This is for California families whose money has outgrown its paperwork: a position concentrated in one company, property held since the 1970s, a trust drafted at a different address with different children. The problem is no longer the rate of return. It is cost basis, how things are titled, which beneficiary form silently controls what, what a transfer does to a property tax bill — and the fact that the next generation has usually never been shown any of it.
What is actually different about your money
Start with the position that is too big. It might be founder’s stock, or fifteen years of one employer’s restricted stock units, or a building bought in 1984 that is now worth more than everything else combined. Every adviser you have ever met has told you it is too concentrated, and they are right, and you have not done anything about it — because diversifying is not an investing decision at that size. It is a tax decision. Sell a long-held position and the federal long-term rate can reach 20%, the net investment income tax adds 3.8% above a threshold the IRS states is not indexed for inflation, and California ignores the holding period entirely and taxes the whole gain as ordinary income at up to 13.3%. Nobody wants to write that cheque, so the position sits. But holding is also a decision, and it is the only one of the two whose downside has no ceiling: the tax cost of selling is arithmetic you can run in an afternoon, while the risk of one company being most of your net worth is not knowable at all. The work is not choosing between those. It is building a schedule — across tax years, across lots, alongside charitable gifts and harvested losses — that gets you out deliberately instead of all at once or never.
Then the documents. A living trust drafted a decade ago is a snapshot of a family that no longer exists, and three failures repeat so often they are almost a checklist. Assets never retitled, so the trust that was supposed to avoid probate holds a house and nothing else. Beneficiary designations that nobody has looked at since the account was opened — and a beneficiary form on an IRA, a 401(k) or a life insurance policy passes that asset outside the trust and outside the will, to whoever is named on it, including an ex-spouse. And a successor trustee who is an adult child with a job and no training, who will one day be legally responsible for investing somebody else’s money under California’s prudent investor standard, and who has never seen the document. None of that is exotic. All of it is fixable on a Tuesday afternoon, and almost nobody does it.
The third thing is the one nobody puts on a website. In most families with real money, the next generation has never been told the plan. Not the amounts, not the structure, not where the documents are, not who the attorney is, not that there is a trust at all. The reasons are usually good ones — not wanting to demotivate the children, not wanting to invite arguments among siblings, a generation raised not to discuss money. The result is that the transfer happens at the worst possible moment: in the weeks after a death, to people who are learning the shape of the estate and grieving at the same time, often with a deadline attached — an inherited IRA clock, a property tax filing window, a business that needs decisions on Monday. That is a bigger threat to the money than any market has ever been, and it is the one part of this that costs nothing to fix.
What you are usually sold
Households at this level are marketed to constantly, and the marketing has a shape: a private-client tier with a name on it, an insurance-based estate strategy, a structured note with a defined payoff, a fund with a lock-up and a minimum. Some of these are legitimate tools with real uses — permanent life insurance genuinely solves liquidity problems in some estates, and there are sophisticated families for whom illiquidity is an acceptable trade. The recurring problem is not the product. It is that the compensation attached to each option is usually different, it is rarely stated as one number, and the strategy that pays the most is often the one that is hardest to compare against anything else. Ask any firm, this one included, for a single all-in annual figure covering advice, the products, and everything inside them. The answers vary more than you would expect.
The second thing sold at this level is exclusivity, and we want to be direct about it: we do not have any. Aduna Capital is a small California-registered firm with a principal office on Rosecrans Avenue in Norwalk. We do not have private deals, allocations, off-market access or anything else unavailable to any investor opening the same account. If a firm implies otherwise to a family with your balance sheet, the right response is to ask what exactly is being offered, who is paid for it, and how you would ever get out of it. What we have instead is unremarkable and checkable: no commissions, no proprietary funds, no revenue from anything we recommend, and a published fee schedule.
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 are a fee-only fiduciary, which at this asset level mostly matters in the negative: we are paid the same regardless of what your portfolio holds, so there is nothing we gain by moving you out of an index fund, into an annuity, or into anything at all. That is what makes the conversation about the concentrated position an honest one. We can tell you what we would do and have no financial reason to prefer either answer — and then do the unglamorous part, which is sequencing the exit with your CPA: which lots go first, which years have room, which shares are the lowest-basis ones and therefore the right ones to give away rather than sell, and how losses harvested elsewhere in the portfolio offset the gains you are choosing to realise. How California treats capital gains · what tax-loss harvesting can and cannot do.
