In Los Angeles County you can work a single incident alongside crews from three different retirement systems. Which one is yours depends on the patch, and it sets your formula, your contribution rate and what you can do with your deferred comp when you leave. This page is about sorting out which is which, and what changes because of it.
Where firefighters and paramedics are in Los Angeles County
The Los Angeles Fire Department is a City of Los Angeles department, and its sworn members belong to Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions — the same system as LAPD, with numbered tiers assigned by hire date and a Deferred Retirement Option Plan that no other fire employer in this county operates. If you are LAFD, the DROP question will eventually be the largest single financial decision of your career, and it is effectively one-way. Model it before you elect it.
The Los Angeles County Fire Department is LACERA. Its PEPRA safety members are in Safety Plan C; earlier members are in the legacy plans. County Fire covers the unincorporated county — Altadena and the canyon communities among them — plus dozens of contract cities including Norwalk, Lakewood, La Mirada, Santa Clarita, Palmdale, Lancaster and Malibu. It is also the reason the crew working an incident in a small southeast-county city is employed by the same body as the deputies down the street. The LACERA guide.
Then the cities that kept their own departments, all of them CalPERS safety employers with separately negotiated contracts: Long Beach, Pasadena, Burbank, Glendale, Downey, Torrance, Santa Monica, Culver City, Beverly Hills, El Segundo, Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Alhambra, Arcadia, Monterey Park, Montebello and Santa Fe Springs among them — the last of those a few minutes from our own front door. And one more system that gets forgotten entirely: the federal wildland crews on the Angeles National Forest are neither CalPERS nor LACERA. They are in the federal system, saving through the Thrift Savings Plan, and none of the California pension guidance on this site applies to them.
What changes locally
The mutual-aid map is what makes this county unusual. Crews from three systems work the same incidents, share the same academies' worth of institutional lore, and give each other financial advice across lines that the actual rules do not cross. Advice about DROP is LAFPP advice. Advice about plan letters is LACERA advice. Advice about a city's formula is advice about that city's specific CalPERS contract and nobody else's. When something sounds authoritative at an incident, check whose system the person saying it belongs to.
The other local fact is strike teams. Large mutual-aid deployments generate a great deal of pay in a short window, and that pay is largely overtime — which PEPRA excludes from pensionable compensation apart from the § 207(k) carve-out. So a heavy season can raise a W-2 substantially and raise the pension by nothing at all. That is not an argument against the work; it is an argument for deciding in advance where the money goes, because it arrives all at once and it is the easiest money in this job to spend without noticing.
What we do about it
We start with the patch: employer, system, plan or tier, and whether reciprocity from earlier California service is in play. Firefighters who tested at several departments before landing somewhere permanent frequently have a few months of membership somewhere they have forgotten about, and it can matter.
Then we set a fixed monthly amount into deferred comp that survives a light month, and route strike-team and callback pay to it deliberately rather than after the fact. For a career that can end at 50, a governmental 457(b) is the account that behaves the way you need it to on the way out, and that is worth knowing years before you plan the exit. Why the separation rule matters.
And we do the household work: beneficiary forms that match the will, a survivor election modelled with both people present, and an honest account of what a disability retirement would do to the plan. We are minutes from the County Fire stations in the southeast corridor and we keep evening hours. We do not administer any pension, and we do not handle claims — those belong to your system, your union representative and, where contested, an attorney.
The structures that apply: LAFPP, LACERA safety, OCERS safety, CalPERS safety, 457(b) deferred comp. The full guide for firefighters and paramedics goes through each one, and here is the same audience in Orange County.
Fifteen minutes, no charge
We are in Norwalk, which is inside Los Angeles County and minutes from the Orange County line. Come to us, we come to you, or we do it by video — evenings by video.
Your city
Los Angeles County has 88 incorporated cities and about 9.7 million residents. These are the ones where firefighters and paramedics concentrate, each with its own page:
- Financial advisor in Los Angeles
- Financial advisor in Santa Clarita
- Financial advisor in Downey
- Financial advisor in Lakewood
- Financial advisor in Palmdale
- Financial advisor in Lancaster
- Financial advisor in Altadena
- Financial advisor in Malibu
All 89 cities we publish a page for →
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 am County Fire. Is my plan the same as a deputy's?
The same system and, for PEPRA-era members, the same safety plan — but not the same career. Retirement ages and formulas follow the plan; contribution rates, special pays and what your department codes as pensionable follow your bargaining unit's agreement. Confirm your own plan and pay codes with LACERA rather than assuming they match the person you are standing next to at an incident.
I am LAFD. Should I enter DROP?
That question cannot be answered in the abstract, and anyone who answers it quickly is guessing. Entry freezes the inputs to your pension calculation and is effectively irreversible, so the real question is whether entering at a particular moment beats entering later or not at all, given your service milestones and your household. Get LAFPP's own figures, then model the alternatives side by side before the paperwork. Our LAFPP page explains the shape of it.
My department is CalPERS. Which formula do I have?
The one your city contracted for, in the era you were hired. CalPERS safety contracts vary between employers, so a neighbouring department can carry different terms entirely — and if you entered on or after 1 January 2013 without reciprocity you are under a PEPRA formula regardless of what your city offered before. Request it in writing from CalPERS and keep the letter.
Does mutual-aid overtime raise my pension?
Generally not for a new member. PEPRA excludes compensation for overtime from pensionable compensation, with a carve-out for overtime as defined in 29 U.S.C. § 207(k), and your system publishes which pay codes fall inside it. The useful move is to treat that income as the funding source for the accounts you control — it is a deferral opportunity, not a pension increase.
I am a federal wildland firefighter on the Angeles. Does any of this apply to me?
Very little of it. Federal firefighters are in the federal retirement system with the Thrift Savings Plan alongside it — different rules, different limits, and no CalPERS or LACERA involvement at all. The household questions are the same and we are happy to help with those, but the pension guidance on this site is written for California systems and we will not pretend otherwise.
I work a County Fire station in a contract city like Norwalk or Lakewood. Who employs me?
Los Angeles County, which means LACERA. Contract cities buy fire service from the county; the station address tells you where you work, not who pays you. Our office is a few minutes from several of those stations, which is why a fair number of these conversations happen in person on a day off.
My spouse is an LAUSD teacher and I am County Fire. Do the two pensions interfere?
Mechanically, no — LACERA and CalSTRS are separate systems and neither reduces the other. In practice they need one plan: two survivor elections, two possible retirement dates, a 457(b) on your side and a 403(b) on hers with quite different cost profiles, and Social Security now paid without the WEP and GPO reductions repealed in January 2025. Her side of it is here.
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.