Christopher Coleman is a Rochester, NY fee-only financial planner and founder of Fiduciary First Advising.

Through the life experiences of raising two children, planning and paying for college, helping aging parents navigate finances and long term care, and losing parents, home purchases, sales and ownership, and managing a career: my family and I have benefited greatly from the stability of  having a financial plan and having investing experience.

I developed a fascination with the financial markets at very young age.  My early influence in finance came from my father, a career banker by trade.  From my father, I learned how money works, where it lives, and what conditions make it thrive. And how and why individual stocks performed the way they did. At 13, when other kids were memorizing baseball statistics, I was evaluating stock charts and reading books about mutual funds.  Financial planning and investing had caught my attention early, and I never looked back. Most importantly I learned that if I worked to make money, and saved, I could invest that money wisely to grow my assets.
Knowing my love for the field, I naturally got a lot of questions from family and friends. They told me that they find investing and planning to be a mystery and somewhat inexplicable. Their confusion has increased over time with the increasing complexity of markets and money, especially as people age and go through transitions, there are many concerns and confusion about their financial future.  In those open and honest conversations, I realized I had the ability to help a broad number of people translate complex financial movements, make them understandable, and help create an understanding of finance to enhance their own financial well-being.​

Upon graduation from SUNY Brockport with a degree in business in 1995, I learned, to my disappointment, that much of the financial services business was really about pushing sales of stocks and not directly serving people’s needs. So, I chose a different career path that allowed me to experience being in business in several different ways.  In the meantime, I followed my interest in finance by trading, investing and planning for my own personal investments, and informally for friends and colleagues. Then my skill sets increased exponentially in the full-time program at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester where I majored in both Finance and Marketing.

Email Me at chrisc@fiduciaryfirstadvising.com

I invite people to start with what I call the Kitchen Table Conversation, where I clearly understand your concerns and we get to know each other a bit. You can ask me anything at all. I'll walk you through how things work. And I'm happy to walk you through things anytime to make sure you are confident and understand.