We do not replace your other advisers, and a family with genuinely complex needs should have three professionals, not one: a CPA who signs the returns, an estate attorney who drafts and amends the documents, and an investment adviser who manages the money and coordinates with both. We do not draft trusts, we do not give legal advice, and we do not give tax advice — when the answer is legal or is going on a return, it goes to the person whose licence covers it. What we do is read the trust and invest to what it actually says, audit every beneficiary designation against the documents so the two stop contradicting each other, keep an inventory of what exists and where, and be the person who raises the property tax question before the transfer rather than after. Trust and estate account management · the four documents California families actually need.
And we will sit down with your adult children, in English or in Spanish, and explain what exists. Not the amounts, if you do not want the amounts discussed — the structure. What a trust is, who the trustee will be, what an inherited IRA requires, which accounts pass by beneficiary form, where the documents live, and who to call first. Families put this off for years and then describe the meeting afterwards as the easiest hard thing they have done. It is part of the engagement, not an extra.
The retirement structures that actually apply to you: Trust & estate accounts, Cash balance, Donor-advised funds, QCDs, Prop 19 planning. 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 high-net-worth families 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
We already have a CPA and an estate attorney. What would you actually add?
Someone whose job is the money itself, and who is in the room all year rather than at filing season or at signing. Your CPA reports what happened; your attorney drafts what should happen at death. Neither is engaged to decide what the portfolio holds, to build a multi-year plan for unwinding a concentrated position, to check that a beneficiary form still matches the trust, or to notice that an account was never retitled. That gap is where most of the expensive mistakes we see actually live. If your existing advisers are good, we would rather work behind them than around them — and if you already have someone doing this well, we will tell you that on the first call.
Most of our net worth is one stock. Should we sell it?
No page can answer that, and be careful with anyone who answers it before seeing your basis, your other income, your state of residence and your charitable intentions. What we can say is how the decision gets made properly: establish the cost basis of every lot, model the tax on selling in one year versus three, look at what else in the portfolio could produce offsetting losses, identify the lowest-basis shares as candidates for charitable gifting rather than sale, and consider whether any of the position is better held to death for the basis step-up than sold at all. If you are an insider or subject to trading windows, that adds a layer and belongs with counsel. The answer is almost never all of it and almost never none of it.
Is it better to give assets to our children now or leave them at death?
The tax mechanics run in opposite directions, which is why the answer is situational. Give an appreciated asset during your life and the recipient generally takes your cost basis with it — the built-in gain travels to them under IRC § 1015. Leave the same asset at death and its basis is generally stepped to fair market value at that date under IRC § 1014, and the built-in gain disappears. For a California married couple this is bigger than it is almost anywhere else: community property gets a new basis on both halves at the first death, not just the deceased spouse’s half. That argues for holding appreciated assets and gifting cash or high-basis assets instead. Against it: real estate transfers trigger their own property tax consequences, and estate tax exposure at the very top runs the other way. This is a question for your CPA and attorney with our numbers in front of them. The California basics.
Our children will inherit the house. Is that still simple?
It stopped being simple in 2021. Proposition 19 narrowed California’s parent-child exclusion from property tax reassessment: the family home exclusion now generally requires the child to use the property as their own principal residence, it carries filing requirements and timelines, and it is limited by a value allowance where market value at transfer exceeds the existing assessed value. The separate exclusion that used to cover other property — rentals, commercial buildings, raw land — was eliminated, so those transfers are generally reassessed to market value. For a home carrying an assessed value from the 1980s, that is a very large change in the annual bill, arriving in the same month as a funeral. The rules are administered by your county assessor under State Board of Equalization guidance, the value allowance is adjusted for inflation, and the details are legal territory — but the planning has a lead time, and after the transfer there is usually nothing left to do. Prop 19, explained.
How do we tell our children about this without doing damage?
In stages, and earlier than feels comfortable. Structure before amounts is the usual sequence: what exists in outline, who is responsible for what, where the documents are, and who they should call. A great deal of the damage families fear comes not from children knowing but from children finding out at the worst moment, in the wrong order, from a sibling. If you would rather not run that meeting yourself, that is normal — we do it regularly, in either language, and it is often easier with someone in the room who is not family.
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.