Why It Helps to Work With Someone Who Knows CalPERS

CalPERS explains the mechanics of your benefits clearly, and for plenty of questions their site is all you need. What their material usually can't do is take your specific numbers and show you how the pieces fit together before you commit.

Your option election, your retirement date, service credit, and how all of it sits next to Social Security are separate decisions that pull on each other, and several of them are individual to you. A general advisor may not see those interactions the same way, simply because most of their clients aren't in the system.

That's part of what we will spend time on: laying the trade-offs out in the order you actually have to decide them, so you're choosing with the full picture rather than one benefit at a time.

Maybe you're staring at the retirement option election, trying to figure out how much of your allowance to give up so your spouse still has something if you go first. Maybe you're wondering whether you can afford to retire this year, or whether a few more months changes the math. Maybe it's whether to buy back service credit, or what to do with Savings Plus once the paychecks stop.

These are the moments people tend to call me for, and most of them share one feature: once you file, you usually can't take it back.

About Me

My name is Elias Young, I'm a CFP® professional and a fee-only fiduciary advisor with Fiduciary Financial Advisors, based in the Greater Sacramento area and working with clients across California. Fee-only means my clients pay me directly rather than through commissions, and fiduciary means I'm obligated to put your interests first. I earned my degree in Financial Planning from Sacramento State. You can find out more on my Bio Page.

How I Think About These Decisions

I write about CalPERS planning regularly, partly to work through the details myself and partly so you can get a feel for how I approach a decision before we ever talk.

Directly below, you can find the articles I have written that are directly tied to financial planning specific to CalPERS.

What Working Together Looks Like

It starts with a 30-minute introductory call so we can see whether I'm the right fit for what you need. There's no obligation to go further.

If we decide to work together, you send me the documents I need, I build a written plan with clear steps, and we walk through it together. From there you decide how to implement it: on your own, or with me managing it on an ongoing basis. You can move between those as your life changes.

My default is ongoing planning paired with investment management, so the plan stays current as things change. If you'd rather work through a single question as a one-time project, that's on the table too.

Some of the decisions specific to CalPERS that we may work on are:

• Your pension payment option and survivor benefits (Unmodified Allowance vs. Options 1 through 4)

• When to retire (birthday quarters, fiscal-year service credit, COLA timing)

• Whether buying service credit makes sense for your situation

• The order to draw from Savings Plus, the 457(b), and the 401(k)

• How your benefit interacts with Social Security, including the Social Security Fairness Act changes

• What happens to your benefits if you separate from service before retirement