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Scott A. Schwartz

A Financial Advisor Who Has Lived the Thesis

Thirty years across borders

Scott has spent more than thirty years advising clients whose lives, assets, and obligations cross borders. He has also crossed his share of them — across aviation, finance, sailing, scholarship, and writing — which is to say he has seen the architecture of expatriate life from the inside, not the outside.

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Overview

A principal at IAM Advisors and a member of EAFA.

Credentials
CFP®
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®
CIMA®
Investment Management Analyst
AIF®
Accredited Investment Fiduciary
IAM · EAFA
Principal · Member

Scott is a principal at IAM Advisors, an independent registered investment advisor, and a member of EAFA — European American Financial Advisors — a network purpose-built for clients whose financial lives cross the Atlantic. He holds the CFP®, CIMA®, and AIF® designations.

Scott is the author of three books, all published by Koda Publishing.

2026 - KODA

Adapting Elsewhere

A framework for Americans considering a life abroad. Macro forces, practical mechanics, and the emotional arc of expatriation. The book this website is built around.
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Amazon
2021 - KODA

Investing in a New Climate

A study of capital, risk, and resilience in a world whose underlying conditions are no longer behaving the way the models assumed. Climate as a structural input to portfolios, not a virtue signal.
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Amazon
Coming Soon
TBD - KODA

The Knights and a Dry Rock

A history of Malta — its strategic position, its long memory, its strangeness regarding water insecurity in the 16th century of early modern Europe.
The thread, across all three
PRINCIPLE 01

Durability over cleverness.

Scott is skeptical of optimization stories — the loophole, the arbitrage, the lowest-tax jurisdiction. They tend to fail at the place where most plans fail: the next rule change, the next family event, the next return home. Boring tax systems and boring democracies look better on a ten-year horizon than clever ones.
PRINCIPLE 02

Strategy over compliance.

Compliance answers a small, mandatory question. Strategy answers a larger one. Most of the work is in the second answer.
PRINCIPLE 03

Belonging over consumption.

A life abroad that gets built well is one that begins as a guest and grows into something closer to a neighbor. Belonging does not grow through consumption. It grows through contribution.
BEfore IAM

An international airline pilot. A long-passage sailor. A scholar of early modern Europe. Then the practice.

Before joining IAM, Scott flew internationally as an airline captain based in New York, St. Louis, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Berlin, operating routes throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.
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He has also crossed both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans under sail, spent years cruising the Mediterranean, and once conducted a two-hour conference call about a client’s estate matter from the bow of an eighty-foot ketch en route from Fiji to Auckland. The call took place during a tropical storm, with Scott soaked by driving rain and connected through an early-generation Iridium satellite phone.
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Scott holds a Master of Liberal Arts degree from Stanford University, where his studies focused on early modern Europe. His historical research informs his writing, treating history not as background but as infrastructure—the foundation upon which institutions, laws, and societies are built.
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Scott divides his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Malta. He travels extensively through the countries that feature in his work—Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom—often enough that his observations carry the perspective of someone who has experienced them in February as well as July.

A partial itinerary
— Air
Berlin-based international captain. Routes across four continents.
— Sea
Pacific & Atlantic offshore. Years on a sailboat in the Mediterranean.
— Page
M.L.A., early modern Europe. Three books, one in progress.
— Desk
Thirty-plus years at IAM Advisors. Cross-border practice.
Who Scott Works With

American households who are weighing — or already living — a cross-border life in countries where the law and the culture align with who they are.

If that's where you are, the first conversation is straightforward.

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