Shorepine Wealth Management’s Marc Lieberman, at center, with his wife Jill and sons Nate and Ryan. Courtesy image.
When Nate had asked his dad what he did for work, Lieberman told him in the simplest terms: “People give me their money and I try to invest it for them correctly, and if I do a good job, I give them back more money than they gave me.”
Nate returned to his dad with four quarters, placed them on the kitchen table and said, “Now give me two dollars.”
Not long after, Lieberman took Nate to open a bank account, at which point he proceeded to grill the teller about what they would be doing with his money.
“This was a 7-year-old,” Lieberman says with a laugh.
Born and raised in the town of Old Westbury on the north shore of Long Island, N.Y., Lieberman was drawn to numbers early in life as the son of an accountant. That interest blossomed in the summer of 1991 when he clerked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, an experience that had him embarking on a self-directed program on the then-nascent field of socially responsible investing. Lieberman says he loved taking classes like environmental economics and environmental entrepreneurship.
After graduation, Lieberman spent three years in Boston working at John Hancock Funds, running the Boston Marathon in 1999. In his final year in Boston, he covered a territory that included San Francisco and his regular trips there convinced him the Bay Area was a place he’d love to live.
“It was the height of insanity,” Lieberman says of those dot-com boom years before the bust when he lived in San Francisco for eight years.
Working for an institutional level money manager at first, Lieberman later garnered Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) status. He left that firm as their director of research and portfolio manager with a client list that ranged from $10 million to $700 million.
“I enjoyed the institutional side of the business but it was not very fulfilling to me,” Lieberman says. “It’s not a very personal experience – more of a ‘what have you done for me lately’ – and I wanted to get back to that feeling of helping people.”
That’s when Lieberman launched his own Shorepine Wealth Management firm, drawing on his long, storied career in the business but returning to the personal relationships he loved when he first started.
“Helping people and getting personal thank you notes from the clients for whom you’ve made a big difference is the experience I was looking for again,” he says. “And it also has allowed me to really focus on that socially responsible investing side of investing.”
“The bulk of my business is helping my clients organize their finances, put money in the right places and not make the common mistakes like acting emotionally,” he says.
Lieberman married his wife Jill in 2006 and moved to Mill Valley a year later, first getting a black labrador retriever named Cooper, who he calls his “strongest advocate,” and subsequently had their two kids, Nate and Ryan.
“Shorepine Junior,” he says.
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