Wealth management services
San Diego Wealth Management Services, Described Properly
Most services pages list eight nouns under eight icons and leave you no better informed. This one says what each piece of work actually involves, so you can tell before booking anything whether it covers your situation.
The work is coordination across a financial system rather than a series of separate products, cash flow, assets, liabilities, protection, taxes and planning, decided in relation to each other.
That matters most when several things are moving at once: equity compensation vesting on someone else's schedule, a business that is both an income source and an unsold asset, an employer plan with mechanics nobody has explained, or a retirement date close enough that sequencing has started to matter.
What we do
Eight Areas of Work
Each of these is a description of what happens, not a category name. If a description does not sound like your situation, that is useful information too.
Service 1: Organising the whole picture
Before anything gets recommended, everything gets gathered: accounts, income, assets, liabilities, employer benefits, insurance and stated goals, organised into a single view rather than a folder of statements. Most people have never seen their own finances in one place, and a surprising amount of what looks like a strategy problem turns out to be a visibility problem.
Service 2: Tax strategy, coordinated with your CPA
Not filing, filing is your CPA's job and we do not do it. This is the work that happens during the year and changes what the return says: which account a dollar goes into, when a gain is realised, how equity compensation is sequenced, and which of California's specific provisions apply to you. We coordinate with your tax professional rather than working around them.
Service 3: Equity compensation planning
RSUs, ESPP participation and vesting schedules, treated as part of a plan rather than as a separate spreadsheet. What the vest actually costs after withholding, whether the holding period is doing what you think, and how much of your net worth is riding on one ticker, with the concentration decision argued on its own terms rather than settled by a tax rule of thumb.
Service 4: Retirement accounts and plan design
For employees, working out what your employer's plan actually does, the match formula, the vesting schedule, the brokerage window, the parts of it that are not in any public document, and coordinating it with everything held outside. For business owners, designing the plan itself: whether a 401(k), SEP-IRA or cash balance plan fits, and what it does for you and your key people.
Service 5: Cash flow and debt
Analysing how money is earned, spent, saved, taxed and deployed, and finding where it leaks. On the debt side, deciding which balances should be eliminated, restructured or deliberately retained, based on interest rate, tax treatment, risk and opportunity cost, rather than paying things off in the order that feels best.
Service 6: Protection and risk
Your ability to earn is usually your largest asset, and it is the one most often left uninsured while smaller things are covered thoroughly. For business owners this extends to key person coverage and funded buy-sell agreements, so that the death or disability of an owner does not force a sale on someone else's terms.
Service 7: Exit readiness
Most owners find out whether the business can be sold at the moment they try to sell it, which is the worst possible time to learn it. Working out what makes it transferable, and what currently does not, makes the eventual transition a decision rather than an event, whether it is two years away or twenty.
Service 8: Estate and legacy
As wealth accumulates the question shifts from building to transferring: how assets pass, what that costs, and whether the documents say what you think they say. This is coordinated with your attorney, and for many people it is aspirational at first and becomes concrete later.
California specifics
Three Things That Only Matter Because You Are Here
California's rates and rules do enough of their own work that a plan built for somewhere else will not fit. These are the provisions that come up most, and being proactive about them is worth considerably more than reacting at filing time.
9.30%
California's marginal rate across taxable income from $145,448 to $742,958, married filing jointly. The band most San Diego high earners are actually in.
46.65%
The combined federal, state and Medicare marginal rate on the next dollar for a household at the top of that band.
Pass-through entity
The PTE elective tax
California's Pass-Through Entity Elective Tax, extended through 2031, lets business owners work around the federal SALT deduction cap. The prepayment deadline in June is the part that catches people, missing it costs a portion of the credit.
Net operating loss
NOL timing
For Californians with income above $1 million, the suspension of net operating loss deductions across 2024 to 2026 changes when it makes sense to realise gains and losses. That timing has to be built into the plan rather than discovered at filing.
Residency
Residency and domicile planning
The legislative trend toward wealth taxes and residency scrutiny affects high-net-worth Californians well beyond the headline proposals. Residency and domicile planning is detailed, evidentiary work, and it is far cheaper done in advance than argued afterwards.
Going deeper
If You Want the Detail Rather Than the Summary
Everything above is a description of scope. Three places carry the actual depth: how we help sets out the five-stage process these services run inside, in order and at what pace.
If your employer is one of the six we have written plan guides for, those cover the specific mechanics, match formulas, vesting schedules, brokerage windows and pension formulas, in detail no general page can reach. Start with the employer benefit plan guides.
And if you would rather read something written for your situation than for a service list, the two lanes most of this work happens in are the H.E.N.R.Y. Strategy for high earners and the Business Owner Blueprint for owners.
How this works
Based in San Diego, Working Nationwide
The practice is fully remote. There is no office to visit, and meetings happen by video or phone at a time that suits you, which in practice is what most people preferred even when there was an alternative.
San Diego still matters here, and not as a marketing line: California's tax treatment shapes most of the planning on this page. BAS Financial also works with employees at Qualcomm, Intuit, Northrop Grumman, SDG&E, Southern California Edison and Service Corporation International, and the pages on this site about their plans are built from each employer's own filings and plan disclosures rather than from general knowledge.
None of that requires you to be in San Diego. If you moved away from an employer whose plan is covered here, or you are somewhere else entirely, the work is the same and the arrangement is the same.
Find out whether this covers your situation
A first conversation establishes whether the scope above matches what you actually need, and whether the way this practice works suits you. If it does not, that is a useful hour rather than a wasted one, and there is no obligation either way.
Book a consultationA 30-minute call. No document gathering beforehand, and no obligation afterwards.
What these figures assume
Every number on this page depends on the assumptions below. Change one and the result changes.
California's 9.30% marginal band
- California Franchise Tax Board, 2025 California Tax Rate Schedules, Schedule Y (married filing jointly): the 9.30% marginal rate runs from $145,448 to $742,958 of taxable income.
- The often-quoted 13.3% is the 12.30% top bracket, which begins at $1,485,906 for a married couple, plus the 1% Mental Health Services Tax on taxable income above $1,000,000 (Rev. & Tax. Code §17043). It is a real rate; it is not this audience's rate.
- Taxable income, not gross. A household earning appreciably more than $742,958 gross can still sit inside this band after deductions.
The 46.65% combined marginal rate
- 35% federal + 9.30% California + 1.45% Medicare + 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax = 46.65%. Each component is stated rather than the total asserted, so the arithmetic can be checked.
- Applies to the next dollar of ORDINARY income for a married couple at the top of the 9.30% band and in the 35% federal bracket, with wages above the $250,000 Additional Medicare Tax threshold.
- Not an effective rate. Nobody pays 46.65% on their whole income; this is what the next dollar costs, which is the number a deferral or timing decision actually turns on.
- Above roughly $1.49 million of taxable income the California figure becomes 13.3% and the combined marginal rate is closer to 52%.