Independent, fee only fiduciary wealth management for Philadelphia families, business owners, and institutions. CFAs and CPAs. Over $1 billion in assets under management.
There is a real difference between a fee only fiduciary and a ‘fee-based’ or commission-and-fee advisor. Fee only means we are paid solely and directly by our clients. We have no broker-dealer affiliation, no proprietary funds, no insurance commissions, no third-party revenue sharing, and no quotas. Many financial advisors are technically ‘fee-based,’ meaning they can collect commissions on top of advisory fees — a structure that introduces conflicts our model is designed to avoid.
Our team includes Chartered Financial Analysts (CFAs) and Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) who follow primary academic research, evaluate factor-based investment strategies, and understand the tax implications of our recommendations. The CFA charter and CPA license are demanding professional credentials with ethics requirements — meaningfully different from the marketing-driven titles that proliferate in retail wealth management.
Your assets are held at Charles Schwab, an independent custodian, not at Armbruster Capital. We manage and advise; Schwab safeguards. That separation between advisor and custodian is one of the most important structural protections a wealth management client can have, and it’s a feature most wirehouse and bank-affiliated advisors do not offer in the same way.
Eastern Pennsylvania’s economy combines healthcare, financial services, higher education, advanced manufacturing, and a deep base of family-owned businesses. The clients we work with most often share one trait: their financial picture has become complex enough that generic advice no longer suffices.
If you’re within 5–10 years of retirement and you’re trying to consolidate workplace plans, IRAs, pensions, and Social Security into one coherent retirement strategy, this is the bulk of what we do. We build retirement income plans that are tax-aware, sustainable, and stress-tested for real-world conditions, not optimistic assumptions.
Whether you’re approaching a sale, considering a generational transfer, or simply trying to coordinate your business and personal balance sheets, we work alongside your CPA and attorney to plan for the post-transition years. Our experience spans manufacturing, healthcare practices, professional services, and family-held real estate.
Receiving an inheritance is one of the most common reasons people seek out a fiduciary advisor. We help you slow down, evaluate options without time pressure, and make decisions you’ll be confident with five and ten years from now.
Local nonprofit boards and investment committees engage us as their institutional investment advisor. We help draft and maintain investment policy statements, manage the portfolio in accordance with fiduciary standards, and report to the board using terms that are easy to understand.
Every client engagement starts with a conversation, not a pitch. From there, the services we coordinate typically include some combination of the following:
Cash flow, savings strategy, debt, insurance, education funding, retirement, and estate considerations are brought together into a single plan that’s reviewed and updated as your life evolves.
We build low-cost, factor-based portfolios based on academic research on long-term return drivers.
Social Security claiming strategy, pension election analysis, Roth conversion planning, IRMAA mitigation, and a withdrawal sequence designed to last.
Coordinating your investment decisions with your CPA to avoid paying for the same insight twice. Asset location across taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts is one of the most underused levers in wealth management — we use it.
We don’t draft documents (your attorney does), but we make sure your beneficiaries, account titling, trust funding, and gifting strategy align with the estate plan you paid to put in place.
Donor-advised funds, qualified charitable distributions (QCDs), and gifting appreciated securities, and bunching strategies are designed around your causes, not around what’s easy.
For your area employers, we serve as a 3(21) investment fiduciary for retirement plans taking the investment decision-making off the plan sponsor’s plate.
No. We serve clients across Philadelphia, —need serving areas–, and nationwide. Our office is in Pittsford, NY, but most client relationships are managed through a combination of video meetings, phone calls, and in-person visits, whichever you prefer.
A fee only fiduciary is paid only by clients, never by commissions, product sponsors, or third parties, and is legally required to always act in the client’s best interest. This is a stricter standard than the ‘best interest’ rule that applies to brokers, and it reduces many of the conflicts that exist at commission-based or ‘fee-based’ firms.
Our investment philosophy is grounded in evidence-based strategies developed at leading academic institutions, including the University of Chicago, Stanford, and Yale. For stock portfolios, we use factor-based investing, emphasizing four key drivers of long-term returns:
We work most often with families whose investable assets are in the seven figures or approaching it, but the right answer is a fit conversation rather than a fixed number. If your situation calls for the depth of advice we provide, we’ll let you know. If it doesn’t, we will tell you so that you can find someone who’s a better match.
We offer personal consultations to individuals and families with investable assets of $1,000,000 or more.
The largest firms are often wirehouses or bank-affiliated brokerages, where advisors are typically paid through a combination of advisory fees and product commissions, and where access to research, products, and capabilities is governed by their employer’s platform. Armbruster Capital is an independent Registered Investment Advisor, fee only, with no broker-dealer affiliation and no proprietary products to sell. The advice you receive is shaped only by your situation.
