Maili Bergman

Financial Life Advisor    |    RFC®
CA Insurance License #4154185

(310)-643-7472 maili@cradvisors.com

Helping corporate professionals turn successful careers into lasting wealth.

Your compensation stopped being a paycheck a long time ago.

You have RSUs vesting on a schedule someone else set. Retirement accounts still sitting at two former employers. An ESPP you signed up for and have not looked at since. An HSA you use like a debit card.

You understand each piece well enough. What has never happened is someone sitting down with all of it at once — and the next vesting date arrives either way.

What I do

For 20 years, when Wall Street had questions about a public company, answering them was my job — the last seven as a Senior Vice President at Live Nation Entertainment. I left investor relations to do something different. I found wealth management, and the 20 years turned out to be the training for it.

Hindsight is exact. I knew how the largest investors in the world make decisions. Nobody was making one about my own compensation. I had investments. I had an advisor. What I never had was one plan connecting my equity to the rest of it — the ESPP, the 401(k), the HSA, the bonus, and the tax bill they were all building together.

Every one of those pieces had someone in charge of it. Nobody was in charge of how they fit together.

At California Retirement Advisors, I work with corporate professionals at established and pre-IPO companies. Planning starts with your total compensation — salary, bonus, equity, ESPP, retirement match and benefits. You earned every piece of it, and for most people it has quietly become the largest part of their net worth. It is also where the most untapped opportunity sits.

From there the plan extends to everything your compensation touches: cash flow, taxes, equity, investments, retirement, and estate planning. Timing runs through all of it. You are already living in the calendar of vesting dates, exercise windows and your bonus payout. What I add is how each dollar is treated once it arrives — and connecting the pieces into one plan. 

How I work with clients

My first priority is understanding what you want your money to do. Not the number — the life it is for. Who you are responsible for, now and later. What you want to be able to say yes or no to. When you want to stop working, or whether you want to stop at all.

Most people have never been asked to put it in words, and it sharpens as we go. But it is the foundation. Every recommendation is connected to you — something you told me matters most.

Then the practical work: what you have, what is sitting unused inside your compensation and benefits, and which decisions cannot wait. That becomes the plan.

What to Expect

Get organized. Understanding your situation takes more data than most people expect, and there is no shortcut. You either have it in order already or you know roughly where it lives. I will tell you exactly what to pull, and why

One clear picture. Together we bring everything into view — what is working, where the gaps are, and which decisions should come first. Most people arrive with plenty of financial information. What they want is someone who has done the sustained thinking.

Reasoning you can follow. Every recommendation comes with the thinking behind it. Understanding the "why" keeps you grounded when circumstances change.

Taxes beyond April. A tax return is one year. A financial plan looks across decades. Taxes are one of the largest costs most people carry over a lifetime, so planning for efficiency is addressed from the start — alongside your CPA, not in place of them.

Why I care

I was born and raised in Hawaii, where the word for family is ʻohana. It reaches past blood, and it carries an obligation: nobody in an ʻohana is left to face a hard thing on their own. Partnership is the accurate word for this work. ʻOhana is why I approach it that way. 

Bring what you have.

We can sort out what it adds up to together. 

Schedule a meeting with Maili