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Independent · Planning-Led · Costa Mesa, CA

Every financial decision sits inside a plan.

Investment, tax, estate, and exit decisions don't operate in isolation — they reinforce or undermine each other. Via Luce Capital builds the plan that holds them together, then manages the capital to execute it.

Where are you in your planning?

Retirement income, structured.

Distribution sequencing, tax-aware withdrawals, Social Security timing, and the rate of consumption that keeps the plan intact across decades.

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The Organizing Principle

Why planning sits at the center.

Here, planning comes first. The plan defines what the capital needs to do — produce income at retirement, exit a business at the right valuation, transfer wealth across generations, fund an institutional mandate. Without that, investment strategy is a guess at the right destination.

Planning is also where coordination happens. Tax decisions affect investment decisions. Estate structure affects portfolio location. A business exit reshapes everything. The plan is the document that holds those threads together — and the planning process is what keeps them aligned as life and markets change.

The seams are where a plan holds together or comes apart. Integration is the work.

Planning isn't a deliverable. It's the discipline that makes everything else work.

What Planning Answers

Capabilities, framed as questions a plan must answer.

Each of these is a planning question first. The work that flows from it — the portfolio decisions, tax moves, structural changes — is in service of the answer. Treating capabilities as services in isolation is how a plan comes apart at the integration points.

What does the plan need to deliver?

Retirement Income Strategy

Distribution sequencing, tax-aware withdrawals, Social Security timing, healthcare coverage, and the rate of consumption that keeps the plan intact across decades.

How does the plan get executed?

Investment Architecture

Rules-based, multi-engine portfolio construction designed with a goal of behaving consistently across market cycles. No prediction. No conviction trades. Clear logic for every position.

How does the plan stay efficient?

Tax Strategy

Asset location, tax-loss harvesting, Roth conversion timing, charitable giving structure, and the integration that turns tax planning into an ongoing discipline.

How does the plan move forward?

Estate & Wealth Transfer

Documented succession of capital — across generations or across mandates. Coordinated with attorneys and accountants so structure and intention stay aligned.

How does the plan adapt at the inflection point?

Business Exit Planning (CEPA®)

Valuation gap analysis, personal financial readiness, post-transaction wealth design. The exit is one event in a longer plan — and the years before and after matter more than the day of.

How does the plan stay together?

Coordinated Stewardship

Direct collaboration with your CPA, attorney, and other advisors. The plan only works if the people executing it are aligned. We coordinate so you don't have to.

Hover or select a capability to see how it connects across the plan.

Investment Architecture

How the portfolio actually gets built.

Brent Rupnow at his desk with the Helios research dashboard and live market data

Our investment process is built on a multi-layer quantitative architecture — momentum and trend signals, economic growth factors, yield curve dynamics, valuation mean-reversion, volatility structures, machine-learning macro signals, and cross-asset ranking algorithms. Each engine answers a different question about market regime; together, they produce portfolios that behave consistently across cycles rather than being held together by judgment.

Three frameworks can be configured at any equity target from 0% to 100%, depending on the mandate. Whether you're managing a retirement portfolio, an institutional reserve, or a foundation with a defined spending policy, the same disciplined logic applies.

We're also crypto-aware: digital assets are evaluated within the broader risk-managed portfolio rather than treated as a speculative side-bet. They earn their place through process, not headlines.

Alpha

Growth-oriented mandates seeking participation across regimes.

Guardian

Capital preservation with defensive positioning in adverse regimes.

Ascend

Balanced framework calibrated to long-horizon goals and risk tolerance.

The Engagement Cadence

Planning isn't an event. It's a cadence.

The engagement runs on a structured cadence: four touchpoints per year, each with a defined purpose — so the plan stays current with the life it's meant to serve.

Feb · Mar

Vision

Personal planning, life vision, retirement and business valuation, family and asset goals, financial position review, cash flow and net worth.

Apr · May

Benchmarking

Implementation progress, course correction, alignment check. Coordination meetings with CPAs, attorneys, and other professionals.

Jun · Jul

Wealth Strategy

Portfolio review, asset allocation, tax location, rate of return analysis, rebalancing, savings adjustments, maintain/grow/exit decisions.

Aug · Sep

Benchmarking

Implementation progress, course correction, alignment check. Strategy work on your behalf with your professional team.

Strategy and coordination work happens between cycles too — we don't only show up four times a year.

Tax-Aware Approach

Tax is the seam between planning and investing.

The tax layer is where a plan proves itself. A great investment idea executed in the wrong account costs more than the idea was worth. A liquidity event without tax preparation can erase years of growth.

Tax planning at Via Luce is treated as an ongoing discipline rather than an annual event — woven into the planning cadence and the portfolio process from the start.

Asset location across taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts
Tax-loss harvesting integrated with rebalancing rather than added at year-end
Roth conversion timing modeled across the full retirement horizon
Charitable giving structures aligning tax efficiency with intent
Distribution sequencing designed with a goal of keeping more of the portfolio working
Exit-related tax planning for business owners, coordinated with your CPA and attorney

Brent Rupnow, Founder of Via Luce Capital

About Brent Rupnow

A boutique firm, built around one principle: direct accountability.

Via Luce Capital was founded around the conviction that clients are better served by disciplined systems and direct accountability than by charisma and prediction. The firm intentionally serves a limited number of relationships. That's the point.

Brent holds the CFP®, CEPA®, ChFC®, and CLU® designations and brings over two decades of experience across financial planning, investment strategy, and exit planning. Via Luce operates independently through LPL Financial — combining boutique-firm directness with institutional-grade compliance, custody, and infrastructure.

Writing on planning, process, and how decisions get made.

Substance over schedule. Pieces are written when there's something worth saying — about how plans actually work, what disciplined investing looks like in practice, and the moments in a financial life where the stakes are highest.

Planning

Why most "financial plans" fall apart at the seams.

5 min read · April 2026

Tax Strategy

Roth conversions: timing, sequence, and the cost of getting it wrong.

7 min read · March 2026

Business Owners

The valuation gap: what the years before exit actually need to do.

8 min read · March 2026

View all insights →

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No prepared pitch. Just a conversation.

We use the first call to understand what you're trying to accomplish, where the gaps are, and whether we're the right fit. If we are, we'll tell you. If we're not, we'll tell you that too.

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