-connected and non-service-connected disability provisions actually say, in writing. Know what your survivor election would pay and what it costs monthly to elect it. And know what life insurance is genuinely in force — department-provided, association-provided and private — including whether any of it ends the day you leave. That is a filing-cabinet afternoon, not a crisis. The claims side belongs to your union representative and, when contested, an attorney.
I want to go at 53. What covers health insurance until Medicare?
Whatever your employer and your bargaining unit have agreed, which varies enormously between departments and between hire dates within the same department — some carry a retiree medical subsidy, some carry a health reimbursement arrangement, some carry nothing at all. Get the actual terms from your employer before you set a date, then treat the shortfall between separation and Medicare at 65 as a specific number in the plan rather than something to sort out later.
My employer offers a 457(b) and something else as well. Which do I fund first?
Ask first whether the second plan is genuinely separate, because a 457(b) has its own federal limit while 401(k) and 403(b) deferrals share one. Where both are available, the sequence usually turns on any employer contribution, then on cost and menu quality, then on the separation-age rule — which frequently argues for filling the 457(b) when an early retirement is plausible. It is a half-hour of comparison work with your two plan documents on the table.
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.