Meet Your Advisor
Meet David Scher, CFP® — Investment Adviser at Krim Associates
30 years of institutional investment experience at Goldman Sachs and Stifel Nicholas, now applied to affluent NJ investors who deserve family‑office‑quality wealth management.
Bergen County, NJ · Serving affluent investors across New Jersey and beyond
David spent 20 years on the institutional side of Wall Street — as a Vice President at Goldman Sachs serving hedge funds and mutual funds, then as Managing Director at Stifel Nicholas where he built institutional coverage from scratch — before founding his independent practice at Krim Associates. What he witnessed across those decades was an uncomfortable pattern: clients with $3M–$10M were stuck in cookie‑cutter portfolios while institutional investors accessed entirely different strategies.
That gap — what David calls the "Institutional Investment Gap" — exists because most wirehouse advisors were never trained in the strategies endowments and pensions actually use. Alternative asset classes, dynamic withdrawal planning, fixed income laddering, tax overlay — these aren't exotic. They're standard practice for institutional portfolios. David's independent structure at Krim Associates removes the product restrictions that prevented him from offering them at the big firms.
His methodology centers on the Institutional Portfolio Framework: broader asset class diversification, sequence‑of‑returns protection, tax‑overlay integration, and coordinated estate planning — the same four pillars Yale's endowment and major pensions have relied on for decades. As a CFP® professional and fee‑based fiduciary, David is legally obligated to act in your best interest, with no proprietary product pressure. His firm's fee structure is straightforward: 0.85% AUM, competitive with leading independent advisors and significantly below the 1.0–1.5% wirehouse standard.
Over 8.5 years of independence, David has grown Krim Associates from $0 to $60M+ in assets under management, adding 8–9 new families per year, primarily corporate executives, healthcare professionals, and consultants approaching or in retirement with $500K–$10M in investable assets.
Outside the office
When he isn't building institutional‑grade portfolios for NJ families, David is deeply involved in Bergen County's community life. A University of Chicago graduate who still follows the Maroons' athletic programs, he believes the same analytical discipline that drives great investing applies to every area of life. He takes particular pride in being the advisor who brings up estate planning, long‑term care, and tax strategy before clients even ask — the things wirehouse advisors consistently ignore.