Amanda Vaught, J.D.

Amanda loves working with young families who want a trusted partner to outsource their “adulting” to. As a parent herself, she knows how easy it is to let those things that you-know-you’re-supposed-to-do slide. Allowing a trusted partner to take care of the financial side of your life allows you to focus more on your own priorities and reduce stress around money decisions.

Amanda brings an analytical lens to financial advising. She initially trained as a chemist, and her time spent in the Ph.D. program at Columbia University helped to refine her ability to strip away the outer layers of what’s going on and look at the fundamental reasons for the way things happen. She brings that same critical thinking to the financial world, another world full of jargon that outsiders can’t understand. Amanda loves to distill that complexity to make it understandable to her clients.

While Amanda found science incredibly thrilling, she also wished to spend her career helping people. After leaving graduate school, she thought law school would be her ticket and pursued a career as a patent attorney. Working with inventors and new technologies was intellectually exhilarating, but in 2009 the Great Recession brought down her law firm and forced Amanda to rethink her legal career. How could some mortgage-backed securities affect someone else’s life path in such a profound way? This was a question Amanda grappled with for a long time, and eventually led her to pivoting her legal career into working on securities litigation. After learning enough on the legal side, and getting too much experience with long hours at big New York City law firms, she decided enough was enough.  She noticed that the interests of regular people were largely absent in the machinations of big bank security litigation. She thought these regular people needed an advocate more than the big banks did and that her talents could be better put to use in a different field.

Since 2017, Amanda switched careers to work as a financial advisor and hasn’t looked back. She’s happy to have more math in her life, and embraces the privilege of being able to help ‘regular people’ navigate the complex world of investing.

After hours, you can find Amanda playing with her two young daughters, watching her husband cook dinner, or training in her Brooklyn neighborhood for her next race.