Rick Speicher
Founder
It has been my passion since high school to enter the financial field as a personal financial professional. After graduating from high school in 1980, I decided to attend college at Penn State University to pursue a goal of starting my own business. I graduated from Penn State in 1984, earning a BS in finance; I earned my CFP®/CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification in 1986. In 1990, after working for several local financial companies as a financial professional, I realized my goal and began Berks Financial.
Educating clients about the changing world of finance and how best to invest for their individual needs is a passion that continues to grow.
Rick Speicher is proud to have been recognized as a Vista Club advisor for 2021—a distinction based on annual production that places him 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.
Heidi Zerbe
Hi, I’m Heidi Zerbe, Rick’s administrative assistant. I’ve been working for Rick since August 1999. What I enjoy most about my work at Berks Financial are the relationships I’ve developed with our clients. My hope is to always be someone our clients feel they can call and get the one-to-one service they are looking for from Berks Financial. In this world of prompts and recordings, we hope to be a refreshing difference and bring back the personal service that has been long forgotten.
Some of my favorite things to do are spend quality time with my family, read a good book, and ride with my husband on his motorcycle enjoying scenic Pennsylvania and other parts of the U.S.
Skylar (Speicher) Hoffmaster
Starting in January 2015, I'm the newest member of the Berks Financial team. I graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC in 2012 with a BS in production management in apparel. After working two years for a women's apparel manufacturer in the heart of NYC's garment district, I realized this was not the path I wanted to follow. I have always been interested in finance, so when I was given the offer to learn the business from Rick, my dad, I knew this was an amazing opportunity that I needed to take.
Since my start at Berks Financial, I've received a few of my securities registrations as well as my insurance license, but there are still a few more registrations that I am working towards. While studying, my main objective and principal responsibility at the office is shadowing my dad and working closely with him to learn the ins and outs of the financial planning industry. I help in preparing for appointments as well as take detailed notes during each appointment. One of the biggest and probably most important projects that I work on is maintaining our master list for RMDs. I'm very excited about my future at Berks Financial. I hope to become a familiar face around the office, and I look forward to the relationships I will build with each client.