Our Team

In 2009, Laura Peeke founded LifeFirst Financial to realize her vision of a financial consulting firm that understands finances are only one aspect of life and when properly cared for, can create more energy for embracing the parts of life one loves best. Her particular passion lies in unwinding the complexity and confusion of the financial industry as a way to empower women. The experience can be freeing and liberating, stripping away stress and intimidation, creating more confidence and leaving more energy for engaging life.

 

At the age of 11, Laura asked her parents to drive her to the Acton, MA branch of Middlesex Savings Bank. She’d read about something called a CD (or certificate of deposit) and learned that she could earn interest (and more interest than a savings account) if she agreed to commit her savings for a particular period of time. Laura had no intention of spending her money, and talked her parents into going along with her plan. Her first real investment account was opened.

Laura spent two years working on Wall Street, quickly realizing it was not the collaborative culture she envisioned for her long-term career. The hierarchy and self-importance of the environment was not for her. She chose to leave and move back to her Boston roots, where she worked for United Asset Management Investment Services and then Manulife Financial (now recognized as John Hancock in the U.S.). While at Manulife Financial, she interviewed more than 100 portfolio managers from over 40 investment firms. In addition to her full-time career, she devoted several years to self-study to earn a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation from the CFA Institute, also becoming a member of the Boston Security Analyst Society (BSAS).It wasn’t for another 10 years, in 1996, that her fulltime financial career began: with all the bells and whistles of a position on Wall Street at the prestigious firm of Goldman Sachs. She’d just graduated from the College of the Holy Cross with a bachelor of arts in both economics and psychology. Although some found her double major choice a peculiar combination, Laura just knew she loved learning about both the economy and people. She had no idea at the time that it was the perfect choice for her future career. 

Still seeking more depth to the relationships in her business endeavors, in 2003, Laura decided to leave the traditional corporate environment in favor of becoming a personal financial advisor. She worked as a registered representative of Jefferson Pilot Securities Corporation and then Lincoln Financial, until 2009 when she started her own firm and became a Registered Representative and Investment Adviser Representative of Commonwealth Financial Network, a Registered Investment Adviser. Still an inspired self-learner, Laura advanced her financial planning knowledge by earning a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional certification, the recognized standard of excellence for competent and ethical personal financial planning administered by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc.

Laura Peeke is proud to have been recognized as a Vista Club advisor for 2022—a distinction based on annual production that places her among the top 27 percent of advisors affiliated with Commonwealth Financial Network. Each year, Commonwealth, the firm we partner with to help us better serve you, recognizes Vista Club advisors by inviting them to an exclusive gathering of their peers, leading industry experts, and Commonwealth home office staff. Vista Club advisors benefit from an intensive learning and networking experience designed to help them hone their expertise, share best practices, and provide ever-higher levels of service, education, and leadership to their clients.

Since 2012, she has also been a part of an amazing women advisors study group, working collaboratively to advance their collective knowledge and leveraging their varied experiences to make them better advisors for their clients. Laura is most proud of her career; her smart, affectionate, and exuberant son Max; the black belt in tae kwon do that took more than a decade of persistence to achieve; and having been by her mother’s side for the many years of fighting cancer before she passed in 2005.

These are the things she’s put her heart into for the long haul that have challenged her along the way. Laura lives and works in Lexington so that she can be near her son. In 2020, her husband Andrew Berryman welcomed the change to working from home for his IT position with a Boston law firm.  Now at lunchtime he jumps on the Peleton. Throughout the day, he doles out copious affection to Roy and Rexie, the two Burmese kitties they adopted during the pandemic. In the summer they can all be seen escaping to their home in South Yarmouth, where Laura escapes oceanside with a book, Andy rejuvenates while reading Reddit in the shade, Max swims in the pond all day (unless the ice cream truck arrives), and Roy & Rexie lounge by open windows with a sea breeze.